CRITICAL ENTANGLEMENTS: ANIMALS IN VICTORIAN FICTION By Sandy M. Burnley A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English—Doctor of Philosophy 2022 ABSTRACT CRITICAL ENTANGLEMENTS: ANIMALS IN VICTORIAN FICTION By Sandy M. Burnley Critical Entanglements: Animals in Victorian Fiction draws on ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial methodologies in four canonical Victorian texts, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), to explore what Victorian authors may mean when they make environmental actors or more-than-human bodies speak, or more acutely, when they render them silent. Conventionally, such silence is often interpreted and misconstrued with more feminine, vulnerable, inferior, inanimate, and helpless characteristics, eliding these characters into mere metonyms or a praxis for humanity. Instead of reading these characters as more palatable metaphors for anthropocentric concerns, I propose to read them as, in fact, more-than-human beings. By centering their alterity and radical identity, I argue their presence invites new narratives to emerge that challenge the hegemony of humanistic models which burgeoned from Enlightenment legacies in the Victorian era. As mute, combative, and/or hostile challenges to the anthropomorphic assumptions of both writers and readers, these Victorian characters, I contend, combat the era’s sympathetic, humanist, androcentric, and liberal rhetoric, sometimes against what seems to be the explicit intentions of the authors. My research thus contributes to current scholarship on how Enlightenment theories of the human helped shaped the political and philosophical discourse that characterized nineteenth-century European society, especially within a masculine and Eurocentric context. Moreover, by applying an ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial lens to Victorian texts, I reveal the delimitations of liberalism and political thought, offer critiques to the incipient proto-posthumanist philosophies that were deployed to disguise the systemic oppression of Enlightenment legacies, and explore the andro- and anthropo- centric rhetoric that simultaneously perpetuated and challenged the definition of what makes one “human.” Finally, my intervention firmly stakes “posthumanist” resistance well within the Victorian era, thereby demonstrating how Victorians were already pushing back against heteronormative and humanist constructs as empire expanded into more foreign, ecocritical, intra-, and interspecies entanglements. This dissertation is dedicated to all my human and more-than-human kin. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to send a special thank you to my committee chairs, Dr. Zarena Aslami and Dr. Linda Kalof for their expertise, time, and encouragement in creating this project. Without them, along with Dr. Judith Stoddart and Dr. Scott Michaelsen, this work would have never seen fruition. I also want to show my appreciation for my partner’s support and patience while I completed this research, along with my parents who strove to provide me with the best education and opportunities. Finally, I must acknowledge my more-than-human companions who lied by my side for every word written. This work, as goes for all the work I do, is for our more-than- human relationships. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Looking Back: Sympathy and Posthumanism in Wonderland .......................................... 10 Sympathy: Down a Rabbit Hole ............................................................................................ 14 Looking Back with Respecere ................................................................................................ 29 Animal Subjectivity: Did You Say a Pig or a Fig? ............................................................... 42 And Say the Animal Responded ............................................................................................ 52 2. Animal Encounters in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm .......................... 58 Liberalist, Transcendentalist, and Ecofeminist Entanglement........................................... 62 A Story of Waldo and His Companions ................................................................................ 71 3. Letting in the Jungle: Companionship in The Jungle Books .............................................. 98 An Unsustainable Jungle ...................................................................................................... 100 The Demonic Animal and Ferality ...................................................................................... 106 Letting in the Jungle ............................................................................................................. 132 4. The Ferality of Wolves, Workers, and Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula..................... 148 Harker’s Environmental Racism and Imperialism ........................................................... 153 Dracula’s Ecological Network ............................................................................................. 164 The Victorian Human ........................................................................................................... 171 Humanimal Vulnerability and Resistance .......................................................................... 183 WORKS CITED........................................................................................................................ 200 vi Introduction Critical Entanglements: Animals in Victorian Fiction, draws on ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial methodologies in four canonical Victorian texts, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), to explore what Victorian authors may mean when they make environmental actors or more-than-human bodies speak, and more acutely, when they render them silent. I propose that by drawing attention to these characters, whom readers often perceive as feminine, vulnerable, inferior, inanimate, and helpless, we can see new narratives emerge that challenge the hegemony of humanistic models which burgeoned from Enlightenment legacies in the Victorian era and begin to extend visibility and centrality to more marginalized identities. As challenges to the anthropomorphic assumptions of both writers and readers, these characters in Victorian novels, I contend, combat the era’s sympathetic, humanist, androcentric, and liberal rhetoric, sometimes against what seems to be the explicit intentions of the authors. Critical Entanglements thus contributes to current scholarship on how Enlightenment theories of the human helped shaped the political and philosophical discourse that characterized nineteenth-century European society, especially within a masculine and Eurocentric context. Moreover, by applying an ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial lens to Victorian texts, I reveal the delimitations of liberalism and political thought, offer critiques to the incipient proto- posthumanist philosophies that were deployed to disguise the systemic oppression of Enlightenment legacies, and explore the andro- and anthropo- centric rhetoric that simultaneously perpetuated and challenged the definition of what makes one “human.” Finally, my intervention firmly stakes “posthumanist” resistance well within the Victorian era, thereby 1 demonstrating how Victorians were already pushing back against heteronormative and humanist constructs as empire expanded into more foreign, ecocritical, intra-, and interspecies entanglements. While human characters illustrate their frustrations with these supposedly universal constructions, the more-than-human actors explored in this work signpost the necessity of interpreting their lives outside of these anthropocentric notions, and thereby signal the need of applying a posthumanist lens in their interactions and interspecies encounters. By focusing on these animals through the diverse and posthumanist scholarship of Mel Y. Chen, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Jacques Derrida, as well as through the critical animal studies lenses of Abraham Gibson and Carol J. Adams, Critical Entanglements echoes N. Katherine Hayles sentiments that deploying posthumanism “evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means” (285). At the same time, and as Hayles forewarns, taking this posthumanist stance requires more than posing animals in fiction as mere gauges of humanity’s inhuman limits. Rather, the objective of this work is to follow what Susan McHugh defines as a new narrative ethology, where exploring the purpose of these more-than-human characters in novels derives its usefulness “for experiments with multiple perspectives and processes that support models centered on agency rather than subjectivity, reflecting as well as influencing ongoing social change” (1). The core goal of these alternative models, as proposed in this work, is to explore the Victorian anxiety of likeness and difference between species, not to efface the human/animal binary but to call for the due deference of alterity. In so doing, these characters propose themselves not as mirror images of Victorian concerns, but as diverse and inaccessible agents of cooperation in the building and dismantling of empire and imperial penchants. 2 Critical Entanglements grounds itself within the Victorian era because of the era’s unique shift in human-animal relationships. While humans have interacted with other species since pre- historic times, the rapidly developing technological, imperial, agricultural, and fashionable shifts in everyday nineteenth-century society brought the tensions, benefits, and exploitations of other species to the forefront. Advances brought about during the industrial revolution, such as the steam engine, trains, refrigerated transportation, and canned goods elevated the exploitation of animal bodies to a newly expanded market. What could only be afforded by the upper class and nobility became common household items made cheaper in their accessibility. While animals were transported alive to fill menageries and zoos, new methods in refrigeration and preservation allowed an increasing amount of frozen flesh to be shipped overseas, introducing British palates to new and exotic cuisines. Meanwhile, imperial encroachment expanded the global market, inviting and taking what was once out of reach into the domestic and colonial realm. The increasing urbanization of England’s epicenter relied on the labor of horses, cattle, and sheep to feed London’s expanding needs in transportation, consumption, and fashion. Birds of paradise, while once thought of as Edenic and untouchable, became fashionable ornaments for ladies in high society. To illustrate just how infused other species were in Victorian society, Helen Cowie notes in Victims of Fashion, A middle- or upper-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of fine alpaca wool, drape herself in a sealskin jacket, strap herself into a whalebone corset, brush her hair with a tortoiseshell comb and sport the feathers or sometimes the entire bodies of wild birds in her hat or on her earrings. She might entertain her friends and family by playing a piano with ivory keys, own a parrot or monkey as a living fashion accessory and, at the dinner table, feast on Argentine beef, New Zealand lamb, or, if she were feeling more adventurous, kangaroo tail. She might chew these delicacies with dentures made from the teeth of a hippopotamus. (6-7) While animals have always been a part of human lives, Victorians found unique ways to showcase their animal companions in horrific and novel ways, exploiting other species 3 extensively in their quotidian lives to the point in which animal companionship dictated one’s socioeconomic status, gender, ability, sexuality, and race. As I mentioned, Critical Entanglements is not interested in focusing on more-than-human animals as victims of exploitation, commodity, or metonym, although these animals are certainly used all too frequently within these contexts. To move away from examining animals as ancillary to human needs or solely isolated to the realm of resource and victimization, these chapters focus on moments where these characters resist their exploitation, challenge humanist constructs in their intractability, alterity, and/or mystery, and ultimately disrupt the human/animal binary in ways that force us to reimagine our dichotomous ontology of human versus animal. Every more- than-human character explored in the following chapters critically impact, manipulate, and reorient their human companions, blurring the boundaries between masculine and feminine, domestic and foreign, living and dead, static and animate, vulnerable and intractable. While the ease in which these characters can blur the boundaries between human and animal certainly assists in dismantling the human/animal binary and decenters the human from its exceptional and lofty heights, Critical Entanglements firmly asserts the importance of radical alterity and deference. Instead of arguing for the inauguration of animals into humanist constructs, I contend that such efforts are often held responsible for their marginalization, impending erasure, and in the very worst situation, signal these animals’ imminent extinction. Nor do I assert that such animals comfortably settle and position themselves within these frameworks but often surpass and disrupt the limits of humanist thought and constructions. This disruption paves an avenue for the elision of dichotomous habits, which in turn questions what it means to be human in the first place. More important than redefining the human, however, is how these entanglements signpost Victorians’ awareness of the impact that empire had on their surrounding ecosystem, which in 4 turn provides intriguing and subversive admonitions for the biodiversity of the planet if the frameworks through which we view, interact, and speak of other animals do not change. My first chapter, “Looking Back: Sympathy and Posthumanism in Wonderland” burgeons off recent animal studies and ecocritical scholarship, such as Lin Young’s “To Talk of Many Things.” Young argues that Wonderland serves as a critique of taxidermic practices, museum displays, and menageries by breaking down human/animal/object identities. As a result, observers/readers enter a collective environment where identity markers merge and become more fluid. However, my chapter emphasizes respecting rather than eliding these identities and reads Wonderland as a critique of Alice’s sympathetic and anthropomorphic practices when rendering other species as simply a mimesis of her anthropocentric universe. Therefore, Alice’s adventures differ from the didactic traditions of children’s fiction. Instead of using sympathy to relate harmlessly to creatures of alterity, Carroll reveals how sympathy signposts their inevitable erasure and specularization. Furthermore, the more Alice tries to change her identity to adapt to their specified umwelt (a term coined by Jakob von Uexküll to reference a world as experienced by a particular organism) the more imaginative and insular her adaptation becomes. As a result, each Wonderland scene prevents Alice from using any imaginative human exceptionalism to successfully navigate that space. Instead, her companions remain inaccessible, and they deny her from appropriating any aspect of their identity, thereby allowing them to resist her humanist projections and metonymic renditions. My second chapter, “Ecocritical Encounters in The Story of an African Farm” examines the proto-ecofeminist maneuvers for which the novel has been lately applauded; maneuvers that seek to illustrate a less hierarchical environment that does not gain its imperial authority from the domination of women and nature. I engage with scholarship from Andrew McMurry, Ruth 5 Knecthel, and Valerie L. Stevens to name a few, to explore how Victorians addressed questions of climate, alterity, and humanity from a liberal and transcendentalist perspective. Moreover, I argue the novel does not deploy these aforementioned Victorian ideologies and philosophies to present a unity between all things, nor to extend agency to more-than-human bodies and environmental agents, but to expose a criticism regarding the limits of these frameworks’ purview and how they can function to inhibit agency, self-sovereignty, and individuality for beings of radical alterity. Therefore, the contention and hypocrisy of Schreiner’s novel resides in the questionability of these frameworks and explains why her bildungsroman is intentionally cut short by her two main protagonists' deaths. In other words, the novel inquires what avenues are made available to more-than-human bodies if we insist on perpetuating these humanist frameworks. More significantly, the novel questions whether such bodies can ever be respected, recognized, and ethically encountered, even through an anti-androcentric lens, such as ecofeminism, or whether there are consequential limits to this epistemology, as well. By killing off her two main characters, I illustrate how this humanist bildungsroman is unsustainable and inherently biased. The novel does not imagine a new kind of becoming, despite attempting to present a unity between humans and their environment but questions our very ability to represent and encounter other lifeforms outside of our own dominant humanist notions. Finally, the novel practically effaces indigenous characters, making them appear extinct despite their imprisonment during the Boer wars and their fleeting migration in the novel's peripheries, suggesting the novel is signaling a scathing criticism that has yet to be unpacked. My third chapter, “Letting in the Jungle: Deconstructing Binaries in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books” decenters the human protagonist, Mowgli, to emphasize how empire is not just a constellation of human (and hypermasculine) actors. Continuing this journey 6 outside of Britain’s geographical (but not its imperial or imaginary) borders, this collection of stories demonstrates how our interspecies and ecocritical entanglements can open a universe of ontological and epistemological diversity that needs to be acknowledged if we are to head into a collective posthumanist future, or as the last tale suggests, to “let in the jungle.” Like Carroll’s Alice, Mowgli must also be expelled from this ecological network precisely because he insists on encroaching into foreign territory with a humanist lens, perpetuating and projecting Euro-, andro- , and anthropo- centric constructs onto his companion species and their environment. More importantly, Mowgli is expelled from the jungle and pushed into “civilization” because of his heteronormative adaptation. That is, he is ejected from this environment because he ignores the forms of pleasure, joy, consent, and companionship that he has found in the jungle. By decentering Mowgli, along with his humanist and heteronormative perspective, and instead reading the novel in conversation with Susan Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, Christie Harner’s “Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books,” and Michael Lundblad’s reading of sexuality in The Birth of a Jungle, I argue “Letting in the Jungle” signals the necessary requirements for ethical environmental companionship. Buried under layers of imperial angst are avenues that signal self-sovereignty, agency, cooperation, interdependence, and consent that function outside of the humanist fictions with which the novel begins and paves the way for a posthumanist future, ultimately critiquing civilization, empire, and heteronormativity. Finally, in my last chapter, “The Ferality of Wolves, Women, and Workers in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” I once again decentralize the eponymous character to make the women, laborers, and more-than-human animals more visible and central to the novel’s focus and subversive criticism. Intriguingly, by the novel’s infamous ending, all seems to have returned to 7 peace, since the Crew of Light can now enter Dracula’s castle uninhibited by the indigenous wolves, women, and workers who once populated the land, thereby signposting this space as a colonized and complacent extension of imperial England. After all, Harker announces in the epilogue, “Every trace of all that had been was blotted out.” However, I unravel this ending’s admonition as a gesture toward the ecocidal and environmental devastation the Crew of Light has enacted both at home and abroad. Shifting the “vampiric” or predatory threat from Romania to England, reading Harker and Dracula as appositional representations of the “human” rather than diametrically opposed, focusing on Harker’s environmental racism, and revealing new avenues of cooperating with companion species, resurrects a new way of being during the fin-de- siecle. Gesturing toward a posthumanist future, I emphasize how the Crew of Light’s efforts and eradication create a dangerous homogeny, effacing while appropriating marginality. This appropriation is most aptly signaled in my reading of the newborn baby Quincey, who is an amalgamation of Dracula, Quincey Morris, Jonathan Harker, and a “gallant” mother named Mina Harker who holds Dracula’s baptismal blood in her veins. Culminating the narrative with this newborn who has adopted the qualities of his parents’ so-called vanquished and murdered enemy signposts the novel’s and this project’s ultimate admonition. If we are to head to a posthumanist future, we must be wary that such a project does not envelop all identities beneath a humanist umbrella. While this expansion benevolently attempts to expand visibility to the margins, each chapter provides myriad evidence for how inimical and awry these attempts can become. Rather, this project urges readers to remain acutely mindful that the identities that are brought under humanist lenses are given their own space to express their identity in ways that are not always legible to anthropocentric constructs or to our current understanding. 8 Therefore, Critical Entanglements: Animals in Victorian Fiction focuses on the systemic oppression of marginal bodies established by Enlightenment legacies. My chapters not only align with postcolonial, gender, and ecocritical scholarship, but stress these disciplines’ required imbrication to fully understand and critique how Victorians engaged with and wrote about their environment. Moreover, examining these canonical works from an intersectional lens prevents any premature and optimistic closures for our current ecofeminist practices and posthumanist futures, thereby ensuring we do not continue to efface diversity and alterity in our readings but begin to seek out ethical and critical entanglements. 9 1. Looking Back: Sympathy and Posthumanism in Wonderland The cause of animals was not helped when they were seen as surrogates for women, or workers, or when they were translated into fictions, no matter how appealing. If we look at animals and see only the reflection of ourselves, we deny them the reality of their own existence. —Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871) follow a young girl’s adventures as she fantasizes falling down a rabbit hole or dreamily entering the backward world of Looking Glass, where she meets several quasi- quotidian species, including a mouse, a caterpillar, a pig, and a cat, to name a few. As is the case with most children’s fictions, Alice can converse with these creatures. The lessons she learns (or at least is proposed to learn) differ, however, from the conventional didactic traditions of its time. While Lewis Carroll may have catered to certain sympathetic exchanges and traditions, such as creating a protagonist who in her infancy is on the same ontological plane as nonhuman animals, I argue Carroll offers us a more dynamic, polyphonic, and significantly subversive narrative in which it is the nonhuman animals’ ability to refuse response or conversation that challenges human ontology. This refusal is at times evoked through combative, obscure, or sometimes even absurd language, but more significantly, such responses are at times evoked outside of linguistic exchanges or withheld altogether. The silence, vulnerability, and resistance these nonhuman characters pose for Alice then differ from that of nonhuman characters in other children’s fiction in that they do not propose to simply use conventional language to disrupt or refute human ontology or a kind of anthropocentric imperialism or superiority over them. Instead, their silence and distance critique the efficacy of sympathetic exchanges perpetuated at the time, perhaps 10 focusing more on its inimical consequences or the ways in which the subject of such sympathetic encounters becomes effaced beneath the eyes of the gazer. In this respect, this chapter adds nuance to Audrey Jaffe’s and Rae Greiner’s work on Victorian sympathy precisely because it places their scholarship, along with David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s sympathy models, within an interspecies context. What comes to the forefront in this conversation is how sympathy becomes highly embedded in an abstract anthropocentric identity to the point in which this mechanism is deployed to make one human. Through Alice’s sympathy, the other’s existence is represented only through this young, white, English girl’s own physical and cognitive capacities and experiences, privileging intellectual and visual abilities over any other and thus casting an ableist, speciesist, and admittedly racist shade over the novel and over this ostensibly benevolent emotion. Despite sympathy’s noble pursuits, it then becomes highly suspect to use such discourse to represent nonhuman life which may not rely on those same physical and cognitive capacities or may not evoke them for the same purpose, and I argue both Alice novels serve to stake this intervention in the midst of burgeoning sympathetic exchanges. Certainly, sympathy is often deployed in Victorian literature to combat animals’ exploitation, especially within a scientific or industrial arena, and is understandably deployed in the Alice novels given Carroll was an avid anti-vivisectionist and animal rights advocate. However, what is surprising about this work is how these characters’ resistance signals sympathy’s own exploitive lens, and thus forces readers to ponder whether sympathy can remain a useful tool in defining what it means to be human in a global, foreign, and interspecies 11 network—a question weighing on many academics’ mind, regardless of whether one's discipline is in Victorian literature or animal studies. 1 Since Harriet Ritvo’s Animal Estate, there has been an animal turn in Victorian Studies and a propensity to read characters such as Wonderland’s as, in fact, other-than-human animals. John Miller notes Victorian Animal Studies has burgeoned and evolved to question the theoretical, ethical, and critical framework of non-human animals’ livelihood and discusses how the field has expanded into Victorian ecocriticism and broadly defined posthumanist branches. Contributing to this framework are scholars such as Anna Feuerstein, who argues the ways Victorians’ envisioned animal subjectivity highlights how liberalism imagines and regulates non- human subjects, disrupts engendered, anthropocentric, and political power relationships perpetuated by governmentality, and emphasizes the political power of alternate subjectivity. Lin Young also explores Wonderland’s imagined subjectivity and argues Wonderland is a playful assembly and disassembly of human, animal, and object status that provides a space for object identity and erases the human/animal distinction. Meanwhile, Zoe Jaques firmly establishes Wonderland as a posthumanist environment. She discusses how these canonical texts can open the borders between humans and non-humans and make them more fluid. 2 While this chapter 1 In “Sympathetic Distance and Victorian Form,” Jesse C. Selbin writes when considering sympathy, empathy, and fellow feeling that “It seems clear that empathy has attained a revived currency in the academy and beyond, and it is easy to see why empathy’s aspirations might be attractive, however difficult they may be to achieve in practice: the attempt to feel in concordance with another appears as the ultimate act of generosity or self- sacrifice” (169-170). Thus, it seems scholars continue to return to sympathetic exchanges in a noble act to share kinship and identity. However, what I find interesting about Wonderland’s rejection of Alice’s sympathy is how it questions whether sympathy or anthropocentric constructs are what other identities desire. Does it matter to Wonderland’s denizens that Alice sees them as human or is there some other method through which they wish her to interact with them? 2 Other scholars contribute to these posthumanist discussions but are not directly invoked in this essay. For example, Catherine Elick turns to children’s fiction to illustrate the unequal power relationships that assign characters their subject or object status and provides insightful readings on the revolutionary avenues provided for young children in these texts. Moreover, Jerome Bump discusses the ethics of Alice’s adventures, illustrating the biophilia and biophobia in the narrative to examine how Carroll addresses concerns about the environment in the Alice novels. 12 similarly explores Wonderland’s posthumanist possibilities, it is not interested in opening the border between human and animal. Instead, it is invested in underscoring how these characters resist Alice’s humanist assumptions, disrupt sympathy’s mechanisms, and staunchly object to being addressed as humans or mirror images of Alice. Consequently, this intervention firmly places the Alice novels within a proto- posthumanist environment, not because it hopes to erase the human/animal binary, but because it highlights the dangers of projecting humanist constructs onto other species and serves as a zoocritical exploration of what it means to address other animals with what Donna Haraway terms respecere. In other words, I argue the novel explores opportunities for Alice to evacuate her humanist assumptions and sympathetic attempts and instead practice looking back with respect. Such a reading then not only follows a posthumanist turn in decentralizing an anthropocentric purview in children’s literature and engages with critical animal studies in its hope to excavate more ethical avenues of interspecies relations and cohabitation, but also engages with significant criticism on Victorian sympathy to illustrate the dilemmas, impact, and insinuations of sympathizing with creatures of radical alterity. Antedating current posthumanist concerns of likeness and difference, Alice must wrestle with her desire to sympathize with these creatures (and vice versa), and as a result, relieve herself of the humanist desire to know, define, assimilate, imitate, and categorize creatures whose very essence remains beyond human knowledge and knowability. Readers are not then left with a conventional story about a child’s journey into adulthood but catch a glimpse of proto-posthumanist possibilities. From this glimpse, we are left with a request to look back at our own frameworks and demand more ethical transspecies exercises to respond to a biologically diverse community. The question Carroll’s work poses is then not how much Wonderland can reflect our own sociopolitical landscape, offer 13 young readers some didactic lesson, or, in a Derridean fashion, explore whether animals are capable of responding.3 Rather, the narrative becomes even more rudimentary, challenging the ways in which we recognize, measure, and evaluate an animals’ response and interaction in the first place. Sympathy: Down a Rabbit Hole Alice’s embedded criticism of sympathy is surprising given Victorian children’s literature is replete with young protagonists relating to and sympathizing with other animals to learn how to become human. Additionally, this genre often utilizes sympathy to champion for animal rights. As Carolyn Sigler notes in “Wonderland to Wasteland,” concern for other-than-human animals became an essential theme in children’s literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Sarah Trimmer’s The History of the Robins (1786) to Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and beyond, Victorian writers stressed kindness and sympathy for other animals and illustrated how sympathy benefited the human condition. 4 Sigler writes, “For many of these early writers, the ability to respect and care for animals also suggests the larger ability to feel compassion and respect for the weak or powerless, and thus to feel close to the unifying ideal of God” (149). She continues to argue that readers are urged “not merely to respect the powerless but to emulate non-human nature as an example of compassion and harmony and as a means to interrogate and critique social values” (149). Faithful to this motif, animal characters and their child protagonists 3 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida discusses Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in conjunction with a very real cat who inspires his philosophical reverie about animal response; a reverie that has gained a large amount of criticism due to its lack of engagement with this nonliterary cat. 4 Works such as Coral Lansbury’s The Old Brown Dog and Brian Harrison’s “Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England” both in their own respect stressed Victorian’s kindness to animals as more of an indicator of humanity’s worthiness and morale, rather than driven by an agenda to improve the lives of animals based on these animals’ own merits. For instance, Harrison emphasizes that bull-baiting “was to be condemned less because it was cruel than because it demoralized the people, or unfitted them for work” (786). Lansbury in turn stresses female affinity with the oppression nonhuman-animal subjects experienced in the medical field. 14 often reflect each other’s values, mimicking domestic and social constructs and making anthropocentric paradigms appear more natural. At first glance, Carroll’s work appears to subscribe to sympathy’s role in interspecies encounters. As an avid anti-vivisectionist, frequent museum-visitor of animal exhibitions, and author of children’s literature often involving more-than-human animal subjects, Carroll was wholeheartedly invested in animal rights and arguably used sympathy to appeal to humans’ more sensible proclivities.5 For instance, in Carroll’s pamphlet, Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection (1875), Carroll writes, “the prevention of suffering to a human being does not justify the infliction of a greater amount of suffering on an animal” (13), noting, as Jaques articulates, that human pain and animal pain are equal evils. 6 Jaques continues to quote Carroll, noting his emphasis that humans are not exceptional to other animals since no reader has potent enough charm “to win exemption from the common doom.” 7 Carroll urges readers to sympathize with other animals by placing them on the same ontological plane and creating a sympathetic unity 5 Works such as Jed Mayer’s “The Vivisection of the Snark” and Anna Kérchy’s “Alice’s Non- Anthropocentric Ethics”, both examine in their own manner Carroll’s investment in animal rights. Mayer and Kerchy each lend support to how Carroll used Alice’s encounters to explore human-animal relationships, and moreover, interpret Alice’s various social faux pas with these creatures to critique how we engage with creatures of radical alterity—how we interact, examine, study, accumulate knowledge, and create ontological hierarchy based off human observations. Yet, while we can acknowledge that Carroll was critical of scientific observation, and often poked fun of the angst that Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution produced (as most aptly seen in Carroll’s demonstration of the caucus race led by the Dodo bird), this article is dedicated to exploring another form of observation interwoven throughout Alice’s adventures, and so examines how Alice exercises sympathy to relate and feel for Wonderland’s inhabitants. 6 Jaques opens with a deep dive on how Victorians imagined and began developing posthumanist possibilities in children’s literature and considers how these canonical texts can facilitate a dialogue on allowing the borders between the human and the nonhuman to become more fluid. While Jaques is integral in understanding posthumanism in Victorian fiction, this essay complicates the agenda to permeate borders between species. 7 See Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection in which Carroll writes, “O my brother man, you who claim for yourself and for me so proud an ancestry—tracing our pedigree through the anthropomorphoid ape up to the primeval zoophyte—what potent charm have you in store to win exemption form the common doom?” (15). Here, humanity harbors no distinction from its primal ancestors, nor any other living creature. 15 with other species. Such harmony or ontology could, in theory, make a homogenous nation where the “uniformity to be found among members of the same nation [would be] due primarily to sympathy rather than to the influence of the climate or soil,” as Bernard Wand summarizes. 8 In this respect, both human and more-than-human animals would share an identity established by sympathy’s mechanisms. Yet, the moment readers are allowed to follow Alice into Wonderland is the moment readers discover these animals are not interested in Alice’s projections or attempts to treat them as human. In fact, in tracing Alice’s sympathetic observations, we realize such homogeny harbors significant consequences for other species, as keenly illustrated when Alice espies a white rabbit. Drifting off to sleep, Alice dreams she sees a white rabbit with pink eyes. Such visions are, of course, common in children’s literature, prompting the narrator to note: There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural). (Alice 2) The novel thus commences with a dreamscape where other animals appear on the same ontological plane as humans, illustrating the conventional belief that sympathy “humanizes” others. However, Carroll suggests that Alice ought to have wondered at this vision, arguably because this scene presents something more than an innocuous anthropomorphizing of another 8 Wand contextualizes a useful summary of sympathy as I witness it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He writes, “By ‘sympathy’ Hume means our capacity ‘to receive by communication [the] inclinations and sentiments [of others] however different from or contrary to our own.” The fact that such sympathy occurs is readily observed not only in children but in men who, despite their discerning judgment, may find great difficulty in maintaining a position in opposition to their friends because of their sympathy with them. When we are in the company of persons who are good-humoured, we, too become good humored; and when we are in the company of a sorrowful person, our own disposition is likewise affected. Indeed, according to Hume, the uniformity to be found among members of the same nation is due primarily to sympathy rather than to the influence of the climate or soil” (275-276). In this sense, sympathy can then potentially be manifested as a pathway for animal rights and interspecies equality. 16 species. The reader is never afforded the opportunity to see the rabbit in and of itself, only Alice’s sympathetic projection of its plight. This scene demonstrates that sympathy is prompted only by that which approximates the human condition; the rabbit must first be seen as an ersatz human before it gains Alice’s concern. Thus, instead of witnessing a rabbit’s frenzied dash as potentially induced by a natural predator—a circumstance from which Alice would be immune as a human in a domesticated landscape—Alice’s gaze operates within sympathy’s tendency to efface any radical differences in the process of relating to another being. She does not attend to the rabbit’s radical alterity, but projects herself, and a specific rendition of herself, onto a distinct other. Alice’s sympathy for the rabbit thus illustrates the inimical consequences of what it means to feel for the other, when that other is of a different species. Sympathy appears here as a form of the gaze in which the other is completely effaced. Replacing persons with imaginary constructs, as Jaffe contests, “sympathy ‘does away’ with bodies in order to produce representations, replacing persons with mental pictures, generalized images of ease and of suffering” (11). This mitigation grants the illusion that the rabbit is free from any natural predators while also attempting to disguise Alice’s own predatory gaze. Through sympathy’s mechanism, Alice consumes all of those with whom she interacts to propose the fantasy of a homogenous nation. Moreover, and in keeping with Sigler’s analysis discussed above, Alice’s gaze ostensibly emulates the harmony and compassion of nature (the rabbit is free from natural predators), but it is predicated on an ideal of nature as tamed, domesticated, and submissive to an anthropocentric will. As a result, Alice’s sympathy does not provide her with the means to relate to another animal but establishes a complex yet peaceful fantasy where nature is already complicit with its objectification—already and always only prey 17 that must passively wait for Alice to project her image onto its blank canvas. Sympathy thus perpetuates the human/animal binary while simultaneously appearing to erase it. Observing how Alice perceives this rabbit suggests that the only recognizable form of life in Alice’s sympathetic dreamscape, and the only desirable identity one could wish to occupy, is that of the human. But what does it mean to be human? According to Alice, to be human is simply to be economically visible. Carroll writes: but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. (Alice 2) Alice only starts to her feet when she imagines this rabbit contributing to a lifestyle and vocation in which she may hope to participate later in life, despite her gender and age. That is, she confounds and intertwines his identity with her imagined possibilities for herself, each of which is curiously limited to the industrial and masculine form. As a consequence, the rabbit then becomes, as Jaffe notes, “inseparable from Victorian middle-class self-representation precisely because [he embodies], to a middle-class spectator, [Alice’s] own potential narrative” (9). Yet, this fantasy shackles not only the rabbit but Alice herself to a model of the human predicated on industrial, masculine, meritocratic, and liberal ideals. In this respect, it is not simply that the animal body is effaced through Alice’s sympathetic gaze, but that sympathy precludes the possibility of the animal, including the human animal, from ever proceeding beyond these ideological constructs. Moreover, this limitation is precisely why the rabbit is permitted to speak, as he exclaims, “‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’” (Alice 9). Rather than use speech to cry out against his anthropomorphosis, his speech only further serves to erase his subjective experience, as it validates (while it is projected by) Alice’s sympathetic gaze and imaginary 18 adaptation. The scene thus recalls Wittgenstein’s claim that “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him” (223), precisely because verbal language cannot encompass any conceivable sharing of world. As much as a lion would attest if he or she were to speak, any access to its unique and radically distinct livelihood as a lion would be lost in translation, creating yet another anthropomorphized animal. Similarly, this rabbit’s speech, although legible to human understanding, is what inhibits us from understanding his life as a rabbit. The moment the rabbit speaks is also the very moment we lose any access to his experiences as a non-human agent. Instead of the truly diverse eco-system that one could imagine down the rabbit hole, Wonderland is more akin to the anthropomorphized dioramic models Carroll studied when visiting the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. As Young argues, dioramas of the period often used animals to reflect “human” experiences. Similar to how Alice’s sympathetic gaze harmonizes her environment, Hermann Ploucquet’s tableaux involving “‘frogs having a shave, kittens serving tea, and a marten acting as a schoolmaster’” (Young 48), projected the idea that nature did not have the agency, autonomy, or animacy to represent itself, and thus needed human intervention. Young claims Wonderland became a place for Carroll where the red rope and glass enclosure that separated gazer from spectacle no longer posed itself as a barrier, but instead marked itself as a space through which such identifying markers could blur into one another, eliding the barriers between human, animal, and object. In these sympathetic exchanges, as an audience looked upon an animal tableau, to be human was no longer a stagnant identity, but simply an assembly of qualities that could be shared with other biological species or inanimate objects (at least in the mind of the spectator). However, while Young reads these scenes as products of an imagined process of assembly and disassembly that can disrupt the distinctions between human, animal, and object, the novel’s focus on these animals’ interactions with humans warns us to 19 proceed with caution. While it is easy to see how animals could become human in such spaces, given Wonderland hardly denies language, clothing, or any other conventional marker of Western humanity to its nonhuman characters, it does not follow that the boundaries between these identities fall away. Instead, what these spaces reveal is how Wonderland’s sympathetic exchanges and dialogue more often than not serve to efface the nonhuman’s livelihood and render them into a metonym for any number of Victorian’s anthropocentric anxieties, whether it is in regard to race, gender, class, or Darwinian evolution. Thus, the only sustainable, flexible, and fluid identity inhabiting all of Wonderland’s sensational characters seems to be that of the Eurocentric and liberal human, as such environments seem to be specifically designed to extend and subsume human identity over the Other. These mis-en-scenes are more than innocuous and playful representations of nonhuman lives, but easily transgress into harmful and offensive territory, leading to premature posthumanist closures. In other words, such caricatures and supposed “fluidity” not only reaffirms liberal humanism as a kind of universal truth of being to which anyone has ostensible access but perpetuates a form of animal capitalism. As Nicole Shukin astutely discusses in Animal Capital, we must always be wary of the paradox of an anthropocentric order, the means and effects of which can be all too posthuman. While one of posthumanism’s hopes might be to challenge the legacies that distinguish the human from the animal in pursuit of animal rights and liberation, the elision of this boundary does not always liberate the animal from beneath a humanist umbrella as much as it provides alternative possibilities for the human to appropriate and sometimes profit from these newly imagined human-animal hybrids—an example of which can be seen in Ploucquet’s popular tableaux. Shukin articulates how these paradoxical displays of human-animal life can “ideologically grant and materially invest in a world in which species 20 boundaries can be radically crossed (as well as reinscribed) in the genetic and aesthetic pursuit of new markets” (11). Sympathy is then portrayed as a mechanism that certainly invests in the elision of the human-animal binary precisely because it reorients and envelops the human, animal, and object into an anthropocentric framework. The novel’s opening scene thus illustrates how sympathy functions, not to grant compassion for this rabbit’s plight, nor give this rabbit a unique identity, nor diversify Wonderland’s landscape. Instead, the novel’s opening holds sympathy accountable for the dematerialization and erasure of the animal body and reaffirms the hegemonic values of liberal humanism. As a result, examining sympathy’s function in Alice’s adventures may warn readers against deploying sympathy in their transspecies encounters. It is not simply that one may risk eliding the human/animal binary, but that eliding such a binary may risk turning Wonderland into Alice’s looking glass, in which all beings and objects appear as merely reflections of the looker. The novel’s diorama-like tableaux serve, then, as opportunities to see the animal as an instance of what Jacques Derrida calls the animot. Derrida’s neologism lumps together every animal, even human animals in this context, into an indistinguishable motley. He writes, “Ecce animot. Neither a species nor a gender nor an individual, it is an irreducible living multiplicity of mortals” (Animal 60). Intriguingly, while Derrida fears backlash for his imaginary animal menagerie, or in other words, his inevitable and philosophical appropriation of other animals, Alice’s adventures prompt readers to notice the ease and frequency with which this kind of representation occurs. Focusing on Alice’s predatory and sympathetic gaze (adjectives that can no longer be detangled) the novel more acutely underscores the urgency of this intervention if these encounters are not reimagined, especially once Alice follows the rabbit into Wonderland’s entrance. 21 Down this rabbit hole, Alice continues to encounter and sympathize with other species, such as a mouse, and notably with other objects, such as a vial of delicious liquid and a fan. Once again aligning these identities—human, animal, and object—Wonderland confirms the inimical consequences of playfully reorienting these identities to excavate a more disturbing narrative, specifically when examined through the discourse surrounding Victorian sympathy. Coming upon a door, Alice peaks through a doorway to which she does not have access because of her conventional human size and says in frustration, “how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin” (Alice 5). Sure enough, the avenue to grant her access lies in a vial that is not labeled “poisoned” but rather has “a sort of mixed flavor of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, toffy and hot buttered toast” (6). This vial gives Alice the impression that she is entitled to drink such a potion simply because it is within reach and its pleasant taste marks the impending consumption and predation that Alice will innocently or naively perpetrate onto other characters. Now having shrunken down to the size of a mouse after consuming the liquid, it is significant that Alice no longer has access to this vial and so can no longer simply change size at will precisely because such an option is only available and reserved for human exceptionalism in anthropomorphic literature. Alice’s diminutive size is a punishment for imbibing a liquid (often read as an admonishment against consuming alcohol) and indicative of Victorians’ fear of degeneration and loss of autonomy. This loss of status triggers an existential panic and so Alice consumes another food item to signal her predatory status and reinstate her at the top of the food chain, suddenly growing nine feet tall. More notable than Alice’s predatory consumption (which is always available to her because her ontological status as a human is never fully threatened) is how her sympathetic exchanges mimic the “poisonous” or degenerative effects of imbibing alcohol. This parallel effect verifies that Victorian’s fear of degeneration did not simply stem 22 from drinking but resulted from an excess of sympathy that Victorians believed also invited a sense of loss over oneself. Standing nine feet tall after consuming the cake, Alice does not need to drink any beverage to shrink in size. All it takes for her to lose this predatory status is to once again gaze upon the rabbit and pick up his glove and fan. Once again, Alice begins to shrink, illustrating how Alice’s sympathetic gaze leads to a degenerative loss of self. Puzzled by this sudden change in size, Alice’s next question is “‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” (10). Alice’s befuddlement cues readers into a significant insight. Alice’s size and human status grants her extensive privilege that she often abuses. Shrinking down to her smallest size after once again encountering the rabbit, Alice suffers from the ecological imprint she left when she was nine feet tall as she is now in the risk of drowning in her own tears formerly produced during her panic. More crucial than Alice’s lack of consumption is how her sudden shrinking is initiated when she picks up the rabbit’s glove and fan. This performance of human exceptionalism disguised as mutability reveals that Alice must first be associated with a thing before she can sympathize with these animals and experience the environmental impact she has caused in this scene, thereby leveling thinghood and animality as subject to the same ontological plane. While there may certainly be a more optimistic reading here, in that Alice must first be evacuated from Enlightenment ideology and understand that it is a network of actors (and not just human actors) which creates successful sympathetic encounters by granting personhood to all kinds of species, Carroll quickly truncates this premature closure by verifying that Alice’s metaphysical position remains intact. The more subversive criticism imbedded in this scene becomes apparent when we discover that simply adorning the clothes of this small creature causes Alice to radically shrink, both physically and ontologically, but always with the option to 23 return to her predator status that is simply set on reserve. Meanwhile, when taxonomic tableaux sport the latest human fashions, these garments do nothing to mitigate or reverse the most extreme loss of autonomy that is death. Thus, Carroll deploys this sympathetic encounter to invite Alice to momentarily experience the devastating effects of losing one’s ontological status. However, this is only a panic on Alice’s part since regardless of her size, she remains a human girl, much as regardless of these animals’ dress, they remain a postmortem spectacle, metaphysically barred from the human exceptionalism that Alice may playfully sacrifice on occasion. To emphasize Alice’s retainment of human exceptionalism, Carroll ensures that despite being reduced to the same size of the mouse that Alice encounters while in danger of drowning in her own formerly shed tears, Alice continues to project her own humanist constructs onto others, and so proceeds to communicate with the mouse in the same manner that she is accustomed to speaking with members of her own species. Alice wonders, “Would it be of any use, now,” thought Alice, “to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there’s no harm in trying.” So she began: “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!” (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her brother’s Latin Grammar, “A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!”) The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing. (Alice 13) Indeed, how does one address a mouse, speak of a mouse, and to a mouse? Faithful to a children’s narrative, the answer is easily attainable by switching to another human language—in this case, French—but for an adult audience, readers discover this scene is much more nuanced. Instead, a deeper exploration of this scene suggests that such a dialogue does not propose successful transspecies communication, nor does it contribute to a groundbreaking narrative ethology in which the mouse gains agency and personhood precisely because it fails to surpass 24 its anthropocentric framework. The mouse must still operate within humanist constructs, such as human language, to be legible and visible in this encounter. Consequently, this dialogue continues to reveal how a seemingly polyphonic narrative may fail to exemplify the distinctive presence of two radically different identities, and what’s more, confirms how sympathy not only metaphorically but visually consumes the body of those with whom it is trying to relate. After receiving nothing but a blank stare in her first attempt to speak to the mouse, Alice then proceeds to utter “‘Où est ma chatte?’” (Alice 14), which subsequently sends the mouse into a state of shivers. Crucially, we notice that despite having become the same size as the mouse, Alice is still fighting to hold onto her superior ontological position by illustrating her preoccupation with her carnivorous feline companion, Dinah, whom she has physically left in the surface world, but whose imaginary identity keeps Alice’s much needed companionship. Indeed, we notice that Dinah has never left Alice’s thoughts, for even as she is falling into Wonderland, her first few inquiries revolve around what Dinah might eat were she with her. Alice can easily sympathize with her cat in a manner that she is unable to properly replicate with this mouse before her. Still, she attempts to soothe the mouse’s anxiety and excuse her statement by saying, “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.” “Not like cats!” cried the Mouse in a shrill passionate voice. “Would you like cats, if you were me?” “Well, perhaps not,” said Alice in a soothing tone: “don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah” (Alice 14). Despite momentarily realizing she might not like cats if she were a mouse, Alice quickly rejects this sympathetic encounter and ardently clings onto her own relatively humanist identity. The mouse’s fear is repulsive to her, whereas Dinah’s carnivorous and predatory appetite is significantly relatable. Regardless of her change in size, her humanist identity is still apparent here as it is scaffolded by a particular ontological superiority, as she chooses to relate with her carnivorous cat, Dinah, rather than this shivering mouse of prey. Similar to the animal tableau of 25 a mouse having a shave, then, this scenario does not underscore Alice’s resemblance as much as it drives her to distinguish herself or underscore the encroachment of a spectator’s imaginary representation. This maneuver then once again privileges her transformation and flexibility regarding her own identity in a way that the mouse is inhibited from performing. Despite Alice not physically eating in this scene, this sympathetic exchange marks a space of violent consumption, nonetheless. In doing so, the novel signals how linguistic and ocularcentric or visually focused methods may impede Alice from sympathizing with her companion and demonstrates how sympathy erases the identity of those who fall under its focus. Such scenes of sympathy then serve to do away with the body in a manner that renders nonhumans into an animal bestiary, incapable of breaking free or being heard by their gazer, and where Dinah’s “privileged” position can only be pedestaled by her similarity to Alice. Dinah can then be abstracted into the Cheshire-Cat (but more on that later), and this mouse can become mutable with the first rodent we met, the White Rabbit. Thus, Alice performs her consumption via linguistic and ocularcentric methods, deindividualizing the creatures of Wonderland and erasing them bodily. While the mouse may not be dressed in a waistcoat or pocket-watch as is the rabbit, Alice has still done away with his body without giving any due deference to his species. This consumption is much more tactful than the image of Dinah physically consuming and digesting this mouse. Instead, Carroll appears to draw attention to more discreet methods often employed in anthropomorphic literature. That is, Alice performs this bodily erasure by not only speaking to the mouse in a manner to which she would speak to her own species, but in wishing she could show Dinah to this mouse, she is then attempting to subsume him beneath a humanist umbrella that privileges linguistic, sympathetic, and ocularcentric idealisms above all else. She believes so 26 long as he could see Dinah, he would then be able to sympathize with Alice’s position, and direct her on how to safely navigate Wonderland, which would then make witnessing a key component in the practice of sympathy. It appears if he would only submit to ocularcentric ideology, he would be anthropomorphized enough to not fear cats and win Alice’s sympathy. However, by failing to win Alice’s sympathy, he is not anthropomorphized but animalized as we witness Alice’s attempt to deindividualize him by mentioning she forgot the mouse didn’t like cats. It is as if her glib conversation has now changed his opinion or as if the dynamics that is occurring here between predator and prey relationships has shifted, since she does not say, I did not realize you do not like cats. By claiming she forgot the mouse didn’t like cats, she is not only attempting to position his fear in the past, but more crucially, submitting to a stereotype that deindividualizes him from any other mouse or animal. Therefore, any erasure that is occurring here is not for the purpose of erasing the boundaries between human, animal, and object, but further privileging and concretizing anthropocentric ontology. It is important to remember that while such narratives may be commonly read as attempting to level the ontological plane and allow nonhumans to speak back to Alice’s (or humans’) imperial tendencies, what these scenes reveal is how these narratives are often tactfully complicit to methodologies that render the nonhuman as nothing more than a metonym for human anxieties and serve to concretize the boundaries between species. Such concretization then disallows the nonhuman from disrupting or manipulating human ontology and does nothing for granting agency to nonhuman lifeforms. In scenarios such as this, the only agents are those who have become successful in performing as ersatz humans. The only individual—Human. This is not to say despite the novel’s complicity, there are not exciting moments in which nonhuman animals speak back to their interlocutor, and more critical to the field of Victorian 27 Animal, Posthumanist, and Environmental Studies, where Victorians adamantly defended the diversity and due deference of their planet and its inhabitants. In fact, there are quite a few instances in which nonhuman animals were passionately protected and researched to prevent further devastation or extinction, and who in literature, evoke agency and personhood for themselves. What makes the Alice novels such an enriching source for these rebuttals is how these rebuttals are reframed outside of metonymic readings and transported into ecological debates. Turning to a new reading of Alice’s encounter with the infamous Caterpillar (used as a proper name here rather than a species marker) through the lens of ecological debates surrounding caterpillars’ occupation in Victorian gardens, we discover that this Caterpillar is not simply a stand in for India but illustrates these species impending extinction if these interspecies encounters were not radically reexamined. Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole invites her to enter a posthumanist environment that signposts humanism’s inability to capture, categorize, and understand alternative lifeforms outside of a familiar anthropocentric framework. Instead of validating our anthropocentric order, these beings disrupt the humanist constructs that Alice persistently employs and challenge her to acknowledge the various umwelten they occupy. Reeling from her efforts to engage with these creatures in the same way she would engage with her own kind, Alice must learn to acknowledge the deference each of their alternative modes of being demand, regardless of whether they are like her. That is, Alice must engage these characters with what Haraway refers to as respecere, where each encounter is designed to encourage her “[t]o hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem” these other creatures beyond what is familiar (When Species Meet 19). 28 Looking Back with Respecere In the polis of Wonderland, where every creature demands its acknowledgment as a denizen, it is a caterpillar who will request that Alice act with respecere and reject her humanist assumptions, extending the polis to a more radically diverse universe. Carroll’s choice to locate one of Wonderland’s most memorable scenes in Alice’s encounter with a caterpillar is not serendipitous or unconscious. Owing to its place in popular gardening texts of the period, the insect had acquired a variety of connotations, many of which emphasized its elusive or easily misidentified nature. Asa Fitch’s Miscellaneous Papers on Injurious Insects (1845-1865), for example, illustrates how such a seemingly generic species was imbricated within a history of misrepresentation, and more importantly, how these misrepresentations led to unjustified extermination. Fitch follows an account from M. Köllar of Vienna, who in his treatise on injurious insects, “relates that in the autumn of 1843, complaints were made that the wheat on the estates of his imperial highness, the Archduke Charles, at Altenburg, in Hungary, has been considerably injured by an unknown insect” (319), giving numerous accounts of sickly plants and inferior harvest. Discovering the empty shells on the grains, M. Köller attributed the estate’s agricultural destruction on “[t]he life of the caterpillars (their duration as naked worms?)” (319), to which Fitch responds, “M. Köller, who seems to have known nothing of the American history of this insect” corrects his mistake only after seeing a drawing of the Hessian Fly produced by Mr. Thomas Say in a North American journal. Mr. Köller only then confesses that the blame he attributed to the Caterpillar is caused by the Hessian fly, but by this point, word had already spread to England where Victorian gardeners began searching their own plants for the culprit. Carroll then transports us from the fantastical and anthropomorphized mise-en-scènes of Victorian museums and places us in a rather familiar, domestic, tamed, and cultivated location of anthropocentric making: the domestic garden. By reformulating Alice’s environment to mimic 29 one inhabited by the average middle-class English denizen, Carroll invites readers to identify the urgency of ethical cohabitation and accurate representation, exposing the dangers such ocularcentric and hierarchal practices posed for non-human alterity, and aligning with Fitch’s proposition to rectify these practices. After all, caterpillars were quite common in Victorian gardens, but their misidentification put them at genuine risk in Victorian England. According to Fitch, gardeners had difficulty identifying caterpillars due to the varying stages of metamorphosis for many species found in the class Linnaeus categorized as Insecta in 1758. As we note in the passage above, caterpillars were often confused with the Hessian Fly during its larval stage. These flies ate exorbitant amounts of necessary cereal crops, such as wheat, rye, and barley, and devastated farmers. Striving to destroy the destructive flies, gardeners would often mistakenly attack caterpillars, smoking them out of the garden with tobacco mixed with whale oil, the latter ingredient unintentionally associating the insects with the large mammals that Victorians nearly hunted to extinction. Carroll positions Alice’s caterpillar, notably, atop a mushroom smoking a hookah, a gesture that not only racializes the caterpillar, but calls to mind the means by which this species was commonly destroyed by Victorian gardeners. The Caterpillar, as a misidentified species who inhales the tobacco meant to exterminate him, is suspiciously situated as a mere specter awaiting death. As Jaques notes, Tenniel’s image obscures the caterpillar’s face, underscoring our misrecognition of his identity and purpose; we are unsure what he is doing there, why he is smoking tobacco, how he obtained it, and what his fate is.9 Meanwhile, Alice’s eyes are more clearly in the frame, staring at this insect and appearing obliviously unaware and seemingly undisturbed by her complicity in this 9 Jaques writes, “This illustration is designed to draw the viewer’s eye away from the human, with Alice partially occluded by the large mushroom, and toward the elevated caterpillar who perches atop it, framed by the tube of his hookah. Yet while viewers might be invited here to look at the non-human, he remains remarkably difficult to see: his face is in shadow, his eyes are turned the other way” (237). 30 extermination. While smoking out injurious insects was a quotidian practice for Victorian gardeners, and the caterpillar is a member of one of the most ubiquitous species, his obscurity and mystery in this scene gesture toward his radical alterity and misrecognition. As is the case for every other more-than-human character whose identity is misrepresented, death is imminent. The mystery and alterity in which Carroll shrouds this scene demonstrate an inchoate awareness of humans’ impact on other species. According to Fitch, the fate of the caterpillar is emblematic of how little humans understand the nonhuman agents that make up their world: Such facts forcibly show how much, how very much we need a thorough investigation of the Entomology of our country. It is indeed surprising that this branch of natural science, in an economical aspect second to no other in importance should have remained to this day so lamentably neglected. (321) It appears that although Victorians were aware of their desire to encounter, observe, and know other species, especially those who occupied or were brought to “English” territory, they were also mindful of the ecological impact such assumptions of “knowing” could have. Alice does not know whom she addresses, and Victorians did not know who occupied their gardens. As a result, Wonderland both reflects and imitates the practices of tableaux, menageries, zoos, and other collections that cultivated, categorized, and granted the illusion that England could govern over these global interspecies networks but does so to illustrate the possible devastation that might follow when other species or identities were misidentified. Thus, Wonderland draws the reader’s attention to the potential danger its residents face if they are not addressed with respecere, as Alice soon discovers. Alice has difficulty addressing this caterpillar, not because she mistakes him for a Hessian Fly, but because she follows the same ontological hierarchy she employs above ground. She not only assumes she understands to whom she speaks, but bases this assumption on her anthropocentric knowledge: 31 The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!” (Alice 33) At first, this scene may call readers to sympathize with Alice, as this caterpillar’s audacity is uncustomary, despite its direct reflection of Alice’s behavior. This exchange might, however, also be read not as a call for sympathy but as a criticism. “Who are you?” is not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice has been trying to sympathize with each character, the result of which is that each addressee becomes only a mirror image of herself, each different from the one before (which is why she only knew who she was when she awoke). In this current situation, however, she is unable to answer—Alice has lost her sense of herself as an ontological fullness, a stable presence in the world. Still not understanding the import of this address, she continues to sympathize with the Caterpillar: “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” “I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar. “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied, very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” “It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar. (33) It appears sympathizing with this caterpillar has not allowed Alice to understand either one of their characters—to see them in what ecofeminist Josephine Donovan refers to in The Aesthetics of Care as an epistemological ascesis—or without interpretation.10 Moreover, Alice says she cannot explain herself but does not foresee her assumptions regarding the caterpillar’s ability or how he looks back at her. Once again, Alice has attempted to understand him, relate to him, and 10 Donovan argues, “Attention requires looking directly at an object, suspending imaginative constructs so as to see the object ‘without interpretation’—an epistemological ascesis” (8). 32 thus sympathize with him, but in doing so, she assumes she understands what it is like to metamorphose and that through this shared trait, he will sympathize with her. However, Alice does not reflect on how she is projecting her consciousness onto an interspecies ability. Similar to Alice’s encounter with the mouse, she asks, or rather states, he sees, demonstrating that Alice is unable to understand how one’s gaze might be evacuated from hegemonic constructs, and to combat such a projection, the caterpillar replies that he does not see. This rebuttal illustrates how taxidermic spectacles’ seemingly vulnerable positions might resist metonymic, mimetic, and sympathetic renderings. In this instance, we witness how nonhumans positioned in dioramas truly speak back to Victorians’ imperial and anthropocentric projections by refusing to act in accord with the ideological principles that displace their identity. The caterpillar’s response is worth considering more carefully. He does not look back on Alice with sympathy and he does not see nor understand the methods with which she approaches him. In an endeavor to discredit his reply, Alice attempts to patronize the caterpillar by suggesting that he has much to learn or has not yet gone through the appropriate stages of development to understand this concept. Carroll writes: “‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice; ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’” (33). However, the caterpillar once again quickly counters her claim—“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar—since to feel queer would be already to occupy a state of non-normativity. Refusing to submit to anthropocentric, ocularcentric, or sympathetic ideology, the Caterpillar does not seek to compare his situation to any other, and so the parameters of normativity disappear. So, when Alice says, “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me,” and the Caterpillar emphasizes the very same subjective pronoun, “You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?” 33 we discover he does so to signal the irony of such a limited concept of identity. Who she is in relation to him does not conjure up any useful markers. The kinds of queerness proposed in the novel liberate the subject from taxonomic and restrictive constructs. Who indeed is any queer subject if queerness exceeds the limits of how we identify ourselves through language or epistemic comprehension? The circularity of this scene then illustrates how Alice cannot seem to operate outside of her anthropocentric universe. She does not know how to answer who she is in isolation from the caterpillar’s experience. Carroll writes: Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, “I think you ought to tell me who you are, first.” “Why?” said the Caterpillar. Here was another puzzling question: and, as Alice could not think of any good reason, and the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away. (Alice 41) Unlike the taxidermic spectacles of Victorian tableaux, this caterpillar need not explain who he is and rejects Alice’s access to his consciousness. As a result, Carroll circumvents a potential scene of human entitlement and sympathy to introduce a new narrative in which this Caterpillar illustrates agency and personhood without mimicking or embodying humanist notions. Moreover, the caterpillar’s response exposes the adverse consequences of Linnaeus’s fluid categorization and the current critical consensus that sees the novel as challenging the human- animal binary. As Diana Donald writes, “Animals, in particular, resisted categorization on the basis of morphology, and were apparently capable of infinite variation” (32), an idea that also denied more-than-human animals their individuality, radical identity, and umwelt. Yet, Wonderland presents itself as a posthumanist environment where Alice is encouraged to encounter these species with respecere rather than sympathy, and in this context, we discover that the “who and what are is precisely what is at stake,” as Haraway articulates (When Species 34 Meet 19). Therefore, the Caterpillar stakes his sovereignty over his unique identity rather than allow Alice to sympathize with him. More importantly, his response prohibits Alice from abstracting him into an animal bestiary where readers might mistake his purpose as dispensable, metaphorical, or nonexistent. The novel then suggests that there is something to being a Caterpillar that is beyond human comprehension and representation. The scene thus anticipates one the central insights of animal studies. In his influential essay, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?”, Thomas Nagel refutes reductive materialism, arguing that if one were to imagine another state of livelihood, consciousness, or experience, crucial aspects of such conditions would be lost in translation, and what’s more, may efface the individualism and identity of the person with whom one is trying to relate. Nagel writes that philosophers, and in this case, Alice, share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. (435) In other words, in attempting to persuade this caterpillar to sympathize with her, Alice reduces him into a familiar image of herself, and nearly succeeds in replacing his radical difference with a state that she can comprehend. Yet, the caterpillar resists Alice’s reduction. Thus, despite Alice standing at the same height as the Caterpillar (three inches tall) and urging him to sympathize with her on what it is like to undergo metamorphosis, the Caterpillar suggests that simply because he shares this characteristic or ability does not necessarily mean he can relate to her. He does not seek to understand what it means to be a human any more than Alice can understand what it is like to be a caterpillar. Consequently, the advice this caterpillar is proposing reminds readers that simply because the distinction between Alice and other animals is one of degree and not kind, it does not follow that she understands what it is like to be any other individual. 35 Although she may be able to change size, such an ability does not mean she may enter another’s mental or physical experience. In this respect, the caterpillar’s advice calls into question the supposed benefits of conventional models of sympathy. It suggests that even though Alice may resemble her interlocutor in some regards, the Caterpillar remains utterly autonomous, independent, and inaccessible to her gaze. He is neither reduced to a spectacle nor a mirror image and rejects the ideologies that aim to render him as such. As Alice walks away in frustration, the Caterpillar calls after her, “‘Come back!’ ‘I’ve something important to say!’” (Alice 41). The demand sounds promising to Alice; she feels she may yet understand this most inscrutable of beings. But the exchange that follows serves only to grant the Caterpillar the opportunity to prove that Alice has not changed, despite her physical and ontological metamorphoses. Though she may constantly change in size, Alice’s consciousness has remained that of a little girl whose species, race, and class mark her as a privileged identifier. Despite entering the Caterpillar’s environment and sharing many of the same qualities, Alice can never enter his umwelt, or this particular environment as he relates to it. This distinction may also be why the Caterpillar and Alice react to the mushroom upon which the Caterpillar sits very differently. While the mushroom acts as a kind of stool or perch for the Caterpillar, raising him to an elevated height above Alice and thus acting as a means of asserting his ontological superiority (since they are both currently only three inches tall), Alice views this mushroom as a means of changing her physical and metaphysical size. The overlapping yet distinctive uses of the mushroom thus signal how these two beings occupy the same environment but interact with their umwelten in markedly distinct ways. The novel uses the encounter between Alice and the Caterpillar to refute the idea that one’s gaze can serve as an act of benevolence or an avenue to relate to, sympathize with, and 36 identify another being. If Carroll had the Caterpillar sympathize with Alice, such sympathy would result in an elision of his identity, only serving to make the Caterpillar human by erasing his consciousness and projecting, in its place, a figure that is entirely of human making. Distinct from many other anthropomorphic novels, these nonhuman figures do not present themselves for appropriation but call for the reinterpretation, and perhaps reanimation of their speech that is necessary in these interspecies encounters. While I am shying away from reading Alice’s and the Caterpillar’s dialogue as a promotion of sympathy’s mechanism, Jesse Selbin argues that sometimes sympathy. “Requires a mnemonic and linguistic savagery: a way of fracturing the calcified meanings and associations that, barnacle-like, have made memento mori of words and embalmed human speech” [qtd. From Sympathetic Realism 120]. In the two-way street of sympathetic form lies the capacity for what Greiner calls “Linguistic reanimation” (SR, 63), a way of continually adjusting and reappraising how words signify in new contexts and between new interlocutors. (171) It is through the Caterpillar's rejection of Alice’s sympathetic projection that he establishes the mnemonic and linguistic savagery necessary to signify his intervention. Although Carroll allows this Caterpillar to speak in a conventionally human manner, Carroll does so in a fashion that continually adjusts and reappraises the meaning of the Caterpillar’s speech, emphasizing what Derrida might identify as the differánce of language in his 1963 paper “Cogito et historie de la folie.” Differánce disrupts the coherence of meaning in language to the point where the ultimate signifier—here referred to as the Caterpillar—is never attained, and therefore, can never be restrained or identified by its linguistic container. Instead, one signifier leads to another signifier in an unending back and forth that is replicated in these characters’ dialogue. The back and forth of the Caterpillar’s inquiries signals the constant state of nonarrival taking place in this encounter, further deescalating logocentrism from its lofty heights. Meaning here is forever deferred in an endless chain of signifiers, with the only relevant signifiers emphasized via italics 37 being the addressed subject—the most inaccessible and untranslatable signifier of all. Language and sight are not the means of relating to or sympathizing with the other, and the scene thus questions the utility of anthropomorphizing nonhuman characters and the value of sympathizing with other species. Yet, Alice struggles to understand this proto-posthumanist concept and so must continue looking back at other species with respecere. The Caterpillar’s manipulation of this linguistic exchange certainly remodels conventional forms of resistance by creating an anthropomorphic novel that is incredibly hostile to its own production and rendering of nonhuman life, and yet this is not the only encounter that challenges Alice’s epistemic comprehension. Along Alice’s journey, she volunteers to play in a game of croquet. As is the case with any diorama or animal tableau Alice enters, Alice brings with her a set of assumptions, expecting these tableaux to do nothing more than reflect the anthropo- and Eurocentric surface world that Alice previously occupied. Due to these assumptions, Alice enters Wonderland and this game of croquet with the idea that she already knows how the rules work. Presuming this polis is nothing more than an ersatz of her own environment and oblivious to the difference of the occupants who inhabit it, Alice continues to treat the objects/subjects of this world in a Kantian manner familiar to her. Grabbing onto a flamingo as she prepares to use it as a mallet to strike a hedgehog curled up in a ball, Alice first attempts to position this character in a manner that is most convenient for her purposes, tucking the bird into a stagnant and stiff plank that may resemble the stuffing process of animals placed on display in dioramas. The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely strengthened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing. (Alice 67) 38 Even though no other character, whether posited as player or instrument of the game, is behaving or cooperating in a manner familiar to her, Alice does not recognize how this environment is resisting her anthropocentric projections or refusing to be a mirror of the surface world. As Daniel Bivona astutely argues in “Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland,” Alice is incapable of comprehending her situation because of the ethnocentric, and I would add, anthropocentric cast of her outlook: “her knowledge is perfectly circular in the sense that it consists solely in what she already knew before coming to Wonderland” (163). In her surface home, animals are subjected to utilitarian purposes, and cooperate and remain in the positions in which they have been placed. They appear as stagnant and vulnerable as the governable worlds of dioramas, where images displayed around menageries posed predator and prey as coexisting peacefully, or conglomerated exotic species from different continents and staged them as coexisting naturally in the same space. In this scene, however, these characters are aiming to break out of these settings by illustrating the confusion and fragmentation of these postures. Not by any means are they cooperating or coexisting with one another but appear absurd in their proximity. For Young, this scene demonstrates how: Alice’s efforts to make both objects work for her is characterized by conflict. The hedgehogs refuse to wait on Alice’s leisure, even at the risk of her displeasure: “it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away” [qtd. in Alice, 117]. This positions the notion of functionality as pertaining to human use as absurd, as the objects in question assert their agency through an unwillingness to be used improperly—or, at least, on someone else’s terms. (36) Asserting their agency not only allows these animals to resist Alice’s projections but offers new forms of resistance that do not operate within linguistic confrontations. This scene in turn invites less dichotomous paradigms offered by scholars such as Judith Butler, whose work reimagines 39 vulnerability and resistance as intricately conditional and dependent on one another, rather than oppositional and juxtaposed, as we will soon see illustrated. By turning around to gaze back at the human who is physically restraining and objectifying the flamingo’s body, this flamingo stages his resistance in the same moment that he seems to be the most vulnerable, illustrating how these conditions are not mutually oppositional but constitute the intricacies that form the very possibility of resistance, in the first place. Butler continues to challenge these fundamental concepts, arguing that conventional understandings of “vulnerability and of action presuppose (and support) the idea that paternalism is the site of agency, and vulnerability, understood only as an alternative to such frameworks”, implying “the need for protection and the strengthening of paternalistic forms of power” (Vulnerability 10). This scene posits itself as a reimagining of these dichotomous conceptions. Alice stands as the paternalistic power that physically restrains the animal that she is preparing to use for action (namely to play a game of croquet). Yet, it is only in this vulnerable position that the flamingo exacts its agency, turning to gaze back at its restrainer and dismantle these conventional forms of power to the extent that Alice becomes completely at a lost as to where each actor in this game stands, ontologically and physically. It is also worth mentioning that, unlike the Caterpillar, the flamingo’s resistance is not performed via some vehement rebuttal or through any verbal interjection. In fact, the flamingo does not speak against Alice at all, but remains a silent character. This is significant for an anthropomorphic novel for a cascade of reasons: First, just as the flamingo’s neck swivels around, we notice a flexible turn in the narrative that invites the reader to question the spaces in which agency and resistance are enacted. Second, the fact the flamingo does not utter a sound, but instead gazes back at Alice challenges the defining aspects of personhood. How much 40 cognitive capacity this flamingo has remains unclear, but as Alice stands arrested by his gaze, the flamingo exemplifies a kind of personhood and awareness outside of linguistic exchange. What’s more, because he does not speak against Alice, his silence is juxtaposed to Alice’s own form of subjectivity and defense. Thus, his silence impedes any reading that might attempt to pose the flamingo’s evocation of personhood as a kind of mimesis or humanist construct for Alice. While the Caterpillar may have staged his resistance linguistically, but refused to see, the flamingo stages his resistance within an ocularcentric ideology evacuated from language. In this scene in which Alice is challenged to look back at the flamingo, however, carnivalesque or farcical she finds this meeting to be, Alice’s discomfort is induced precisely because this demand for response attributes the flamingo with a face and demands a kind of respecere. In this moment then, Alice is invited to see this flamingo as a member of the polis, and perhaps we may even go so far as to read this gaze as a maneuver that invites this being into Levinas’ realm of ethics, where this face-to-face encounter calls the subject into giving and serving the Other. Such an encounter, according to Levinas’ phenomenological account, forbids any reduction to Sameness, and so impedes any mimetic exchange between the flamingo and Alice. Instead, the flamingo gazes upon Alice, arrested somewhere between vulnerability and resistance, and demands to not be killed, or rendered into an object, which for animals, amounts to the same thing. Of course, such ethics in Alice’s surface world is highly policed and so Alice discredits this encounter with an outburst of laughter—a disavowal for which Alice will soon become accountable. After all, the flamingo has demanded a response, a response that illustrates itself, as Butler states, as “a comportment toward the Other only after the Other has made a demand upon me, accused me of a failing, or asked me to assume a responsibility” (Precarious Life 129). Butler continues, 41 The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails. (Precarious Life 130) Of course, as I have stressed, the flamingo does not need to speak, but Carroll is certainly drawing our attention to the principles and ethics of such response, given that only moments later the Queen begins to shout, “‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy” (Alice 67). In laughing at such an address, Alice’s existence does indeed become extremely precarious, as she knew her existence could cease “any minute, ‘and then,’ thought she, ‘what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here: the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!’” (68). While the novel may be stressing the potency of Alice’s ontological position, this statement reveals just how precarious her own ontological position remains when gazed upon by another, and moreover, continues to question the responsibilities of the one who observes. What does it mean to address another with respecere? And more so, if addressing one with respecere allows us to become-with our environment, then who is ultimately invited into this ecosystem of radical alterity? Animal Subjectivity: Did You Say a Pig or a Fig? It is not just rabbits, mice, caterpillars, and flamingos that Alice encounters and attempts to sympathize and anthropomorphize, and more importantly, they are not the only creatures who demand to be treated with respecere. Rather, the crux of these encounters has very much to do with how we approach and define identity and animal subjectivity in a biologically diverse environment. As a result, Alice’s adventures and dilemmas revolve around the same issues Matthew Calarco discusses in Zoographies. After all, Alice’s various social faux pas occur whenever she tries to sympathize with other species, yet each attempt either blatantly offends the 42 animal other, or effaces them beneath a humanist umbrella. Similarly, in critiquing animal rights discourse, Calarco writes, Animal rights discourse, then, is beset by two rather fundamental difficulties. On the one hand, in order to gain a voice in the political and legal spheres, it is constrained to adopt the language and strategies of identity politics, which in turn further constrains the discourse to establish a concept of animality and animal interests that must be somewhat distinct from the focus and concerns of other forms of identity politics.” (7) Identity politics continues to unravel in Alice’s next encounter, questioning who is invited to have a voice in this anthropocentric arena, and more importantly, reimagining agency, alterity, and existence in this posthumanist environment. Before making her way to the Red Queen, Alice stumbles upon a little house four-feet high where she spots a footman outside the door. “‘How am I to get in?’ asked Alice again, in a louder tone. ‘Are you to get in at all?’ said the Footman. ‘That’s the first question, you know’” (Alice 44), and indeed the Footman is astute in offering this question. Much as Alice pondered earlier how she would get into the garden, the footman is investigating whether Alice is becoming conscientious of the privileges her ontological mutability as a human has afforded her. Readers soon discover the answer is a resonating no, as Alice is surprised to find herself morphing again to take the place of the footman and enters the house. Once inside, Alice witnesses a cook stirring a pot of soup with too much pepper, and “the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby” (44). Next, she espies a large cat, “which was lying on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear” (44), which leads Alice to timidly inquire, why the cat grins like that. In response to her questions, the Duchess explains, “‘It’s a Cheshire-Cat . . . and that’s why, Pig!’” followed by the declaration that Alice doesn’t know much, “‘and that’s a fact’” (45). Despite Alice’s offense and the momentary confusion Alice must wrestle with regarding her own position—is she even human here or has the Duchess just reoriented Alice’s 43 own identity, Alice wonders—the reader is immediately cued into the erroneous conjectures Alice may be making of this spectacle precisely because she struggles to detach the scene she has entered from any mimetic position of her own domesticity. Regardless of the supernatural characteristic of this cat, Carroll never elucidates why Alice thinks this creature is a cat in the first place. Instead, its place on the hearth seems to be enough to reflect Alice’s own domestic environment, and as has already been suggested, allows Alice to render this “cat” as a placeholder for her own feline companion, Dinah. Furthermore, despite the Duchess’ announcement that what she holds in her arms is a pig and not a baby, we discover the Duchess’s speech is rendered mute, as this information never registers for Alice. Significantly, language does not grant the Duchess any authority here, which can then signal the ways in which one is dehumanized by the absence of language, or humanized by the attribution of such, but never understood outside these humanistic strati. Thus, everyone in this scene is treated within anthropocentric constructs; the Duchess is rendered into a bad mother who violently shakes her baby, and Alice acts as the sympathetic Samaritan who saves the baby from certain violence. Yet, what this scene really suggests is how none of these social mechanisms aid in helping Alice to discern the identity of the occupants with whom she shares this particular environment. Rather, these frameworks have only permitted Alice to subsume each encounter beneath a humanist umbrella, making what is unfamiliar, problematically uncanny. As a result, the novel suggests that for Alice to understand the import of these encounters, she must rethink what it means to be included in a truly diverse social setting. In this respect, the polis is no longer made of human or animal as we dichotomously refer to them, but rather an 44 obscure mixture of what Mel Y. Chen distinguishes as animacies.11 Therefore, once the Duchess throws “the baby” into Alice’s arms, Alice falls back into her ontological tendencies, but only for this inchoate being to throw Alice into a state of confusion regarding who or what she is holding. Carroll writes: Alice caught the baby with some difficulty as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, ‘just like a star-fish,’ thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it. (Alice 47-8) In a rather authoritative and dominating move—much as one would herald over a “baby”—Alice tries to restrain this creature in a manner that will make its handling most convenient. Yet, the “queer-shaped little creature” resists Alice’s manipulation by projecting its limbs out in all directions so that it now mimics another five-pointed creature. Wonderland then continues challenging Alice’s ontological and categorical acumen and control by comparing this creature to a starfish, a misnomer for sea-stars in that they are not at all fish. All of Alice’s sympathetic attempts in acting as its makeshift mother and perpetuating a common children’s narrative of compassion, along with all of her coinciding ocularcentric and anthropocentric exercises, then seem successful only in misidentifying, misusing, and suspending these beings into Alice’s familiar imaginary and humanist constructs. In this respect, treating this pig as a human still does nothing to respect its alterity. However, this pig does not need to be “human” to resist Alice’s attempts at coddling, restraining, and infantilizing its person. Rather, what’s important here is that its description as “queer” prohibits its audience from any neat categorization or ocularcentric description of its 11 In Animacies, Chen offers a truly interdisciplinary work that uses linguistics, disability, postcolonial, and queer theory to challenge the normative constructs that often designate animate from inanimate lifeforms, and challenges the agency attributed to such beings based off their level of animation. 45 person, as it not only mimics a starfish, but snorts like a steam-engine—a non-biological lifeform whose powerful animation serves to extend agency beyond the human form, and whose vocality—rather than language—is easily understood as a protest to its usage. Following Chen’s analysis of such queer life forms in Animacies, this creature’s description then serves to invite a more playful transformation and agency than would be otherwise welcomed had this being remained in the frozen parameters of Alice’s sympathetic gaze. Furthermore, its various addresses as an “it” in alignment with its queerness casts off the dehumanizing aspects of non- gendered labels and instead signals alternative gender and social identities, as well as the agency and personhood that may still be attributed to these creatures despite their obscurity. By blurring the boundaries between human (baby), animal (star-fish or pig), and thing (steam-engine), the creature’s animacy then functions to veer away “from dominant ontologies and the normativities they promulgate” (Chen 10), since this “creature” is hierarchically indecipherable, and thus challenges the reading Alice proposed when she first entered the scene. More importantly, the intimate encounter Alice and this pig share shore up a number of questions regarding what it means to look back and respond with respecere, and what qualities signal to us that such ethics need to be deployed. After all, Alice appears to be as deaf to this pig’s vocality as she is to the Duchess’s. Instead, she cries out, “‘Don’t grunt,’ . . . ‘that’s not at all a proper way of expressing yourself’” (Alice 48), which is a shocking reply given the reader has been assured that this being does not have a concrete identity, and thus does not have any proper definition as to what its response should look or sound like. However, what quickly becomes apparent in this exchange is how language is weaponized to deny another’s transformation. The lack of anthropomorphic language exhibited by the pig is misinterpreted as a sign of Alice’s superiority. It is then important to note the only dialogue she has with this 46 creature is more directed to the human audience, such as when she says “‘Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?’ She said the last words out loud, and the little thing grunted in reply (it had left off sneezing by this time)” (48). While it may appear that Alice is speaking with the creature, it is significant that this dialogue never produces a decipherable answer. Rather, Alice uses its vocality to justify her own actions, which was never really a question or request for permission to take the thing away. Instead, Alice assumes the grunt is an amiable response to her own inquiry, positioning this infant not as a vocal agent, but a restrained hostage whose contribution to the narrative only serves to buttress Alice’s dominant position. The fact that the vocality that was emitted from this creature has shifted (from repetitive sneezing to a grunt), never suggests to Alice that she has forcefully manipulated its ontological position or social identity in proper imperial fashion. The dialogue and language deployed here only serves to illustrate that when authors make animals speak, it is just as often done to defend a monologic and anthropocentric universe as it is to defy human ontology. The more successful rebellion occurs outside of the parameters of language and designated identity, thus allowing this creature to endorse its own agency outside of humanist constructs and produce a polyphony uncommon to anthropomorphic literature. It stands to follow that since Alice uses language as a weapon to restrain and imprison her interlocutors, Alice must continue in silence, and so she warns, “‘if you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,’ said Alice, seriously, ‘I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Mind now!’ The poor little thing sobbed again (or grunted, it was impossible to say which), and they went on for some while in silence” (48). After a little while of walking, Alice was just beginning to think to herself, ‘Now, what am I to do with this creature, when I get it home?’ . . . it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig. (48) 47 It is only when Alice stops trying to sympathize with the baby through her linguistic and anthro- political framework (wondering if it would be murder to leave it behind) that she realizes the face of the Other cannot be delimited a priori to the realm of the human, but can instead indubitably belong to a pig, or something/one else. In this respect, the novel predates and verifies Calarco’s intervention in animal encounters when he writes that, “animals of various sorts might have a face, which is to say, animals might call upon and obligate me in ways that I cannot fully anticipate” (5), and so Alice, unable to anticipate this encounter, is alarmed to find the pig flying out of her arms and into the forest; a direct refusal to her wish to bring it home with her. Clearly, the pig does not need to have a voice, for it is significantly in silence that Alice comes to treat this animal with respecere, and thus practice what Donovan conceives of as wit(h)nessing. This scene then immerses itself between the Kantian and ocularcentric ethics of witnessing and Donovan’s adoption of wit(h)nessing. While the former struggles to see animals outside of the animal bestiary and humanist imaginary, the latter is a concept borrowed from Griselda Pollock that demands observers to sympathize with others without the reduction to Sameness or self-representation. Instead, wit(h)nessing acknowledges subjectivity and immerses itself in difference. What becomes quickly apparent in this scene is how Alice struggles to perform an epistemological ascesis, to see without interpretation, and to wit(h)ness her place in this network. She has been invited into this environment to become a part of this microcosmic environment but lacks the ability to evacuate her ocularcentric episteme until she is forced to address and respect the radical alterity of this pig. While children’s literature is infamous for teaching, questioning, and reimagining young humans’ place in their environment, what is significant and subversive about this encounter is how it refuses to dictate the appropriate container (in terms of geography, intimacy, and species) for this creature. The pig trots off into 48 the forest and out of human purview, allowing readers to entertain any and all possibilities. Whether this being should occupy a domestic space as a “baby”, a cultivated agricultural space as a “pig”, or some other space is unclear, precisely because his species marker no longer makes him capable of being ontologically categorized. Rather, the story entertains a non-normative intimacy in Alice’s attention to the creature, entertaining all possibilities without concretizing the appropriateness of any. In this respect, the novel may be hinting at the arbitrary boundaries and delineations of such spaces, and consequently has the creature simply disappear off into the woods and out of the pages of this anthropomorphic narrative that cannot possibly contain such animacies. However, this may be an optimistic close whose prematurity dismisses perhaps the most important lesson for Alice. After all, even while Alice has learned “that animals have not only a response but also a point of regarding her” (Feuerstein 244), Alice still has not questioned whether other animals are obligated to respond in the first place, perhaps explaining why Alice later forcefully shakes her kitten into response once she exits Wonderland. Instead, our interpretations of Wonderland may certainly succeed in deconstructing the human, but such deconstructions, as Shukin admonishes, can also risk fetishizing these creatures, and thus positing them as articulations of alterity that make them more accessible within an anthropocentric framework. In this manner, we jeopardize turning felines, rabbits, caterpillars, and pigs into talismans of our posthumanist future. Therefore, while I am not eager to propose any resolutions for the novel’s intervention in posthumanist concepts—especially regarding what it means to be a human, or to be a human looking at other animals, my objective is to explore the limits to which the novel is willing to go to entertain an ecocentric community. Significantly, Alice must walk along in silence before she recognizes the alterity of this other being, witnessing 49 this animal’s transformation into a more-than-human figure, evacuating language from its ontological privilege, and fracturing while simultaneously respecting the human-animal-object divide. As a result, the novel may pave exciting avenues that not only separate vulnerability from the realm of the animal, but marks vulnerability as a necessary condition for resistance; inviting these characters to become more than passive participants in Victorian literature. However, such avenues cannot allow us to forget that Alice’s realization and recognition continuously returns to operating within humanist constructs that define what it means to have a face, and thus remains gazing at the animal other equipped only with the anthropocentric tools of humanism’s gauge. After all, even after Alice’s realizes that this pig does indeed have a face, and thus demands a certain right to life, Alice “felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly” (Alice 48), for then she is not responsible for what happens on the outskirt of civilization, where not coincidentally, many abattoirs reside. Yet, this pig may not be a pig at all, as the Cheshire-Cat appears to confirm. Materializing in the forest once the pig has trotted off, the Cheshire-Cat asks Alice whether the pig has turned into a pig as he thought it would, in which Alice responds in the affirmative. “‘It turned into a pig,” Alice answered very quietly, just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way” (Alice 51). The Cheshire-Cat’s ambiguous appearance and abilities remain unquestioned so long as this character addresses Alice as a symbol of authority. However, this encounter quickly takes a more antagonistic turn, as the Cheshire-Cat reappears to question whether Alice said pig or fig. In response, Alice asserts, “‘I said ‘pig’ . . . ‘and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly; you make one quite giddy’” (51). Alice’s confrontational tone is resurrected precisely at the moment her ontological and categorical acumen is challenged, confirming that it is not because she identified the pig as a pig that makes it such. The Cheshire- 50 Cat’s secondary inquiry playfully yet significantly dismantles humanistic systems of identity and suggests the possibility of transformation even after “the pig” has been named. Furthermore, this confrontation continues to impede the notion that Alice has control over such transitions and can concretize these appellations. Rather, the Cheshire-Cat returns to suggest that he may have misheard Alice’s response, tactfully subverting the confidence in which she asserts in marking the creature’s identity. It is only when Alice is challenged that she becomes disturbed by the Cheshire-Cat’s own ambiguous and metaphysical identity. She cannot concretize the pig as a pig any more than she can arrest this creature beneath her gaze, thus disrupting the linguistic and ocularcentric constructs that Alice projects to establish dominance and anthropomorphize these creatures. However, this subversive disruption to Alice’s humanist frameworks does not succeed in obscuring a more sinister possibility—that all these encounters continue to efface and erase these animals post-encounter/utilization. After all, it is not until Alice confirms the pig as a pig that the animal is erased from the pages, and despite Alice’s confusion regarding the Cheshire-Cat, her focus on this animal’s smile taints the posthumanist potential of its disappearance. Has the animal been released from its anthropocentric restraints or is its disappearance indicative of the death that is to come after being named, as Derrida might ask? For Derrida, it seems that “every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost” (Animal 37), which certainly throws the reader into discomfort after having watched this specter slowly disintegrate, only for Alice to focus on the mouth. Alice’s focus on the Cheshire-Cat’s mouth confirms this insidious perpetuation of anthropocentric projection, especially when we recall how preoccupied Alice is with her own cat’s mouth, or more acutely, with Dinah’s consumption, since it is the very catalyst that sends Alice into the rabbit hole. Once submerged, Alice’s first 51 thought revolves around what her cat would like to eat: “‘Dinah’ll miss me very much tonight, I should think!’ (Dinah was the cat.) ‘I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time’” (Alice 4). By focusing on the Cheshire-Cat’s mouth as the last remaining remnant of its personhood, the Cheshire-Cat becomes nothing more than a placeholder for Dinah. The disappearance of the Cheshire-Cat’s body then may signal its entrapment into the Victorian imaginary rather than its dissolution. Ultimately, both supposed felines remain trapped in the very imaginary that aims to concretize their identity. The Cheshire-Cat, regardless of its inexplicable abilities, is rendered as a cat by the same animal bestiary and Victorian imaginary that makes Dinah’s appearance already introduced in the past tense, as Carroll writes, Dinah was the cat. And Say the Animal Responded While Alice’s journey through Wonderland proposes several interspecies responses, either through a linguistic or an ocularcentric confrontation of Alice’s presumptions, what these encounters signpost is how often we struggle to operate outside of these parameters altogether. However, this struggle does not obstruct the potential to excavate something fruitful out of these tête-à-têtes or to broaden avenues of exchange and meaningful dialogue, as Alice’s engagement with a puppy demonstrates. Taken out of the domicile and away from the domestic hearth, Alice continues her journey through the forest where she meets “an enormous puppy [who] was looking down at her with large round eyes, and feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her” (Alice 30). Alice’s meeting with this puppy in the forest rather than within the home arguably disrupts how we are meant to interpret its position. Its oversized stature and relatively wild environment work against its infantilized appellation, signaling a potential confrontation— Alice may be food. At the same time, its nomenclature mitigates its threat, ensuring that this 52 animal does not truly challenge or surpass Alice’s ontological position from an evolutionary standpoint (as does every encounter, thus far). This mitigation means that even though this puppy may be staring down at Alice, Alice’s episteme is not radically altered, although it may be thrown into momentary confusion. More important than its stature, its gaze, and its evolutionary position, however, is how this creature evacuates rather than supports humanist constructs. I argue the puppy’s odd position and environment encourage readers to relinquish humanist and domestic assumptions as to what role this puppy plays in relation to Alice. The puppy’s gaze and potential predator status is not as significant as the confusion that amounts in this scenario. That is, this scene’s optics do not provide either partner in this exchange any useful information, and yet it is clear the puppy is still trying to engage with Alice and acknowledge her existence outside of these ocularcentric ideologies. The potency and predation of his gaze is diminished once he holds up a paw to contact Alice, thereby initiating and heralding interspecies corporeal contact over humanist ocularcentric ideology in this game of species interdependence. What we have in this encounter is a new dialogic. As Haraway writes, “Species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention” (When Species Meet 19). By circumventing the puppy’s ocularcentric focus, Wonderland invites other possibilities for learning to pay attention. In this sense, Alice’s anthropocentric frameworks do not preclude response and respecere, but nor do they serve as preconditions. Instead, a true play of companion species is initiated from the place of the Other, in that Other’s language—a lift of the paw that establishes trust in a new encounter. After all, it is only after this game is initiated that Alice’s concern for her ontological position begins to fall away and her preoccupation with what this puppy is 53 becomes secondary to this act of play. It no longer matters how this creature is identified, and so as Alice begins to play with this puppy, she feels as if she is having a game with a carthorse, instead (Alice 31). This identity disruption once again disallows us from perceiving the “appropriate” environment or setting for this animal, along with any conventional and restraining forms of engagement. Once liberated from these humanist shackles, we are met with the challenge of how to address a game of response and respecere, regardless of whether we find ourselves engaging with a human-rabbit, a flamingo-mallet, a pig-starfish-steam engine, or a puppy-carthorse. While Alice’s adventures unsettle our relationships with companion species by focusing on alternative modes of respectful response—whether this response challenges the benevolence of sympathetic exchange, highlights our anthropomorphic projections, or disrupts linguistic and ocularcentric meaning-making—the novel stresses one more crucial insight, pondering whether the other is obligated to respond, in the first place. Thus, Alice awakens and exits Wonderland by shewing away a deck of cards that are once again posited as an object-animal hybrid. Discovering that she is in fact holding her kitten, Alice exclaims, ‘You woke me out of oh! Such a nice dream! And you’ve been along with me, Kitty—all through the Looking Glass world. Did you know it, dear?’” Of course, “it is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. ‘If they would only purr for ‘yes,’ and mew for ‘no,’ or any rule of that sort,’ she had said, ‘so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?’” (Through the Looking Glass 229) The kitten’s silence is an odd frustration for Alice to have at this point, and so her utterance is displaced from any solid temporal plane—she had once made the remark. Perhaps now, Alice, and even readers, understand that even if Kitty did purr for yes, and mew for no, it would not help us understand Kitty’s livelihood any more than we do now. Rather, she would still always say the same thing, perpetually subscribing to a language that will not tell of her life as a kitten, 54 but as an anthropomorphic character and another humanoid figure—the Red Queen. This is precisely the dilemma Derrida dissects. He writes, “I am certainly not about to conclude hurriedly, upon wakening, as Alice did, that one cannot speak with a cat on the pretext that it doesn’t reply or that it always replies the same thing” (Animal 22). However, in entertaining the possibility that the animal may respond, Derrida overlooks the potential behind this kitten’s lack of response. The pretext of no response is not to be confused with capacity, certainly, but it does pivot off the assumption that response is necessary and obligatory. In keeping with these animals’ critical moments of silence, this Kitten ensures readers press beyond the kitten’s reply and consider the ability to refuse response as an indicator of agency, autonomy, and resistance, or in short, that silence is also a form of respecere in interspecies encounters. While we are uncertain whether Alice is still frustrated by this kitten’s silence, the lessons for readers are manifold and surpass the geographical and imaginary parameters of Wonderland. The first of these lessons is that in questioning whether the animal has the ability to respond, one overlooks whether they have the obligation to respond. Any capacity for response is then paradoxically redirected into a Cartesian field in which not responding is not a significant option. Second is the hypocritical action that would have been evoked had the kitten responded, since Alice’s encounters have all been situated to impress upon her the idea that language is a barrier and an impasse, rather than a bridge between companion species. It is what offends the mouse, what erases the white rabbit, and what leads her in circles with the Caterpillar. Lastly, outside of hermeneutical law, the kitten not only refuses to respond, but like the Caterpillar, refuses to see, as we discover when Alice places the Red Queen’s chess piece in front of the kitten. Carroll notes “(But it wouldn’t look at it,” she said, when she was explaining the thing afterwards to her sister: “it turned away its head, and pretended not to see 55 it)” (Looking Glass 228), just as it “pretended it hadn’t heard the question” (230). By refusing to see, hear, confess or respond to Alice, Kitty in turn declines to be vacuumed into an anthropocentric universe that asks her to witness her own reflection, her own mimetic rendering in that of the Red Queen. While for Alice, the mimesis appears obvious, as Kitty vexes her as much the Red Queen’s rhetoric does, the kitten’s resistance here illustrates an alternative path in which this more-than-human character can refuse Alice’s ontological position and resist her own objectification, without submitting to humanist ideology. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland offers itself as a significant text for Victorian, Animal Studies, and Posthumanist scholars. From a Victorian perspective, it commences with a conventional deployment of sympathy, which then Raises questions well worth posing. Have we retained modernism's faith in the ability to feel as others rather than simply alongside them . . . [And] is a certain measure of distance perhaps worth retaining? If a too-diffuse sympathy threatens to reduce us to nothings or nobodies, a too-diffuse empathy risks homogenizing us all into the same type of person, or enabling self-affirming fictions of uninhibited entrance into the psychic life of others . . . Sympathy thus raises major questions about whether we are willing to take the time to get it right, and whether Smith's is a form worth preserving.” (Selbin 170) By inviting Alice to pursue the white rabbit into Wonderland, Carroll creates a novel that showcases humanism’s penchant to homogenize identities into what is familiar and domestic, however unintentionally. The self-affirming fictions that Alice conjures for humanity then transform Wonderland into the dioramic models of London museums and exhibition, where more-than-human identities are suppressed and molded postmortem to showcase humanity’s accolades while remaining excluded from humanity’s most basic rights, let alone constructed exceptionalism. This hypocrisy warns us to proceed with caution and asks readers to remain vigilant on how the desire to seek such commonalities risks perpetuating the anthropomorphization of other species. Too often, we “protect” only those who are similar to us, 56 the rabbits in waistcoats. Wonderland then exposes the dilemmas of interspecies encounters, especially when approached from an anthropocentric perspective and grants us the opportunity to challenge such projections. While such sentiments of commonality and sympathy may be of little use in the diverse eco-system that makes up Wonderland, these more-than-human denizens ask Alice whether she, and Wonderland’s readers, are willing to take the time to get it right. Rather than offering themselves as models on how to become human, Alice’s interlocutors showcase how animals surpass the limits of human epistemes and emphasize the value of looking back with respecere. Here, where species meet, agency and identity are evoked not through language nor through specularization, but through the silent resistance conjured by impositions of vulnerability. By remaining silent while still refusing to submit to Alice’s desires or ontological impingement, the characters explored in this chapter find a resistance in their vulnerability, and challenge dominant conceptions of vulnerability as a marker for inaction, passivity, and victimization. In this respect, like Butler, Carroll elucidates what might change if we were to reimagine vulnerability as one of the conditions that make resistance possible, and what might happen to the ontological claims we project onto these bodies were vulnerability to be reimagined. In positing each encounter in spaces of subtle to extreme hostility and vulnerability, children and critical readers alike are taught the dangers of sympathetic representation, of relating to and speaking to the other, and of ocularcentric ideology. They witness how the Other becomes enmeshed in signifiers that only posit them as mimetic placeholders. Thus, the novel ends on the potential dynamics of human-animal companionships, what could be if we started to speak for animals in not speaking for them but remaining silent long enough for dichotomies to slip away—not dichotomies that elide the human and the animal or the object—but dichotomies that make these distinctions hostile to one another, in the first place. 57 2. Animal Encounters in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm The only thing that gives me any joy, is the sparrows and pigeons . . . It’s not only that my heart quivers with love when I see them . . . but some person must be kind enough to throw crumbs out to them—though they are not of his nation. Nationality isn’t everything! -Olive Schreiner, letter to Havelock Ellis, Dec. 13, 1914 Olive Schreiner’s most popular work, The Story of an African Farm (1883), has recently been acknowledged as not simply a proto-modernist work, but also a proto-ecofeminist work, given its attention to the impact imperialism had on nonhuman animals and the South African landscape. Ruth First’s and Ann Scott’s biography on Schreiner, along with Schreiner’s letters to her lifelong friend, Havelock Ellis, elucidate the compassion and fondness the author felt for the environment and its inhabitants, and her novel takes great pains to centralize the most marginal of native characters, regardless of their species, with varying success. 12 It is the novel’s multispecies and ecocritical entanglements that allow scholars such as Andrew McMurry, Ruth Knecthel, and Valerie L. Stevens to position The Story of an African Farm as a rich site for both ecofeminism and animal studies, or in other words, as a rich site to deconstruct the overarching domination of nonhuman and conventionally feminine bodies. 13 In this respect, it has been 12 This is not to say the novel succeeds in presenting an anti-racist or anti-sexist narrative. In fact, we can easily read the epitaph as one that exonerates the encroachment of colonial settlers in South Africa and uses other-than-human animals as metonyms that make this racial tension and appropriation of land more palatable. 13 In “Figures in a Ground,” McMurry inquires whether, for Schreiner, land can be examined as separate from the environmental actors who occupy it; or as he quotes from Haraway, if the cultural/linguistic/natural hybrid that is a ‘ground’ and the ‘material-semiotic actors’ who compose it can ever be viewed as distinct entities, thereby “opening the possibility of a ground where figures can coexist in relationships not based on hierarchy” (432) through the confusion and conflation of gender. In “Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism,” Knechtel also questions the distinction between entities, arguing that “In emphasizing unity and connection, [Schreiner’s] ideal is often one of androgynous sameness, yet her concept of healing is rooted in images of nurturing, creation, and maternity, emphasizing difference,” between the sexes (259). In keeping with this gender ambiguity, Knechtel places Schreiner’s work within evolutionary, scientific, and gender discourse, and argues the text strives “for an animist ideal of human, animal, plant, and spiritual connectedness” (259). Furthermore, in “Human-Animal Mother-Love,” 58 argued that Schreiner’s novel offers a promising and elucidating avenue to explore what it means to look at animals in Victorian literature and culture, and enriches our understanding of how Victorians grappled with the question of the animal in an imperial, humanist, and specifically, liberal and transcendentalist context. However, this chapter is not devoted to illustrating the novel’s proto-ecofeminist maneuvers, but rather focuses on the dilemmas the novel exposes when it comes to showcasing agency, autonomy, and individualism within these aforementioned Victorian frameworks. Amidst burgeoning global trade, imperial encroachment, industrialization, mining, steam engines, large scale farming, abattoirs pushed to the outskirts of cities, and other accelerants of the Anthropocene, it may be justly argued Victorians had the question of the animal lurking within their political unconscious.14 After all, Patricia Murphy’s Reconceiving Nature suggests inchoate forms of ecofeminism emerged in the Victorian era in response to these urbanizing and imperial factors, even if Victorians did not acknowledge or define this twentieth-century neologism as such. Rather, Murphy illustrates how a number of Victorian works, such as those by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, can be read as commenting on the destruction, exploitation, and degradation of the nonhuman world for the creation of more urbanized industrialization in England and its colonies. As a result, it would seem this kind of proto-ecofeminist methodology Stevens discusses the ways in which “feminist and ecocritical scholars have long mined motherhood’s prevalence in Schreiner’s work” (147), and follows this route to illustrate the ways in which an examination of motherhood in the novel lends agency and liberty to the nonhuman characters, and thus invites the potential for reformation within domestic constructs. For these scholars, Schreiner’s focus on more-than-human and environmental agency situates her novel within a proto-ecofeminist agenda; one that seeks to illustrate a less hierarchical environment that does not gain its imperial authority from the domination of women and nature. 14 In other words, when considering these accelerants, Victorians may have addressed other animals as a kind of meta-commentary on their own livelihood, “according to which our object of study is less the [signifier or animal body] itself than the interpretations through which we attempt to confront and to appropriate [them]” (Jameson 9-10). 59 arose as an optimistic answer to what it means to encounter animals across a global and shifting network, as this discipline proclaims itself to be capable of evacuating other-than-human animals from anthropo-, Euro-, and andro- centric constructs, thereby liberating them from an imaginary bestiary designed to consider them as mere resources. By keeping this methodology within the purview of this chapter, this reading explores whether The Story of an African Farm—a novel created on the outskirts of empire and masculine privilege— participated in such optimistic avenues or whether the novel ultimately discredits the possibility of examining animals outside of ourselves. This chapter satisfies two objectives: the first merges with Andrew McMurry’s, Ruth Knechtel’s, and Valerie L. Stevens’s respective claims that Schreiner’s novel serves as an ecofeminist criticism of masculinity, Christianity, and the human/animal binary, and can thus be read as contributing to the foundation and development of ecofeminism. For these scholars, Schreiner’s focus on more-than-human and environmental agency situates her novel within a proto-ecofeminist agenda; one that seeks to illustrate a less hierarchical environment that does not gain its imperial authority from the domination of women and nature, but instead hopes, as the novel’s preface states, to “paint what lies before him” (SAF xxvii), and perhaps to follow what ecofeminist Josephine Donovan qualifies as an epistemological ascesis.15 Despite the author’s self-proclaimed agenda, however, such a maneuver does not account for the complicated erasure of the marginal life the novel superficially proposes to examine and excavate, whether such life is South African, feminine, or more-than-human. Therefore, the second objective of this chapter is occupied with the ways in which the novel reveals the limits and dilemmas of ecofeminist thought for both Victorian and modern-day thinkers, and thus can 15 See Donovan’ Aesthetics of Care for ecofeminist interpretations of how to interpret more-than-human animals through an ecofeminist lens. 60 be read as critiquing the ways in which we look at animals in Victorian’s sociopolitical and literary culture.16 By aligning Schreiner’s proto-ecofeminist tactics with more established nineteenth- century ideologies and philosophies, primarily liberalism and transcendentalism, I argue Schreiner carefully critiques, deploys, manipulates, and disrupts the frameworks through which we view more-than-human animals in order to demonstrate how all of these lenses fail to capture or fully realize what it means to encounter other animals. As a result, the novel forces readers to ponder whether an ecofeminist reading, along with the desire to extend human rights and liberal ideology onto marginalized life, is a successful avenue for suspending our imaginary constructs and forming more equitable companionships; or whether such readings must be satisfied to simply signal the acute oppression of other lifeforms, while also perpetuating the same systemic oppression it hopes to combat in its analysis and deployment. Ultimately, I contest because the novel does not deconstruct nor dismantle the liberal and transcendentalist ideologies and philosophies it deploys to grant life, liberty, knowledge, and agency to its actors, nor does it disentangle such idealisms from beneath ecofeminism’s foundation, the novel reveals how such frameworks continue to only privilege a select few, despite these frameworks’ attempts to disseminate supposedly universal autonomy. Instead, the novel designates all of these lenses as inherently anthropocentric, Eurocentric, and intriguingly ocularcentric, and thus critiques the 16 Especially from a masculinist lens, in that Schreiner quotes her preface from Alexis de Tocqueville’s statement on childhood—a statement that was inspired by Renaissance thinking and thus may very well harbor the dilemma we must confront when applying and projecting such philosophies onto more-than- human animals. Rather, the preface continues quoting Tocqueville’s claims that “We must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; or must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions that will rule his life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be found in the cradle of the child” (SAF XXVII). In this respect, one must wonder whether the prejudices, habits, and passions that rule a European man’s identity can be ethically reallocated and perpetuated into other lifeforms—into the cradle of an animal. 61 ways in which we visualize the possibilities for more-than-human life. While this argument shies away from any confirmed resolutions regarding the question of the animal, I contend that such disruptions firmly place our posthumanist concerns in a Victorian context and origin, and moreover, harbor intriguing and critical admonitions for our posthumanist futures. Liberalist, Transcendentalist, and Ecofeminist Entanglement Victorian England’s imperial pursuits, along with Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the aforementioned accelerants of the Anthropocene, forced Victorians to question their place in a global and ecological network, and demanded a reconsideration of what it meant to be a sovereign and independent subject, not simply for those at the helm of empire, but for those who resided on the outskirts.17 In this respect, it seems sensible for a novel concerned with self- cultivation and independence, such as The Story of an African Farm, to follow the prescriptions of liberal ideology which invited individual sovereignty, as South Africa was seeking independence from imperial rule. Unlike the former centuries of England, Victorian England’s adoption of liberal thought transferred power from a conventional and tyrannical sovereign head to the individual subject, thereby excavating an avenue of independence and autonomy, as illustrated in J.S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859). Mill traces Western society’s early turbulent conditions that allowed for a sovereign to govern over a small population terrorized by war. However, after the Enlightenment, qualities such as the evidence of reason and cultivation of the senses as primary sources for the accumulation of knowledge, liberty, and progress, highly influenced liberalism’s formulation, and became the primary and ideological model of Victorian 17 Anand Pandian’s “Pastoral Power in the Postcolony” (2008) burgeons off Foucault’s metaphor of pastoral care when considering the shift in biopolitical order. According to his argument, pastoral care is a useful, and even vital, method to examine how humans govern themselves as animals in modern times. A look at domestication practices and grazing hierarchy can reflect how government seeks to manage certain humans as animal objects of government. However, with the rise of Victorian liberalism, power and sovereignty is transferred from the head of government to the individual subject. 62 England’s sociopolitical landscape. Following this trajectory, Mill stresses the importance of individual sovereignty and freedom from government intervention, urging English citizens to pursue their interests and cultivate their talents—an interest whose mimesis and dissemination can be found in The Story of an African Farm’s two main protagonist, Waldo and Lyndall. Thus, the novel follows the supposed bildungsroman of Waldo and Lyndall, two colonial settlers who seek ownership, invention, and power in an engendered and colonized sociopolitical landscape.18 After Waldo’s German father, Otto, dies, Waldo becomes the head farm keeper, only to be challenged and bullied physically and spiritually by the English con artist, Bonaparte Blenkins. He then travels in search of his purpose, only to return to the farm and die among chickens. Meanwhile, Lyndall is the cousin of Em, who is the stepdaughter of the Dutch farm owner, Tant Sannie. Lyndall seeks independence and autonomy and is often acknowledged by critics to be the first literary New Woman, but she too dies after losing a child and refusing to succumb to the man she loves. What is intriguing about the novel’s plot then is not necessarily how it pivots off, reflects, and ostensibly applauds liberal ideology, but rather how it denies any character’s ability to progress or meet any meaningful fruition. Instead, its mundane, purposeless, and oddly irenic trajectory (which again speaks to the blatant erasure of indigenous subjects during the Boer wars), deploys and reflects liberal ideology for the purpose of exposing its dilemmas, oversights, and stasis. In this respect, this chapter argues the novel may surpass its 18 In “Olive Schreiner: The Story of an African Farm” (2014) Mandy Treagus builds off Rachel Blau Du Plessis and Gerd Bjørhovde respective arguments, discussing how the novel’s genre was criticized after its publication because its only protagonists die. However, they explain Schreiner’s straying conventions symbolize and criticize the form’s imbrication with the nineteenth-century’s stringent gender ideologies. Rather, the bildungsroman genre would be an impossible prescription for Schreiner to follow given her position on the outposts of empire. In my argument, I branch off their analysis, not by placing criticism on the form, but rather on the cultural setting established via the meritocratic ideals of liberalism in the novel. In this respect, I contend Schreiner’s colonial and engendered status inhibits both her and her female and otherwise marginalized characters from obtaining an ideal and powerful position, thus dissolving the universality such idealisms fallaciously promoted. 63 own intentions in that it does not simply replicate and applaud liberalism in an attempt to extend these qualities onto marginal life, but more importantly, serves as a criticism to these movements’ myopic scope and exclusionary function. After all, within the first few chapters, it becomes apparent quickly how such ideological models were premised on the exclusion of indigenous and non-white, women, and more-than- human populations in varying degrees (since the plot follows Boer settlers rather than any indigenous characters), and as a result, illustrates how liberalism operates via veiled imaginary constructs, biases, and assumptions in its deployment and dissemination. This exclusion is perhaps most blatantly signaled in scenes where Tant Sannie’s maid is attributed dialogue only for the purpose of translation, therefore appropriating her voice to act as a simple echo-chamber of the farm owner’s speech, or a validation of Tant Sannie’s actions. Significantly, this dialogue does not add depth or history to the maid’s own story, nor does it produce a polyphonic narrative in which distinction and difference in cultures and identities are respected beneath a liberal umbrella. Instead, this echo chamber produces a stringent monologue that can only seek liberty and truth for a select few, thereby concretizing a single avenue of sovereignty in the novel’s imagination, and revealing the ways in which such prescriptions perpetuate, rather than suspend, anthropo- and euro- centric ontology and fantasies. Nor does it appear the novel is oblivious to the systemic oppression inherent in the fantasy upon which it seems to be operating. Rather, the novel’s insight is revealed in the dissolution and death of the protagonists who follow these prescriptions in the pursuit of freedom and happiness. While the novel appears to applaud, admire, and operate within liberalism’s ideological parameters, it simultaneously highlights this ideology’s underlying dilemma; liberalism functions via a fantasy that universalizes and thus inevitably de-individuates the liberal subject. 64 In Liberalism and Empire, Uday Singh Mehta carefully articulates the absence within liberal thought and how it operates on a cosmopolitan of reason and sentiment; both of which assimilate the unfamiliar individual to already be something familiar and comparable within the context of empire. We can see how this cosmopolitan not only envelops Tant Sannie’s maid, but all the marginal characters of the novel, human or other. Even the sparrows and pigeons of this chapter’s epitaph become abstracted into an imperial imaginary, as it already considers such beings as part of a nation, and thus metonymically human, without any access into whether the birds are concerned with such matters, or without a question as to whether it is ethical to project such liberal fantasies onto them. However, I want to emphasize that I do not interpret Schreiner’s writing as unaware of its hypocrisy, but determined to test, challenge, and explore the frameworks through which we define what it means to be human and encounter others. I suspect Schreiner’s novel predates Mehta’s astute insight, even if it does not articulate this insight in as convincing a manner—or perhaps even more intriguingly, may tactfully propose such a criticism as yet another form of resistance to liberalism’s emphasis regarding the importance of freedom of speech.19 After all, the scenes examined in this chapter draw attention to the ideological and systemic oppression imbricated throughout Lyndall’s and Waldo’s so called “bildungsroman” in order to underscore how these Victorian movements aided in inhibiting colonized bodies from achieving any success, growth, or progress. As a result, Lyndall’s and Waldo’s deaths are foreshadowed by the restrictions and constructions such movements established for bodies on the outskirts of empire, and consequently signpost how liberalism strictly defined the liberal subject 19 It is a titillating exercise to read Schreiner’s tactful criticism as a resistance to liberalism’s emphasis on the freedom of speech, given that such an emphasis must already define liberalism’s parameters as only permissible for humans who have the capacity for speech. If indeed, resistance and sovereignty can be distinguished outside of speech, then the novel may very well open unexplored avenues for not simply what it means to be human, but what it means to be an autonomous and individualized subject. 65 as euro-centric, white, financially secure, industrialist, masculine, and human; excluding bodies of alterity from its purview and leaving little flexibility for how these attributes could be displayed, altered, or challenged. 20 Perhaps suspecting the failures and dilemmas of this ideological model and hoping to resolve the restrictions imbedded within liberalism’s formulation (especially when applied to feminine and more-than-human entities), Schreiner turned to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas on transcendentalism; a philosophy that granted certain liberties from religious doctrines and gender constructions and appeared less anthropocentric at its core. Transcendentalism rejected the Christian domination of women, animal, and plants, as well as certain Enlightenment legacies that promoted human exceptionalism (especially regarding rationalism—a defining attribute liberalism encouraged). Instead, transcendentalism argued there was an Absolute entity or divinity that ran through all forms, thereby combatting the Cartesian fracture between humans and nature and promoting a more ontologically leveled or equal universe. In Schreiner’s novel and elsewhere, it is easy to identify Transcendentalism’s allure as it appears to mitigate some of the more exclusionary tenets of liberalism’s principles. While liberalism and ecofeminism appear to be fundamentally at odds in their target or visualized audience, threading a transcendentalist 20 Such a critique is in alignment with Uday Singh Mehta’s critique of liberalism. He claims, “At the broadest level, with respect to the empire, there is the dilemma that Arnaldo Momigliano claimed was at the root of the ancient Greek and Persian empires: ‘[F]reedom required power, because power is a condition of freedom, but power proved in fact unobtainable without ruling others’” (16), thereby explaining why Lyndall’s and Waldo’s freedom is conditional upon the oppression of others—most significantly signposted in Waldo’s consistent oppression of Lyndall, and their simultaneous oppression of racialized and nonhuman bodies. Mehta continues to claim, “The project of the empire is inscribed in the judgements of that way of ‘doing’ history, [where I believe one’s view is kept in advance of one’s findings] which relentlessly attempts to align or educate the regnant forms of the unfamiliar with its own expectations” (18). As a result, Schreiner’s novel claims to perform something new and authentic in an effort to rewrite the ways in which South Africa is portrayed in empire, but as I argue, ultimately reformulates the land and its inhabitants into an imperial abstraction. In this sense, while these actors’ display of liberal ideals helps assimilate them and thus grants them some form of visibility, the only mark that becomes visible is that which empire has imprinted upon them. 66 agenda into the mix helps to extend autonomy and unity into all living creatures, animate or inanimate, and thus serves to alleviate the exclusionary nature of liberalism’s potential resolutions and underscore transcendentalism’s contribution to ecofeminist thought. Like ecofeminism, this nineteenth-century philosophy hoped to combat increasingly harmful effects of the Anthropocene escalated by the Industrial Revolution by promoting a union between nature and humanity; a union that would in turn disrupt the fracture rationalism and other enlightenment legacies had upon the objectification of nature. With this disruption in place, nature would no longer suffer from the absence of the exclusionary “cogito” that separated man from animal but would rather emphasize man’s connection to the natural world, thus signposting transcendentalism’s translation and foundation to ecofeminist thought. It is these tenets of transcendentalism that I believe encourages ecofeminist readings of Schreiner’s novel, allowing scholars to excavate nonhuman agency and autonomy throughout the plot, and moreover, recognize the foundations that transcendentalism contributed to ecofeminism. Their commonality is revealed when we acknowledge that transcendentalism burgeons off a unity between all living things, and ecofeminism is a unity of multiple disciplines whose aim it is to share centrality and dismantle a human and patriarchal hierarchy. To achieve this goal, its theoretical foundation not only combines feminist theory with environmental studies and activism but also strives to critique all forms of marginality, from ableism, to racism, to the singular focus on human as opposed to more-than-human or nonhuman bodies, and more. As explained in Karen Warren’s discussion of Ecofeminist Philosophy, and quoted from theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, feminism and ecocriticism appear to be a sensible collaboration, since “Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships continues to be one of 67 domination” (xiii), precisely because this model of domination serves to marginalize any non- white, non-European, non-male, non-adult, non-human, and non-abled body. Warren not only insists the women’s movement and the environmental movement are intimately connected, but also argues both require “transforming the worldview which underlies domination and replacing it with an alternative value system” (xiii). Thus, as much as the novel applies transcendentalist views in its plot, in doing so, we can also see how the novel strives for such an alternative value system by staking its concern in truth-telling and critiquing the imperial abstractions of British adventure fiction regarding South Africa, thereby appearing to serve as an antipode to imperial fantasy. After all, in her preface, Schreiner responds to her male compatriots’ and critics’ penchant to publish imperial fantasies when she writes, “It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked the little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible ‘kranzes’ by Bushmen; ‘of encounters with ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes’” (SAF xxvii), as one might find in H.R. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), but “This could not be. Such works are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand; there the gifts of the creative imagination, untrammeled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings” (SAF xxvii). In this respect, the preface locates the novel’s value not in the domination, subjection, and objectification of South Africa’s resources and peripheral identities, but rather in its opposition to such imperial fantasies and abstractions commonly found in British adventure fiction. To further verify this proto-ecofeminist agenda and juxtapose her novel to works that could only be written in the heart of empire, where Schreiner’s male compatriots’ gender and imperial constructions allow them to follow a prescription tailored to their privilege, imagination, 68 and cultural denouement, Schreiner stakes her agenda in painting things as they truly are. Thus, she continues: But should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brilliant phases and shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him to portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into the gray pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him. (SAF xxvii) Schreiner’s preface appears to firmly align with an ecofeminist agenda and one that is further excavated in Josephine Donovan’s Aesthetics of Care. Donovan argues readers and writers must begin to examine nonhuman life through what she determines to be an epistemological ascesis— an epistemology evacuated from anthropocentric imaginaries and fantasies in order to see other- than-human animals without interpretation. However, Schreiner’s preface reveals the dilemmas and struggles of performing such an ascesis in ecofeminism. Her attempt to combat the oppression and marginalization of South Africa, to paint things as they lie before her, and to discredit the desultory renditions of British adventure fiction, does not result in an environment free from interpretation, but reflects and mimics the values, oppression, and hierarchy of liberal and transcendental philosophy. While marginalized and nonhuman entities may be granted a kind of visibility and autonomy that would be denied in works produced in the center of empire, what the novel succeeds in displaying is how transcendental and liberal ideology can restrain and pollute the development of ethical and equitable intra- and interspecies entanglements independent from anthropocentric constructions. The kind of authenticity Schreiner’s preface hopes to exercise does not necessarily act as an antipode of adventure fiction then. Although it reveals an albeit less inimical aesthetic, it is still produced through a methodology which speaks in place of environmental bodies. For example, Schreiner’s setting opens on a harsh, red, desert-like climate that juxtaposes itself to the 69 lush, green, water-flowing, tropical lands of adventure fiction, displaying a contrast that is meant to dissolve certain thematic concepts found in this latter genre. However, what is significant about this contrast is how nature’s supposed hostility is signaled from a Boer’s (read survivalist’s or encroacher’s) perspective. It certainly contrasts the fantasy of sustainable, helpless, inanimate, endless, and nurturing nature apropos to adventure fiction, but we must not forget this genre always includes an undercurrent of hostility for white encroachers to overcome in order to prove their adeptness and masculinity in such environments. In order to boost this hostility, this genre also has a propensity to depict indigenous inhabitants as more in tune with and accustomed to the land, not in an effort to debunk western notions that fracture humans from nature, but to animalize and naturalize the denizens so that any violence performed on the environment is desultorily extended onto the animals, human or other. Therefore, I am not simply saying Schreiner is writing what she knows (or writing from the perspective of a Boer settler), and thus underscoring the utter impossibility of “squeezing the color from [her] brush.”21 Rather, I am arguing the novel appears to be making a blatant effort to signal how imperial ideology is adapted, disseminated, and disguised in “the making of civilization” (or the reformation and colonization of South Africa of which she would later write), and does so in a manner that discredits and incessantly impedes it very efforts. If this were not the case, the novel would centralize marginal life, and more specifically, the eponymous character of Waldo would be more than capable, in theory, to commune with nature and live a nascent or prototypical ecofeminist life. Instead, the novel appears to sacrifice Waldo as a scapegoat, revealing a subversive critique of the very ideologies and philosophies the novel applauds. The Story of an 21 It’s also intriguing to ponder why Schreiner did not adapt Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim to fit her feminine persona. Instead, both her preface and her pseudonym (Ralph Iron) appear to remain intentionally androcentric. In this respect, the novel may very well be targeting a masculine and industrial perspective for the novel’s ecofeminist dilemma. 70 African Farm consistently holds liberalism and transcendentalism accountable and culpable for their myopic, universalizing, and androcentric legacies, and more significantly, harbors significant admonitions for the future of ecofeminism, antiracist, and zoocritical studies. A Story of Waldo and His Companions Waldo’s various soliloquies, conversations, and perspectives signal his adoption and practice of liberal, transcendentalist, and ecofeminist thought, but more significantly, showcase the scenarios and predicaments in which these frameworks fail to grant visibility and authenticity to identities that remain outside of the British empire’s prerogative. That is, by manipulating the spaces and actors in which these frameworks are deployed, The Story of an African Farm directs attention to how race, gender, labor, and species critically braid themselves together, and raises paramount concerns and questions for postcolonial, zoological, and environmental studies. After all, this chapter has argued that liberal ideology was only created for and directed toward the human, whose parameters became increasingly stringent to exclude “people of the soil” or colonial subjects who were exempt from certain human rights because they were “closer to nature” or supposedly not evolved enough to vote or bathe in the same liberty as British subjects. In this manner, liberalism dealt less with the scientific species of the human and more with its constructions, specifically regarding race as we witnessed in the previous reading, as well as regarding gender. As Leigh Boucher summarizes in “Victorian Liberalism and the Effect of Sovereignty,” “political liberalism required potently gendered ideas about maturity, capacity, competency and sensibility in order to manage its operations; and these encoded both the individual and the nation” (39). Waldo then becomes a rather safe subject for Schreiner to develop as he is not only protected by his race, but by his transcendental philosophies that aid in exemplifying his supposed maturity, capacity, competency, and sensibility to become a proper 71 liberal subject operating in the realm of masculinity. The novel then attempts to fall back on this safety net, but in doing so, explores the tensions that evolve when these ideologies come into contact and contention with more marginal bodies. Faithful to Schreiner’s agenda to combat harmful fictions taking place in South Africa, Waldo is a striking contrast to the male protagonist often found in adventure fiction, at least at first glance. He is a sympathetic, sensible, and competent character whose androgynous qualities act as a direct rebuttal to the fractured dichotomies of adventure fiction, where male characters exemplified a hyper-masculinity, while female characters were enveloped in a realm of acute vulnerability and helplessness. His androgyny is an extension to his apparent union with nature and Transcendentalist philosophies since such oppositional gender performances were developed as a response to the increasing isolation and retreat from nature that was brought on by the industrial revolution and urban development. The direct contrast of his character, along with the genre of adventure fiction itself, illustrates the awareness Victorians had regarding their environmental impact and the coinciding angst it developed for Victorian gender constructions regarding male bodies. Men were encouraged to dedicate themselves to adventure and exploration in the name of empire, which aided in perpetuating harmful fantasies of abundant resources abroad; of lush, green, exotic lands that invited an imaginary escape from the bleak depictions prevalent in the heart of empire and keenly illustrated by Frederich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin to name a few. 22 In their accounts, the coinciding urban development 22 Murphy’s Reconceiving Nature is an excellent source for such materials. For example, on discussing the Old Town of Manchester, Frederich Engels writes: “I must admit that, far from having exaggerated anything, I have not written vividly enough to impress the reader with the filth and dilapidation of a district which is quite unfit for human habitation. The shameful lay-out of the Old Town has made it impossible for the wretched inhabitants to enjoy cleanliness, fresh air, and good health. And such a district of at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants lies in the very centre of the second city in England, the most important factory town in the world! It is here that one can see how little space human 72 needed to fuel such industry at all given hours has completely defaced the natural environment, has diminished the purity and vigor of its English citizens, and illustrates Victorians’ sensitivity to the impact such industry had on the natural landscape and on Victorian notions of masculinity. With such depressing and disastrous landscapes becoming more and more apparent for Victorians, it is hardly a wonder such a desire for adventure fiction arose among the British populace. The genre acted as an escape from industry and the growing confines of civilization, where one can enter a land still lush and abundant with untapped and unharnessed life, and where men could return to “primal” instincts embedded in hyper-masculine constructs. In other words, the bleak terrain of Britain’s industrial impact, along with imperial expansion, triggered an upstream in adventure fiction, where young British citizens, especially boys, could invigorate themselves with often hyper-masculine narratives of exploration, beings need to move about in, how little air—and what air!—they need to breathe in order to exist, and how few of the decencies of civilisation [sic] are really necessary in order to survive . . . Everything in this district that arouses our disgust and just indignation is of relatively recent origin and belongs to the industrial age.” (Frederich Engels 318) Meanwhile, Charles Dickens’ narratives are famous for their depictions of London’s smoke-filled areas and the smog that crept upon the city, along with the horrific conditions of factory workers and the lower class. Not to mention regarding the ever-expanding impact of industry, John Ruskin writes regarding his view of the Swiss Alps, “In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure, is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into crystalline rest, are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore . . . The light, the air, the waters, all defiled! How of the earth itself?” (The Queen of the Air VI) Clearly, the water of the Lake of Geneva appears to resemble the water of the Thames, where London’s sewage was emptied, illustrating Victorians’ awareness of the increasing spread of pollution across the continent. Finally, as Murphy quotes from an 1858 commentary in Household Words, Edmund Saul Dixon writes, “[W]e have utterly polluted and defiled one of the noblest watercourses in the world. This has occurred in the metropolis. As a natural consequence, in the provinces, we have more or less polluted and defiled other watercourses . . . of great positive beauty and utility. We have banished fish, . . . we have destroyed water-weeds, which would absorb noxious elements, and give out pure oxygen, if we would permit them to exist; we have left no living aquatic type remaining, except the lowest and the most rudimentary. (Murphy 22) 73 predation, and domination to combat the factory and armchair settings that began to threaten British notions of masculinity. As John Miller notes in Empire and the Animal Body (2012), such narratives became increasingly popular, with an added forum of hunting and sporting pamphlets hitting the market, such as The Sportsman in 1836, The Field (the country gentleman’s newspaper) in 1853, and Bailey’s Magazine of Sports and Pastimes in 1860. Such literature and sources made it increasingly difficult for young English readers to separate reality from fantasy, providing a dreamy image of infinitely sustainable resources abroad. Not to mention, such fantasies also perpetuated narratives that diminished or normalized the violence performed on indigenous populations and aided in muddling the human/animal divide so as to carve out an othered space for colonial and indigenous subjects. 23 What is interesting about Schreiner’s supposedly antithetical narrative then is not how it seeks to function as an ecofeminist resistance, but how it directs attention to the nuances of an intense Victorian sociopolitical climate that found itself in the midst of defining what it means to be human and a liberal subject, both in industrial spaces and abroad. While the narrative represents Waldo as a more androgynous, transcendental, sympathetic character, and leads Ruth Knecthel to argue the novel’s “unique philosophy foregrounds the fluid boundaries between human, fauna, and flora in an attempt to transform conventional binary models of relationships, particularly as they involve sex and gender" (“Olive Schreiner’s Pagan Animism” 259), I contend that such a structure still fails to dissolve the dualistic fracture that developed within gender, race, and nature. Rather, this fracture remains precisely because such strategies only attempt to switch, simplify, or overlook vital actors instead of dismantling the model upon which these dilemmas and problematic constructs 23 Miller explains how such pamphlets often drew on fictional as well as nonfictional sources of hunting and adventure, each of which drew an indiscriminate portrait of abundance, and paid little heed to the consequences of such fantasies. 74 are pinioned. What develops as a result is a complex and convoluted avenue stunted by the very construction it aims to dismantle, but perhaps only reinforces. To elucidate this argument, it is helpful to turn to one of Waldo’s more transcendentally derived soliloquies, where he stares upon some rupestrian paintings while sitting with Lyndall. “Lyndall, has it never seemed to you that the stones were talking with you? Sometimes," he added in a yet lower tone, "I lie under there with my sheep, and it seems that the stones are really speaking—speaking of the old things, of the time when the strange fishes and animals lived that are turned into stone now, and the lakes were here; and then of the time when the little Bushmen lived here, so small and so ugly, and used to sleep in the wild dog holes, and in the sloots, and eat snakes, and shot the bucks with their poisoned arrows. (SAF 16) Loyal to a transcendentalist model, Waldo does not have any qualms seeking a union between his own identity and that of the images that lie before him, regardless of their sentience, mobility, rationality, autonomy, or any other Enlightenment qualities that would conventionally exclude them from humanity. Instead, he acknowledges his kinship with his sheep, and ostensibly grants (but inevitably ventriloquizes) a voice to these entities. However, contrary to McMurry’s reading, I argue it is this ventriloquism that verifies, rather than dismantles, Waldo’s patriarchal position, denoting for readers how Waldo, despite his androgynous appearance and transcendentalist practice, still inhabits an inherently engendered perspective. In this respect, the conventional binary models of relationships may be transformed, but this transformation still vacillates within a dichotomy that designates vulnerability, passivity, and immobility with nonhuman and metaphorically feminine entities, while bolstering the autonomy, agency, and androcentrism of the human. This dichotomy is precisely why Lyndall remains silent as Waldo continues to attribute his own projection onto that of an indigenous predecessor. He continues, “It was one of them, one of these old wild Bushmen, that painted those," said the boy, nodding toward the pictures” (16). The little Bushman, or reference to a member of an indigenous people 75 called San, is not a harmless philosophy seeking to attribute agency and narrative to another body, so much as it is an imperialist maneuverer that ironically appropriates the paintings on the rock’s wall to simply become metonymic of Waldo’s own search for beauty. 24 As Deborah Shapple writes in “Artful Tales of Origination in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm,” such a fantasy is a premature expedient to indigenous erasure, as Waldo fantasizes such people who are merely imprisoned as already extinguished and in need of substitution. Isolated, desolate, and poor, Waldo reimagines this man as an outcast like himself, using his artistry to make something of meaning to himself, despite South Africa’s intense border wars and the novel’s blips of indigenous labor. He imagines himself before colonization, shifting the modern events into an irreversible and inconceivable, almost primordial time. His usage of wild imagery and disconnection from the marginal characters who show up pulling carts, or are seen serving Tant Sannie, as well as his identification with dogs as he sleeps in wild dog holes, simultaneously renders all other species and animals, including his own mimetic substitute, as absent. The fish and animals who once inhabited the land are trapped in stone, flattened into art, and deemed beautiful. The snakes and bucks who enter Waldo’s imaginary bestiary are only there to sustain his own fantasy and carnivorous appetite. The multitude of animals present are only illustrated to signify his own beautiful individualism; his own uniqueness, different from 24 Not to mention Waldo’s colonial mindset denigrates the artistry of this rock painting, revamping the narrative it proposes and thus silencing and de-individualizing the original artist. In a colonial, imperial, and anthropocentric maneuver, Waldo’s thinly veiled criticism of this art is in keeping with problematic definitions of voice, reflection, artistry, and autonomy. Like the polemical debates of elephant, canine, pufferfish, and gorilla artistry (to name only a few), some of which are highlighted in Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions, this art in the eyes of Waldo becomes disenchanting precisely because his maneuvers deflate the level of autonomy proposed by the individual and original artist. Instead, the autonomy is appropriated into Waldo’s own sympathizing gaze, forcing the artist to want to make something rather than become-with his environment and illustrate a network of actors. Waldo then revamps this authentic human-nonhuman network and interdependence into an object for which Waldo alone can speak. 76 any animot trapped in Kantian ethics and aesthetic appeal. Therefore, while the novel certainly seems to applaud and admire the efforts of Transcendentalism, and thus attempts to manipulate the conventional dichotomies of these relationships, it does so in a manner that emphatically interjects some skepticism or resentment imbedded in its own effort and signals the privilege that Waldo’s masculine and colonial position affords him. In this reading then, the purpose of Waldo’s soliloquy is to emphasize how Waldo’s position and transcendentalist philosophy allow him to relate to other creatures, but in a manner that is drenched with appropriation and humanist constructs. By deploying this lens, Waldo renders these images into artwork suited for his own intellectual horizon, and in turn, effaces them from any individuality or narrative they could have attained outside of his own perspective. In short, Waldo ventriloquizes and commandeers their narrative, and in doing so, announces himself as their successor and thus aids in their silence, erasure, and marginality. Therefore, he confesses in a quintessentially Transcendentalist and rather Whitmanesque manner, “I know that it is I who am thinking," the fellow added slowly, "but it seems as though it were they who are talking. Has it never seemed so to you, Lyndall?" "No, it never seems so to me," she answered” (SAF 17). The fact that Lyndall rejects this conclusion and refuses to ventriloquize or project her own narrative onto the environment around her suggests that Waldo is incapable of understanding the oppression he is enacting onto others, Lyndall included. Although Lyndall finds kinship in their situation, Waldo appears unable to understand Lyndall’s desire and position precisely for the same reason he cannot practice an aesthetics of care. He utilizes both nature and Lyndall’s own intellectual frustrations as simply mimetic of his own. For Waldo, these animals rendered into lexicons speaks to a privilege to which he feels entitled as a colonial man, and to which Lyndall does not have access. Their presence reifies his cogito, as it is because of them 77 that he knows he is thinking, and that therefore he exists. In this respect, it is as if they are there to support, not speak against, such conjectures. However, for Lyndall, this has never seemed so. Instead, any alliance with power and domination she tries to assert for herself ends in failure, perhaps because the ideologies behind the novel’s depiction of a proto-ecofeminist narrative have yet to resolve the unequal distribution of power in dichotomous social constructs. The potential for Lyndall to become powerful or independent is not simply barred from her but tainted with ideologies that would then make her masculine, imperial, and oppressive in her attainment of such ideals. Meanwhile, the potential for Waldo to dismantle his engendered position is persistently met with resistance or even impossibility. His alignment with nature does not necessarily underscore his vulnerability but rather underscores the methods through which he distinguishes himself from the backdrop of his environment. Every alignment the novel then underscores only serves to reify and expose the paradox of these dichotomies. In contention with my own analysis, Valerie L. Stevens proposes a reading in “Human- Animal Mother Love” that argues the novel illustrates avenues in which marginalized figures, such as more-than-human animals, or specifically the dog, Doss, can escape the dichotomies that position them as passive or dependent. Her reading fits neatly into animal studies’ focus given it grants agency to more-than-human figures and refuses to see them as mere metonyms. As a result, Stevens claims Doss escapes the role as pet, and thus any subservient position, by staking his choice to follow either Lyndall or Waldo. According to Stevens, this choice places Doss in a position that breaks away from conventional dichotomies, disrupting his depiction as a child who must be under the care of Waldo and/or Lyndall, and inscribing him with the authority to accompany whomever he chooses by allowing him to perform as a parental figure in the middle of adoption. While this reading succeeds in granting autonomy to a more-than-human character, 78 and thus provides an intriguing reading that expands sovereignty outside of human exceptionalism, I want to stress that it does not reimagine Doss as a creature of alterity who has the ability to choose his kinship outside of anthropocentric constructs. Significantly, he is reimagined as a parent in the midst of adoption, harboring an appellation that already envisions him as a human adult in its analogy, whose consequences then fail to disrupt what beings we consider as having agency, independence, and options. My interpretation of Stevens’s analysis then further engrains my argument; the avenues excavated in the novel do not break free from our dichotomous constructs, but rather underscore how liberal, humanist, and even transcendentalist frameworks only serve to privilege certain genders and identities and may even serve as an inhibitor to our posthumanist futures. Moreover, it is important to recognize Doss’s privilege is a result of his sociopolitical position as a domesticated being. In this example, it is crucial to remember Doss can gain some form of agency in the company of Lyndall and Waldo precisely because his species and historical entanglement relegates him to a pet’s status. As a result, he is inserted well enough within Western domesticity and modernity to be a visible actor, in comparison to the other animals, such as the pigs and sheep in the novel, for whom agency is much more difficult to recognize. It is this socio-historical tie that both instantiates and releases Doss from the role of pet, and intricately binds his modernity and freedom to Lyndall’s and Waldo’s, and not to that of indigenous, marginal, or more alternative characters. Consistent with the novel’s plot, his freedom is dependent on his complicity to certain socio-historical constructions, similar to how Waldo’s denouement is dependent on his complicity to certain liberal ideals and transcendentalist perspectives, but never achieved. In this respect, the novel certainly grants opportunities for agency and autonomy, but incessantly fails to see these opportunities to their 79 full potential, forcing readers to question whether who, if anyone, is privileged under the pre- constructed ideals of liberal and transcendentalist thought. Is it Waldo? Is it Doss? The fact that both characters die while striving for some ideal version of a liberal subject or are continuously read within the parameters of liberalism and anthropocentric constructs, places serious pressure on this question. Is the liberal subject only human? Although Doss must always act as an ersatz human, even in our posthumanist interpretations, to be considered as a liberal and autonomous subject, neither one of the human protagonists seem capable of achieving this Eurocentric pinnacle. Therefore, the exciting moments of the novel do not reside in scenes where an ostensible freedom or agency is obtained, or where some ecofeminist, animal studies, or posthumanist conclusion is reached, but instead resides in scenes where tensions and reservations force us, as readers, to pause. In the former scene, Doss encourages us to ponder whether these frameworks allow us to redefine what agency looks like outside of anthropocentric and Eurocentric confines. In the following scene, the novel will continue to challenge our attempts at inclusivity, persistently revealing the ways in which liberal ideology and transcendentalist philosophy appear to benevolently envelop universal communion and inclusivity, when they in fact overlook, objectify, marginalize, and efface significant bodies of value. Thus, we find our transcendentalist Waldo once again surveying his other-than-human companions while looking over a pigsty. Schreiner writes, Waldo wondered dreamily as he stared why they were pleasant to look at. Taken singly they were not beautiful; taken together they were. Was it not because there was a certain harmony about them? The old sow was suited to the little pigs, and the little pigs to their mother, the old boar to the rotten pumpkin, and all to the mud. They suggested the thought of nothing that should be added, of nothing that should be taken away. And, he wondered on vaguely, was not that the secret of all beauty, that you who look on—So he stood dreaming, and leaned further and further over the sod wall, and looked at the pigs. (SAF 84) 80 At first glance, Waldo appears to be practicing an aesthetic of care and applauding a kind of transcendental union, granting the pigs centrality and indubitable visibility here. He is not immediately romanticizing the pigs or abstracting them into some animal bestiary. He is simply observing them and admiring their unity to nature and to each other. However, this scene is only deemed as ostensibly beautiful so long as these creatures are concatenated and organized in a rather anthropocentric fashion. There still appears to be a binary, and more importantly, a hierarchy perpetuated in this scene in that Waldo, the human, is significantly neither a part of this unity nor a part of this spectacle. Instead, nonhuman animals are conglomerated and categorized with nature, which not only serves to de-individualize them (as their unity to the mud and rotting pumpkin may signal a lack of sentience and agency running throughout this network) but posits them as radically other—perhaps even insentient and inanimate next to Waldo’s philosophical reverie. Physically and metaphysically separated from the observing, thoughtful, pondering human, the pigs here are akin to mud, to rotting life, to conventionally stagnant entities devoid of reason or agency. What’s more, if the pigs’ beauty is devoid of singularity, it is consequently made apparent that their presence is only beautiful so it may reify the human/animal divide—so that nothing should be added, and nothing taken away. In the same manner that Waldo gazed upon the rock paintings earlier in the novel, it is important to note Waldo is the only singular presence that gazes upon these pigs, and so the significance of individualism is only reserved for this particular human—what Donna Haraway would glean here as the sky-gazing Homo sapien.25 Waldo’s rendition of these pigs as beautiful aligns neatly with subtle forms of objectification, which perhaps explains why the narrative hesitates, “was not that the secret of all 25 In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway writes, “Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo” (1). 81 beauty, that you who look on—”. Schreiner’s interruption of Waldo’s reverie exposes her critique of Waldo’s surveillance. The secret inherent in this beauty is that it serves to elevate the gazer, to ensure the gazer is not added to this spectacle, but safe and protected in his ontological position. Nor is this the only moment in which the novel offers this tacit critique. It is the same method that allows Waldo to ventriloquize the paintings he witnessed earlier on, followed by the same alarming truncation of his reverie. The novel’s pause in Waldo’s pondering mimics the signal Lyndall earlier supplied when she informed Waldo that she does not witness the rock paintings in the same manner, thus establishing a distinction between an ecofeminist lens and a transcendentalist lens, and what’s more, exposing the andro- and anthropocentric dilemmas inherent in this latter philosophy. In this respect, the pigs only appear to project a unity for Waldo because such a union is fractured from his own person and is thus precisely what objectifies them. What appears to be harmless gazing then becomes a blatant reminder that the pigs are only momentarily protected from a more physical violence so long as their presence provides aesthetic amusement to their spectator. As a result, this rhetoric appears to be questioning whether an aesthetic of care, a way of visualizing nonhuman and alternative lives outside of imaginative constructs is possible if we still operate within the confines of ocularcentric or Eurocentric ideology. Does Transcendentalism or recognizing a unity between all beings, justly offer a way to practice ethical transspecies encounters or to help make marginal bodies more visible? Does gazing upon the other automatically position one as an Enlightened human, signaling the inextricability of ocularcentric exercises from other imperial and thus perhaps anthropocentric methodologies? 82 To address this question, Schreiner disrupts Waldo’s reverie, not simply with a critical interjection, but with a maneuver that literally eliminates the divide between the human and the animal—in short, she does indeed add something to the mix. Yet, how this divide is elided becomes rather curious, as it is Bonaparte Blenkens, the English, imperialist, sadist, and villainous character who inserts his leg between Waldo and the wall and sends Waldo toppling over head-first into the mud, linking what was once sky-gazing homo to the pigs, to the rotting pumpkin, and to the earth. In this respect, this scene could be read as yet another proto- ecofeminist maneuver; one that aligns with Maureen Colleen Ewing ecofeminist reading of the novel in South African Women’s Literature and The Ecofeminist Perspective. According to Ewing’s argument, we may be able to read this scene of cruelty as an example of Social Darwinism; a model that corrupts the union between human and animal, thereby exposing in this scene the perversity of Bonaparte’s actions and punishing Waldo for his earlier fracture from the animals whom he was observing. Therefore, Ewing writes, Social Darwinism distorts Darwin’s view of the symbiotic relationship between nature and humanity, by emphasizing that humanity’s technological strength gives it power over nature. A Social Darwinist approach thus provides colonialism and patriarchy justification for maintaining power hierarchies in which the white men with the money possess power. In her non-fiction work Thoughts on South Africa, published in 1901 and again in 1923, Schreiner writes that the most serious danger to a person’s spirit occurs “when he severs himself from all contact with the living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself . . . It is an inverted view of the universe, with accompanying narrowness and blindness . . . Her novels echo the belief that separating humans from nature in an urban, technological environment denies that all human and nonhuman organisms connect, thus resulting in an unnatural reality. (30-31) Waldo’s reverie was certainly producing an unnatural reality—one that emphasized his exceptionalism under the guise of a supposedly harmless transcendental philosophy. What’s more, this necessary inversion to expand his lens and deplete his exceptionalism could also be read as a castigation for Waldo’s attempts at dreaming of patenting and building a technological 83 tool—a clay model of his sheep-shearing machine—that the curious Bonaparte had also crushed into the sand chapters before. According to the passage above, such a machine would create a fissure between shepherd and sheep, granting Waldo economic and colonial privilege, but at the expense of further enforcing this unnatural reality. Therefore, Bonaparte crushes the model into the sand with his boot, as Schreiner writes, “The boy looked up into his face. ‘Looks better now,’ said Bonaparte, ‘doesn't it? If we can't have it made in England, we'll send it to America. Good- bye; ta-ta’” (79). While Bonaparte certainly seems to be an offensive impediment as he disallows Waldo from patenting his invention, and thus preventing colonial settlers from reaping the rewards of their industry outside of colonial government, Bonaparte’s actions also signal the suspicion of technology that often manifests itself in ecofeminist rhetoric, thereby adding a more subversive layer to not only Schreiner’s potential criticism to transcendental philosophy, but to liberal ideology, as well. The fact that such a machine would be better suited in more imperial environments signals the antithetical (and rather hypocritical) future Schreiner envisions for her own colonial country. However, we may even be able to read the novel as aware of its own ideological hypocrisy, given that both these scenes are interrupted by Bonaparte. Bonaparte is an odd figure to expose such lessons, especially since readers might expect these admonitions to be posited by indigenous characters, or characters who would resist, rather than replicate, colonial and imperial rhetoric and practices. Yet, we are met with the complete opposite in character, as Bonaparte is a quintessential symbol of empire, not only illustrated in his nationality and name, but in his clothing, which are evidently a union between town and country. Schreiner writes, “The tails of his black cloth coat were pinned up behind him to keep them from rubbing; he had on a pair of moleskin trousers and leather gaiters, and in his hand he carried a little whip of rhinoceros hide” (SAF 78). Far from an ecofeminist display, Bonaparte’s 84 appearance is meant to blatantly illustrate the manner through which animal bodies become commodified. In this “unnatural reality,” Bonaparte’s tail is not a biological entity, but a function of his clothing. He wears pants and shoes collected from animal bodies, and in his hand—the metaphysical limb that perpetuates anthropocentric power—he carries a whip made from rhinoceros. Like Waldo before him, Bonaparte’s identity and authority is then nothing more than a mosaic of vulnerable bodies utilized to establish his sovereignty. While his presence appears striking, the bodies that compose that presence appear marginalized—just short of absent referents. Furthermore, Bonaparte clothing is an indubitable symbol of his colonial and patriarchal power, as this scene goes on to further emphasize the significance of his appearance. After all, the reason Bonaparte wishes to throw Waldo into the mud is because he envies Waldo’s position on the farm, a position signaled by the inheritance of a greatcoat he wears from his father. Thus, Bonaparte formulates a plan to soil the coat he wears, whispering to himself, “What is the connection between the naked back of a certain boy with a greatcoat on and a salt- pot under his arm, and the tip of a horsewhip? Answer: No connection at present, but there will be soon” (83). For Bonaparte, soiling the appearance of Waldo and throwing him into the environment of other animals closes the gap between liberal subject and animalized object. Yet, for the reader, this thin connection only serves to reveal the illusory distinction between human and animal, since Waldo’s position in the mud then serves to swiftly unravel his ontological position, making him akin to the bodies who raise and signal Bonaparte’s superiority as a European human. As a result, Waldo now joins the spectacle that he previously had the autonomy to only stand and observe from a distance. He is then a part of the animal landscape he objectified and romanticized moments before, but he has yet to excavate the significance of this inversion. Rather, for the reader, this distinction is signaled by the arbitrary possession of 85 capitalist goods and racial status. Most significantly, however, is how Schreiner positions this distinction as one that is persistently perpetuated in any re-imagination of the liberal subject. As a result, Schreiner shows her awareness of the inherent hypocrisy of this scene when she has Tant Sannie exclaim, “how the child looks—as though he thought the mud would never wash off” (SAF 85). Despite throwing him into the mud, this exclamation reveals the difference between Waldo’s colonial status from the utter marginalization and erasure of the novel’s indigenous inhabitants. Rather, Schreiner appears to be aware that Waldo’s ontological inversion is only momentary. Significantly, despite Bonaparte’s attempt to distinguish himself by racializing and animalizing Waldo, Waldo is indubitably protected by his race as it limits and mitigates the violence Waldo must suffer simply because of his class. Therefore, I do not read this scene as an attempt to universalize the experiences of animals and oppressed indigenous inhabitants, but as a moment that holds liberal and transcendental ideologies accountable for the exclusion of these marginal characters. Certainly, the novel grants moments for Waldo to practice an aesthetics of care or adopt a proto-ecofeminist perspective, but Waldo persistently rejects these potential moments in order to hold onto ideologies that he believes harbor a more promising future for himself. Despite harboring this incredibly insightful moment that we can read, from a posthumanist perspective, or as Haraway would better articulate, from a Chthonic perspective (or a perspective that centralizes creatures of the mud), as Waldo’s becomes a creature of the earth—a being of the mud—Waldo simply refuses to shed himself of masculinist universals. He certainly has the opportunity to make kin, which is perhaps why the sow comes over to inspect him with her nose, but Waldo never even considers accepting or embodying this kinship. Despite the metaphorical “reversal of head and feet” that signals Waldo’s loss of ontological status, or how easily he was debunked in a chain of social Darwinism, he quickly 86 climbs back over the pigsty and would have walked off sullenly, but he wanted his book. Of course, Waldo is waiting for J.S. Mill’s Political Economy to be returned to him, as it fell out of his pocket once he went over the sty, making the absence of the book the most significant aspect of this scene. The fact that Political Economy never enters this Chthonic space not only reveals the arbitrary exclusion of liberal ideology when it comes to certain identity markers but illustrates why Waldo never considers this space as one that harbors the potential to resurrect agency, redefine what it means to be a laboring body or what it means to be human and make kin. Instead, I argue the novel can be read as imbricating liberal ideology and transcendentalism into its plot, not to mimic Schreiner’s own rapture when discovering and considering these frameworks, but to underscore certain suspicions regarding their supposed universality and potentiality. As a result, by exploring the scene in which Waldo first discovers Mill’s book up in Tant Sannie’s loft, Schreiner’s novel showcases and predates a Derridean logic of sovereignty whose analysis has consequences for what it means to be a liberal subject in interspecies spaces. In other words, the space in which this text is introduced and resides is perhaps the most crucial indicator of its influence and impact in the novel, especially when compared to the space from which it is excluded. After all, Waldo finds Political Economy up in a loft, stashed away in a box with the rest of Em’s father’s books. As he is swept away by ideas that reverberate with his own experiences and emotions (and with Schreiner’s), he loses track of time, leaving Bonaparte wondering at the bottom of the ladder what Waldo could be doing up there for so long. As a result, both the physical and imaginative plane upon which Schreiner introduces this work then motions toward the hierarchal and Eurocentric constructs upon which such idealisms have rested. Physically, Bonaparte, and more importantly Doss, are left waiting at the bottom of the latter, 87 with Doss physically incapable of surmounting the obstacle between Waldo and himself, and thus metaphysically barred from obtaining and participating in the knowledge and ideology Waldo is now acquiring. Nor would I consider this reading as a stretch regarding the purpose of this scene, given the assumptions Bonaparte makes regarding what Waldo is actually doing in the loft. That is, Bonaparte assumes Waldo must be eating smoked sausages and biltongs. As Jacques Derrida concisely notes in his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy in “Eating Well: or the Calculation of the Subject,” the head of state could never be a vegetarian, precisely because the consumption and oppression of other beings is a signpost of virility, sovereignty, potency, and masculinity. From an Enlightenment standpoint, eating meat underscores the fracture of the animal body from the spiritual plane or the cogito. It distinguishes man from the natural world and grants the illusion of supreme power and divinity compared to sacrificial and mortal animal flesh. This practice is defined by Derrida’s neologism, carnophallogocentrism. Therefore, in imagining Waldo is consuming meat when he is really reading Mill’s work, the narrative depicts a scene that establishes Waldo’s carnophallogocentrism as a signpost of his metaphorical and intellectual rebirth—his literal enlightenment—and underscores how this idealism is bolstered and reliant upon enlightenment legacies and hierarchy. To further stress this binary, Waldo’s physical elevation on the loft is then symbolic of his elevated ontological status, and acts as a striking opposition to his later placement in the sty and to Doss’s position. Therefore, in this literally lofty position, whether Waldo is metaphorically digesting Eurocentric ideas via linguistic absorption or physically consuming meat, the novel ensures the result gestures toward the same position. Waldo is depicted as an autonomous, free-thinking, enlightened subject, a sovereign in his own right, and a Renaissance man in the making, despite 88 the vulnerable position in which his poverty places him. Doss, however, is never invited into this plane; there is no renaissance for the animal body. As a result, we can extrapolate these conjoined scenes as potentially questioning whether Waldo’s acquisition of knowledge or adoption of liberal ideology can benefit the marginalized characters of the novel, the ones waiting at the bottom of this constructed ladder, or whether Waldo’s search for erudition and progress will disregard the identities that invisibly bolster his privilege. By focusing on Waldo’s position, and the ontological and teleological scaffold upon which it is built, I argue the novel may be utilizing Waldo’s character to inquire whether the constructions and legacies upon which transcendentalism and liberalism rest can potentially excavate a channel to sharing subjectivity with others. In a skeptical turn, the fact that Doss remains waiting and whining at the bottom of the ladder, unheard and ignored, and the pigs and sheep are perpetually rejected and disembodied, suggests the narrative is not altogether optimistic in supporting such a possibility. Rather, it may illustrate Schreiner’s potential suspicion regarding such ideals, and her possible recognition of the stalwarts that impede her narrative from becoming an ecofeminist success or culminating in a progressive future for her protagonists. Finally, to further pinion this suspicion on the exclusiveness and inherent dilemmas of Victorian liberalism, it is important to note that as Waldo enters the pigsty, this work does not enter such spaces, but as I have mentioned, remains unaltered on the former side of the wall—the space occupied by stargazing Homo. Rather, this binary (star-gazing Homo versus pigsty) may very well be kept intact precisely because liberal ideology never entertains this environment as one in which subjectivity can be excavated and practiced. Rather, enlightened knowledge and liberal ideals remain on the antipode of animality, marginalization, and racialization, forcing the 89 novel to struggle with reimagining how such spaces can be evacuated from overarching notions of vulnerability, predation, and victimization, and perhaps explaining why Waldo only feels shame and helplessness once pushed into the sty. Here, Waldo believes he is devoid of the visibility, hierarchy, and sovereignty Mill’s liberal ideals had metaphysically granted his person when he stood outside the sty. Without the book, and evidently now without these ideals in place, Waldo simply cannot imagine how such spaces can be centers of agency and potency, which is why he does not engage with the pigs he formerly only saw as spectacles. Rather, because Waldo treats this space as the epitome of his vulnerable position, the narrative ensures its focus rests on these assumptions and dualistic habits by darkening Waldo’s body and completing his disempowerment—a disempowerment that Waldo seems to forget he can wash off—unlike the other, less mutable, and more vulnerable characters of the novel. Since such dichotomies have not been fractured, but are subtly replicated and replaced with new actors (Bonaparte quickly takes his place as star-gazing Homo, Mill resides on one side of the sty, and Waldo, racialized and animalized, is unwillingly inserted in a position of disempowerment), the novel explains why Waldo does not claim agency or resistance in this space precisely because his own reversal of hierarchy has done nothing to disrupt the dichotomies established from these legacies. Despite his androgynous qualities and adoption of transcendentalism, the only union we witness is that which concatenates the space of the marginal subject to notions of vulnerability, prey, femininity, powerlessness, insecurity, animalization, racialization, and disenfranchisement. Yet, for a brief moment, Waldo was not a stagnant entity pinioned by these dichotomies, but a moving body, struggling to bridge the gap between these supposedly oppositional ideals. His trajectory then allows readers to ponder what would happen if such dichotomies did resolve, or what potentialities could exist if the text had dared to allow Mill’s work to enter this Chthonic 90 space. After all, Political Economy focuses on the necessary conditions of labor and natural objects in the existence of production, which may mean the pigsty might be just the place for such questions. Admittedly oversimplifying his work for the purpose of brevity, in his first chapter, Mill states “Nature does more than supply materials; she also supplies powers. The matter of the globe is not an inert recipient of forms and properties impressed by human hands; it has active energies by which it co-operates with, and may even be used as a substitute for, labor" (24). In this respect, nature appears more agentic than passive—more than mere resource and far from the stagnant, inert, and invisible body of which Waldo now imagines himself to be a part. Rather, “she” is at once the supplier and nurturer, and in this supply, she garners and bestows power, hinting toward a fracture in our dualistic practices and evacuating nature from the vulnerable and victimized position with which industrialized nations often view her. Moreover, it is important to remember there is movement in this space. While Waldo may simply lie there, a pig walks over to sniff him, (making him the static and inanimate object, while this other space becomes lively) inviting him to engage in this space, or perhaps even to empower him into action (if indeed he even must move to display this power), but Waldo rejects this invitation. For the reader, however, this invitation of possibility is impossible to ignore. After all, Mill continues to argue this labor then produces three distinct types of utilities, only one of which is not immediately apparent in Waldo’s relationship with his environment, and thus motions toward the possibility for new potential. The first is the production of objects that will be used by humans, and intriguingly, this object is destroyed by Bonaparte when he crushes the sheep-shearing machine into the sand, precisely because it treats nature merely as a resource. Second is that of service valued by society or are the very conditions upon which society is made. While Mill may be specifically thinking of teachers or physicians here, the fact that his 91 work has not entered the sty (or that we do not recognize this engagement as “work”) underscores the ways in which we arbitrarily designate what constitutes labor. While pigs contribute to agricultural labor by rooting through the soil and making the land more fruitful (read: profitable), and performing an invaluable service for farmers, the text’s absence from the sty illustrates how our notions of liberalism actively exclude or refuse to make space for nonhuman cooperation and contribution. However, according to more recent scholars, such as Jocelyn Porcher, work is simply the space in which human’s and nature’s worlds overlap. By reading Waldo through the lens of Porcher’s The Ethics of Animal Labor, Waldo may even be granted the opportunity to reclaim, as an impoverished body, the space in which labor is produced and from which it garners profit. 26 Yet, he is too focused on his book, and thus on ideals that insinuate and define what we value as life, labor, and consciousness—a book that clings to one side of the sty alone. However, Mill’s third point continues to emphasize, perhaps against its intention, that labor is not an anthropocentric action. Rather, the third utility of labor is that of entertainment, which does not result in any tangible object, but increases the individual’s or society’s productivity. This is indubitably a utility the pigs provide for Waldo, as they were previously witnessed to be providing a form of entertainment for Waldo that led to his existential reverie of a unity between all things. On a more macroscopic level, we can even argue the pigs have contributed to Schreiner’s literary production by utilizing their presence to trigger Waldo’s resonance with her own ideas. By conflating this space with that of political economy or allowing Mill’s work to merge with such a space of evident vulnerability and marginality, the 26 Porcher writes in reference to how such idealisms are embedded in racist and classist constructs, “Why, thought the industrialists, leave those sources of immense profit that are nature and animals in the hands of peasants?” (xii-xiii) 92 pigsty would be marked as a space of labor, where consciousness does not determine life, but as Marx claims, life determines consciousness. In this respect, Waldo would not need his book with him to emphasize his humanity and sentience, this space of labor would be enough to emphasize such an existence. The potential of this scene may have then reached an entirely different conclusion and effect. Waldo’s inversion into the mud and kinship with the pigs and the rotting pumpkin could have aided in disrupting the trajectory of industrial spaces that increasingly aim to shirk and veil the inevitability and sightlines of death, and instead mark this space as an alternative place of labor, consciousness, life, and animacy. 27 However, the novel does not allow this potential to come to fruition, but instead leaves the text befallen on one side of the sty, only to be burned for the ideas it might possibly contain—ideas that could empower characters such as Waldo, the pigs, Doss, and the invisible and marginalized persons of the novel, if only they are removed from “hands more white and delicate than those of the Boer-woman” (SAF 87). Or the text may have to be abandoned, burned for its sociohistorical history to make way for a new future. How we define agency and recognize labor are then key concepts for Schreiner’s novel, underscoring the urgency to either reimagine these concepts or abandon them altogether. Intriguingly, the ending of the novel can be read as entertaining and foreseeing both options, especially when compared to an earlier scene in the novel, where Waldo lies muttering to himself in a field, once again surrounded by his animal companions. In this scene, and much like the setting I have just explored, Waldo lies motionless in a field, where “a curious old ewe came to sniff at him; but it was long before he raised his head” (SAF 5). When he finally rises, he creates a small clearing in the bushes and resurrects an altar made of twelve stones. 27 I am using animacy here to refer to Chen’s exploration of life that is not often considered as such due its lack of apparent sentience, animation, and/or necrotic appearance. 93 Then he walked to the bag where his dinner was kept; in it was a mutton chop and a large slice of brown bread. The boy took them out and turned the bread over in his hand, deeply considering it. Finally he threw it away and walked to the altar with the meat, and laid it down on the stones. (6) Mimicking the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, Waldo performs the role of a male actor in Genesis. He continues to follow in Abel’s steps, finding wheat an insignificant contribution, and instead offers one of his ewes, already dead, and whose body is now displayed as an absent referent, devoid of livelihood or any reference to its once living form. He claims that if the lambs were his, he would give one, superfluously evacuating his authority and ownership over these animals, and instead emphasizing his own forsaken poverty. Instead, he professes that he has only this “dinner meat” to sacrifice. He requests his god to send fire down from heaven to burn it and waits only to find the sun “had melted the fat of the little mutton chop, and it ran down upon the stones. Then, the third time he bowed himself. When at last he looked up, some ants had come to the meat on the altar. He stood up and drove them away” (6-7). Finally, he feels himself forsaken, calls his ewes together, breaks down the altar, and throws “the meat far, far away into the field” (7). What I find interesting about this scene is how rather than witnessing his sheep’s presence as autonomous subjects, as individuals capable of voicing their concerns, protesting their slaughter, or witnessing their own kin’s sacrifice, Waldo treats his dinner meat as isolated and utterly fragmented from the living who stand before him, and in this respect, this dinner meat is a fitting scapegoat for the marginalized nonhuman characters of the narrative. The liminality of the ants who present themselves in answer to this sacrifice (ambiguous subjects whose presence appears to disorient or escape Waldo’s discernment as subjects made evident mid-stage in this sacrifice) are shewn to the margins and off his makeshift altar in much the same way as he chucks a postmortem body part into the fields. It never occurs to him the sun’s heat may be God’s fire, or the ants may be the subjects to whom he is sacrificing this meat, or even that in 94 sacrificing this meat, as Rene Girard explains in Violence and the Sacred, that these liminal lives then become the most humanesque entities in this scene, forming a union between “human,” “animal,” “object,” “meat,” and thus muddling the distinction and definition of all these signifiers.28 Rather, taking only a Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment perspective, the liminal lives depicted here are never heard nor acknowledged, and become indicative of the other earthly bodies whose abjection and sacrifice become the very foundation of liberalist and Eurocentric ideologies. Their liminality and consequent erasure become symbolic of the ways in which Judeo-Christian doctrine oppresses, silences, and sacrifices nonhuman lives for the sake of anthropocentric salvation. The focus the novel places on these “scapegoats” is then not intended to centralize their agency or impact in the narrative, but to display how an animal bestiary, perpetuated by imperial fantasies, takes only what is useful and complicit to its production, and chucks all other animacies to the margins (including dead animals, insects, or any other entity whose sentience and locomotion do not neatly comply with Enlightenment ideals). The human is all who is left at the center—gazed upon by a questionable Absolute and forsaken—never realizing the sheep also gaze upon him. However, once again the novel appears to be aware of this hypocrisy, and so once again inverts this hierarchy, this time with Waldo lying dead in the field. Toward the end of the novel, Waldo is once again lying motionless with his companions, and is in fact, dead, unbeknownst to all around him except the chickens. In this respect, we might verify that this bildungsroman has not followed the trajectory of a human’s journey into adulthood. However, more exciting than this verification is the notion that this bildungsroman 28 Quoting from Joseph de Maistre, Girard writes, “The sacrificial animals were always those most prized for their usefulness: the gentlest, most innocent creatures, whose habits and instincts brought them most closely into harmony with man . . . From the animal realm were chosen as victims those who were, if we might use the phrase, the most human in nature” (2-3). 95 may still very well be elucidating the journey of a human’s metaphysical or ontological progress. That is, although we may read the ending as anticlimactic, given Waldo has not achieved his dreams and seems to have died prematurely and inexplicably—perhaps even from a broken heart—Em offers him (or rather his body) a glass of milk. The import of this offering is how a sacrifice is being made to an empty vessel, rather than to a deity. The “human” here is then ambiguous—is it male/female, corporeal/abstract, sentient/inanimate? Rather, the culmination of Waldo’s journey forces readers to question what it means to be human in this network of actors. Here, he is not forsaken, but to explain what he is and how this scene is operating would need to be completely reimagined in a posthumanist future. Certainly, he may be becoming-woman, given he is surrounded by chickens (who were only thought to be appropriately cared for by women) and is offered a glass of milk (a product of maternal, female, and animal labor), but the humans who surround him are completely unaware and unsuspecting of his status. Instead, Schreiner notes only the chickens knew better, thus signifying not only the radical alterity of other beings or another form of sentience but admitting to the complete inaccessibility of another way of knowing and operating outside of an anthropocentric episteme. As a result, readers are not left to ponder why the novel ends in death, or performs as a failed bildungsroman, but are invited to reimagine what it means to be an actor in an ecologically diverse network. Rather than failing to achieve his dreams, perhaps Waldo’s death motions toward an alternative avenue in which the death of the Human is the death of the enlightenment, liberal, Euro-, ocular-, andro-, and anthropocentric constructs that could only inhibit the progress of the novel in its limited purview. Therefore, despite its anachronistic creation in terms of exercising, defining, and discussing ecofeminist theory, I argue The Story of an African Farm staunchly embeds itself as 96 one of the first, and perhaps most critical texts to explore when it comes to analyzing the intersection between race, gender, and the human/animal binary. While it certainly acts as a crucial text in analyzing Schreiner’s complex involvement, digestion, and criticism of empire, gender, and race, Schreiner’s aesthetics and focus on nonhuman animals’ precarity offers an even more complex picture of Victorian’s socio-political climate, and the awareness Victorians had regarding their precarity and entanglement with other species and livelihoods. Furthermore, the novel’s simultaneous adherence to popular idealisms, philosophies, and social constructs does not merely illustrate a blind complicity or offers unflinching accolades but unravels the nuances and impacts such notions have on the outpost of empire and on marginalized identities. It significantly relies on a vocabulary and rhetoric of systemic oppression to explain the death, failure, frustration, and utter invincibility of its characters. It ostensibly praises and aims for a kind of union and comradeship to be established between each character and between all things but does so in an effort to signpost the carnophallogocentric dominion that keeps dichotomous habits in place and prohibits the novel’s progress. Most importantly, it entertains alternative possibilities, even while it may not see them to complete fruition, in order to hold these aforementioned legacies culpable for the novel’s truncated journey. Significantly, the novel suggests unless we reimagine these constructs to abide and adapt to other lifeforms, and not merely overlay them onto bodies of radical alterity and hope for a fit, then this story must fail to grant life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all beings who remain trapped beneath this anthropocentric umbrella. As a result, our posthumanist future is left unwritten, simply gesturing toward an unknowability that only the novel’s more-than-human bodies harbor, and thus begging for a re-articulation of how we define what it means to be a visible actor in and on the outskirts of empire and interspecies entanglements. 97 3. Letting in the Jungle: Companionship in The Jungle Books Similar to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (published in 1894 and 1895, respectively) has inspired multiple interpretations that posit other-than-human characters as metonymic of imperial concerns, inviting scholars to read these animals as metaphors for colonization, racial and cultural tensions, as well as gender constructs and other humanist possibilities. Moreover, these texts often embed these possibilities within the “cradle of the child,” as Schreiner quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville, thereby operating off the notion that children (or colonial denizens) were somehow closer to nature, unevolved, wild, capable of being tamed, cultivated, and civilized into a “fully-formed” or western-European human. After all, it is this romanticized view of children and nature that is at the crux of Jane Hotchkiss’s interesting article on “The Jungle of Eden,” which examines the fascination that imperialism associated with children and nature and unpacks how the colonial imagination manipulated this relationship to translate indigenous attitudes for nature to be childlike. Even Lisa Makman’s introduction to The Jungle Books takes minimal effort to underscore how other-than-human animals function in the novel outside of metonymic interpretations. Instead, readers are prepared for a story “marked not only by the events of Kipling’s life but by the interests and anxieties of late-Victorian culture, by prevailing attitudes toward empire, gender, nature, race, and children” (JB xv), but evidently not at all about the elephants, jackals, wolves, and tigers that occupy the peripheries, and as I argue, even the central focus of the novel. 29 29 Even if Makman included these species under the enveloping term of “nature,” conglomerating sentient beings under such a broad ecological term can be too risky in its hegemony, as Will Kimlicka and Sue Donaldson articulate in Zoopolis. Rather it denies these individuals their own unique intersubjectivity with their environment and risks lumping them together in what Jacques Derrida defines as animot in The Animal That Therefore I Am. 98 In contrast to these readings then, this chapter is dedicated to continuing to question the role of the “animal,” which is not to say there is a possibility of reading animals outside of anthropocentric concerns, or that authors such as Kipling are somehow capable of not instrumentalizing these animals to entertain alternative possibilities. Instead, I want to emphasize that these alternative possibilities make these characters more significantly visible, illustrating that empire is not just a constellation of human actors but that these entanglements open a universe of ontological and epistemological diversity that needs to be acknowledged if we are to head into a collective posthumanist future. In this respect, I contend these canonical works, and specifically, Kipling’s work can indeed be interpreted as considering the potential of posthumanist thought (or questioning what it means to be human), even if such a theoretical framework was not yet identified, precisely because these animals never neatly obeyed, abided, accepted, and functioned through Victorian’s and modern humans’ liberal, imperial, and anthropocentric constructs in the first place. Rather, their inclusion into our literature must always already posit a kind of resistance, alterity, and potentiality that we are consistently striving to excavate. To read them as otherwise—as somehow complicit or supportive of our ideologies, or as scapegoats that are mechanized to make sociopolitical issues more palatable and digestible for a human audience—is to argue that at bottom, we have always known what it means to be human, and thus understand precisely how to orient these characters to support such readings. However, at every turn, these animals prove to be intractably unmalleable and puzzling flexible. Like the animal menageries of Carroll’s Wonderland, Kipling’s animals transform at the very moment in which we find their identity to be most aptly concretized, supporting a Victorian awareness that is piqued, if not excited, by these alternative possibilities. 99 Therefore, this chapter focuses on scenes of contentious encounters and conversations to explore what these animals—if read as animals—have to say about our trans-species relationships and posthumanist futures. Furthermore, the chapter branches off animal studies scholarship, such as Susan Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, to reimagine the frameworks in which The Jungle Books illustrate autonomy and sovereignty; ideologies that both operate within and subtly critique the conventional human/animal binary within Kipling’s work. As a result, my argument aligns with more recent readings of Kipling’s novels, such as Christie Harner’s “Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books,” to think about avenues of alliance and cooperation. Moreover, this chapter is in agreeance with Michael Lundblad’s reading of sexuality in The Birth of a Jungle to consider how Mowgli’s relationship not only transforms the adverse consequences of the human/animal divide but also transforms the heteronormative prohibitions that inhibit us from reimagining what it means to be human. To quarry these readings from a Victorian corpus then expands what authors may have meant when they made animals speak, magnifying their concerns beyond empire and the humans who constitute it, and recognizing, however inchoately, that there may be other channels of enacting agency, self- sovereignty, cooperation, and interdependence outside of humanism’s fictions. An Unsustainable Jungle Although The Jungle Books follow the same template of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in that each scene posits forth a kind of menagerie or natural display of imperial construction, both novels propose an intractability that pushes against the Victorian imaginary regarding other-than-human life. Therefore, while this section will trace a conventional reading regarding the novel’s primary framework, it does so to underscore the instability and unsustainability of the novel’s ontological orientation—an unsustainable order of which 100 Victorians may have been nascently, and perhaps unconsciously, aware. After all, for Victorians, the menagerie, literature, art, animal husbandry, and imperial expansion all acted as a means to present an identity of English totality across its colonies, bringing a tamed fantasy of exotic imagery to young English readers. As a result, instead of illustrating India across a cultural divide, these collective stories serve as the same blank canvas upon which all of these aforementioned frameworks operate, effacing indigenous life and inserting them into an imperial imagination of untapped resources, industrial development, encroachment, and governance. However, once this framework is established, an examination into the novel’s trajectory signals a criticism regarding these imperial practices. Rather than presenting a lush and sustainable jungle, The Jungle Books soon become an endangered space that is in a constant battle for independence and questions the governance, cooperation, and alliance of each actor to entertain the possibilities of more sustainable futures. Therefore, the novel commences with a traditional metonymic representation of English sovereignty, positioning Mother and Father Wolf as placeholders for the British government, while the majority of the other prey animals stand in as ideal Indian subjects. In keeping with this metonymic framework, the tiger, Shere Khan, is then posed as a metonym for Indian rebellion and oppositional leadership since he challenges Mother and Father Wolf’s reign and wishes to eat the metonymically hybrid (human-animal or ideal subaltern), Mowgli. Finally, the jackal who appears at the very commencement of the novel, and even before Shere Khan, can be read as an intractable rebel who will side with whomever has the highest chance of winning the throne. Through this framework, the hierarchal relationship and imperial governance between colonies and the British empire are then projected onto the natural world via these metonymic characters, and akin to the agenda of menageries, this structure makes British authority appear more 101 ubiquitous and irrefutable by feigning the impossibility of any other kind of order. As a result, this imperial structure posits nature as a blank canvas awaiting the inscription of whatever narrative empire wishes to propose and thus depicts nature as a passive entity awaiting and perhaps even in need of sense, order, and cultivation by human reasoning. In this respect, the novel closely follows the same prescriptions outlined in Kurt Koenigsberger’s discussion of The Novel and the Menagerie. Although not quite novels so much as they are an amalgamation of stories, The Jungle Books still neatly tie in with Kurt Koenigsberger’s analysis as such genres are not simply meant to portray a dichotomy of English versus Other but are designed to present a perspective of English totality and sustainability. He claims the novel is devised to appear inclusive, polyphonic, and multicultural, similar to a menagerie’s blueprint. Although the novel and menagerie may appear to be diverse and authentic in their “natural order,” these aforementioned imperial methods instead establish a narrative dedicated to centralizing European, and more so, English life as the pinnacle of evolution, and dictate the relationship that English and Western society supposed they encountered with the natural world. As a result, despite the various fauna and nonhuman life brought in from around the globe, species are amalgamated in a manner that grants the illusion of a ubiquitous English identity and reach, as species from India and Africa were stationed together and made to appear natural in their proximity. At the same time, menageries were often designed with celestial backgrounds to solidify a natural order as religiously preordained, granting the illusion that imperial ubiquity was also religiously justified. The socio-historical ties that bind humans and animals are macroscopically overlaid onto all species that fall beneath the empire’s hand. To signal this imperial reach, the protagonists with which The Jungle Books open are unsurprisingly the metaphorical characters of imperial 102 governance, Father and Mother Wolf, whose leadership over the jungle (or the geography and parameters these stories cover) reflect England’s global outreach. Metaphorically, the wolves’ unique species is overridden by their symbolic British alliance and representation, indicated by their governance over the jungle, stressed heteronormativity, and Judeo-Christian inculcation. Readers are given to understand Father Wolf is depicted within a masculine realm of identity politics as he provides nourishment for his family. As he awakes from his slumber, his consciousness is immediately denoted by his claws, nose, and teeth; tools that each mark in their own way his equipment for consumption and predation, and thus his aptitude for control, dominance, and superiority. From this predation, he is inserted into an inimical animal bestiary and becomes the quintessential sovereign of Derridean rhetoric, strictly indicated by his position as an apex predator, given that the sovereign must always be a meat-eater.30 Moreover, as William Wynn Yarbrough articulates in Masculinity in Children’s Animal Stories, such biopolitical order and governance easily translate into the domestic order of households, as the juxtaposition of Father Wolf’s masculinity and sovereignty positions Mother Wolf as the keeper and manager of the domestic space, and Father Wolf as the public speaker and figure. In this respect, the seemingly exotic becomes the uncannily familiar, as is the case with most anthropomorphic narratives since these creatures of alterity are positioned to imitate anthropocentric and Eurocentric constructs. Through these depictions, Father and Mother Wolf teach children not only a natural hierarchy of authority (designated by their parental titles), and thus impose an imperial dominance, but establish their dominance through gender politics and heteronormative constructs. Such a platform establishes the “proper” realms of masculinity and 30 In “Eating Well or the Calculation of the Subject”, Jacques Derrida writes “In our countries, who would stand any chance of becoming a chef d’Etat (a head of State), and of thereby acceding ‘to the head,’ by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself to be a vegetarian? The chef must be an eater of flesh” (114). 103 femininity for young readers, regardless of whether they recognize the methods or intentions deployed by these interpretations. It little matters whether children read with these interpretations in mind, even subconsciously, because the point of these depictions is to illustrate how Victorian writers represented the natural world as one that was complicit to their limited perspectives and concerns, and one that validated and reflected their quotidian lives and the lives they imagined for their children. Therefore, the supposedly authentic landscape of Kipling’s tales gesture toward the myopic avenues Victorians conventionally imagined would be possible in their global outreach. Furthermore, the indoctrination of this species into a bestiary that establishes British rule does not simply reinforce gender and Judeo-Christian constructs but perpetuates and expands their outreach across the globe, feeding into an androcentric rhetoric of imperialism and truncating any other possibility of cultural construction. The formation of a wolf pack was fascinating to Victorians as they interpreted their hierarchy as natural and reflective of their heteronormative constructs. The leaders or alphas are composed of a male and a female (a heterosexual couple), in which this is key for Kipling and didactic traditions of young adult fiction. According to Michael Lundblad’s reading of wolves in The Birth of a Jungle, the figure of the wolf is often favored to represent heteronormative households in that they practice monogamous relationships and are considered to be instinctually heterosexual. Despite the standard position for this species’ sexual intercourse, their animal nature and position in the British imaginary supposedly “precludes the possibility of homosexuality” (Lundblad 40), which is supported in the tales by the subsequent birth of four cubs. Thus, their sexual activity is thought to be utilized only for procreation. They replicate a Western and English family structure, and more importantly, grant an illusion of sustainability and security. After all, the 104 birth of more than these four young cubs (as there are elders, betas, and other young wolves in the jungle) suggests Kipling depicts this climate and order as one of optimal condition. The jungle, despite the threat posed by Shere Khan and others, then appears to be stress-free enough to allow other members of the pack to breed (a practice performed in reality only if the environment is sustainable and flourishing), which would then suggest despite the resistance India is posing for independence, the only sustainable environment is the one the British government provides. The fact that wolves, specifically, are one of the most highly social pack animals who successfully strive to defend their territory by delegating roles to each member speaks volumes to the tactics of imperial government’s attempts to gain and defend their accumulation of land and poses Indian rebellion as a non-threat. However, the diminishing number of wolves found at the end of the novel may tell an entirely different tale—a tale that is precluded by none other than Mother Wolf, which is then relayed to Tabaqui, perpetuated through Kaa and Mowgli, and finally culminates with the elephants who once ruled the land. Therefore, while the narrative ostensibly presents a narrative of sustainability and security, the novel does not simply operate via metonyms to underscore the increasing anxiety Britain felt as it failed to retain the land it had gained but may even present an intriguing alternative to sovereignty and interdependence between the humans and other-than-human animals it deploys. While my analysis of the narrative from here on may proceed to underscore and extract more fruitful and optimistic possibilities than the conventional parameters this introduction has proposed, I also think these readings request us to proceed with caution when exploring this network of obscure actors, inviting us to pause and ruminate over all the possible interpretations such actors may present. However, what is indisputable is that such metonymic renditions and erasures are not the only fate left for these intriguing figures. Instead, I argue it is imperative to 105 think outside of these nineteenth-century containers and pay serious attention to how these actors constantly deviate from their anthropocentric underpinnings, presenting sporadic nonconformities that diverge from the didactic traditions they are meant to support. Through this animal studies lens, I now turn to sites that expose how nonhuman characters might surpass human ontology, thus exceeding the intentions of the racial dichotomies and imperial rhetoric that The Jungle Books portray. In this respect, Kipling’s narrative may very well not be simply about imperial tensions, children, or nature, but about the inscrutability, intractability, and possibilities of complicated nonhuman relationships burgeoning within empire and impacting what it means to be human. The Demonic Animal and Ferality While the previous section summarized The Jungle Books more didactic traditions, this section is dedicated to exploring how the narrative deviates from conventions and gestures toward posthumanist possibilities. However, one must immediately wonder whether such possibilities are singularly reserved for the human. After all, one of the only humans in the tale, the protagonist Mowgli, appears to be a pseudo-were-human, capable of transforming at will. 31 As Tess Cosslett notes in “Child’s Place in Nature,” Mowgli’s “evolution” is not only signaled by his ability to adopt the language of the jungle and to adapt to any situation but is meant to underscore and privilege his human status. Evidently, his many transmogrifying appellations— frog, wolf, ape, buck, man—are unique to his species, given Mowgli’s companion animals in the jungle appear incapable of changing at will. Even Mowgli’s own wolf brothers appear to remain 31 Articles such as Sujit Suvasundarum’s “Imperial Transgressions” and Garry Marvin’s Wolf discuss the Victorian fascination with feral children and their lupine companions. According to these sources, British soldiers and scientist were enthralled with these children’s “savage” nature, as they were inserted into a kind of “missing link” for humanity, and became subjects on whom scientist could conduct tests to determine what makes someone human. 106 in a perpetual state of infancy, despite their apparent kinship and thus ontological equivalency to Mowgli. Rather than be acknowledged as brothers, their infant status more ostensibly disallows them from breaking free from the role of a pet, and thus from the role of a nonhuman-dependent who is incapable of caring for themselves or attaining civil rights. 32 Meanwhile, not only is Mowgli able to adapt to any name he is given, but these appellations significantly do not signal any infant status and are instead, as Cosslett notes, already the fully-formed version of the species. That is, Mowgli’s designation as “frog” suggests that his always-human status precludes any possibility of regression. Rather than being born as a tadpole, he is already a fully-developed and evolved version of any other species—even as a human child. Therefore, the novel appears to suggest mature mutability is the signpost of humanity, which in a dichotomous reading, would suggest that the animal is the opposition to evolution and transformation, incapable of change and always rendered into a static and metonymic representation. Yet, the narrative consistently undermines animal stasis the very moment it appears to propose it, and not just for Mowgli, but for every character in The Jungle Books. Thus, these tales dismiss human/animal distinctions at the same time it tries to establish these binaries, opening posthumanist possibilities for all characters. Moreover, it is not simply by tacitly or blatantly signposting these transformations that marks an animal’s position but more excitingly, by questioning the framework through which we read these animals as antithetical to the human. For instance, instead of reading Mowgli’s wolf-brothers as stuck in a perpetually nascent stage, and thus only capable of occupying a “child status,” I wonder what new interpretations could 32 Cosslett demonstrates this pet status by examining the scene in which Mowgli’s wolf brothers dance on their two hind legs to the music Mowgli plays, thereby mimicking a practice Kathleen Kete later discusses in The Beast in the Boudoir where humans demanded their pets perform for them after dinner. This scene then positions the wolves as inferior to Mowgli. As a result, despite their upright position, these wolves are inhibited from performing as humans, and instead act as subservient humans in fur. 107 arise for animal agency if we read this nascence as synonymous to and even indicative of the avenue that invites these characters to evolve and transform in the first place? In this respect, I contend such incipience does not necessarily signal pet status but can hint toward the potential for alterity—that can be the very condition for alterity—and that paves the way for rewriting a new narrative that does not privilege the human or human progress. Rather, such incipience may signal a state of becoming that allows these characters to pursue other avenues not merely representative of English subjectivity or liberal idealism, but signals frameworks that are not yet imagined. In this respect, their becoming can be perceived as a kind of renegade position in that a particular state of arrival or lack of arrival refuses to cater to notions of independence, complicity, normativity, and hybridity as they are construed in the center of empire. Therefore, I contend this recalcitrance is precisely the cause of subversion in the tales, as the threat resting in The Jungle Books is paved by alterity, by a refusal to assimilate, and a promise to surpass the limits of British abstraction. Furthermore, this recalcitrance is precisely why we no longer know what it means to be human any more than we can determine what it means to be animal, to which Mother Wolf’s character will soon attest. Contrary to Cosslett’s insightful reading, Mowgli is not the only, let alone the first character to morph his identity according to his name. Rather, Mother Wolf is quickly self- signified by another name, Raksha, whose alternative appellation literally translates to demon, according to Kipling. Although realistically, Raksha translates to protector and lunar, such a translation denotes a feminist agency and prowess that would be threatening to a patriarchal narrative, especially as it signals the arrival of the New Woman. Therefore, Kipling’s proposed translation of “demon” appears to motion toward the recalcitrance, hybridity, and multiplicity Raksha’s presence signals in the jungle, as Mother Wolf responds to Shere Khan, “And it is I, 108 Raksha [The Demon], who answer” (JB 11, parenthetics original). However, what I find most intriguing about Raksha’s translation is how it aligns with Paul Wells’ The Animated Bestiary, in which he branches off Deleuze’s and Guattari’s three conceptions of animals: the pet, the State animal or the classified/fabulist animal, and most central to this chapter, the demonic animal. Intriguingly, the wolves occupy all three of these states: their role as pet was already indicated by their proximity to Mowgli in the scene discussed above; meanwhile, their role as a State animal is indicated by their heteronormative and consumptive/predatory constructs that denote their sovereignty and imperial governance; and their role as demon proves to be the most titillating for this reading as it gestures toward their potential to revolt against our conventional readings of their character/position. Therefore, unpacking the demonic animal’s position can help rewrite animals in a manner that forces us to acknowledge their alterity, independence, and recalcitrance to our normative and humanist constructs and advocate for their central position in our literary imagination, culture, and legislation. Instead of reading them as metonyms of state and pethood—and even now as demons—this latter avenue may demand we develop new paradigms and vernaculars to live alongside such radical alterity—alterity that is anything but the static position in which traditional readings often place them. According to Wells, the demonic animal is historically deployed to challenge dichotomous thought and resist conventional ontology and thus becomes a fitting framework to apply to already dissolving and ambiguous distinctions. Furthermore, this dissolution appears to infiltrate every character we encounter in The Jungle Books, including Father Wolf. Indeed, the appellation of “Father Wolf” labels this patriarchal character as the face of heteronormativity and masculine constructs. Still, Rama’s alternative name adds interesting dynamics to this conventional dichotomous relationship and is cued by Raksha’s new appellation. Intriguingly, in 109 Vedic literature, Rama is often defined as lovely and beautiful; adjectives that often signal femininity and vulnerability rather than sovereignty and authority. In this respect, The Jungle Books suggest such identity markers are nothing more than performances, cued and easily mutated by a simple shift in signifiers. However, I acknowledge that even in this demonic reading, The Jungle Books does not yet entertain the idea of deconstructing heteronormative constructs, given Father and Mother Wolf, or Raksha and Rama, must consistently vacillate within gender binaries—perpetually operating within an oppositional masculine and feminine role. What’s more, even while Raksha’s appellation introduces her first-person voice, and elucidates a matriarchy through naming that I will soon discuss, this performance blatantly cues Rama’s vulnerability, and may even foreshadow his looming death in a cave—a space that is conventionally used to highlight maternity and domesticity, and thus dismisses the efficacy of any potential gender switch, and moreover, fails to fragment vulnerability from its conventional feminine realm. Therefore, I want to stress that while demonic readings may aid in debunking human exceptionalism, as I will further stress in the remainder of this chapter, it may not fully resolve the hiccups and hesitance these novels encounter while trying to reimagine new interdependent human and animal relationships. Still, these alternative appellations have potent consequences for the narrative, especially outside of dichotomous relationships. After all, Raksha appears to be the launch point from which other characters will transform outside of many of our conventional tropes, translating this mutability and adaptability away from human exceptionalism and into the already inherent alterity of more-than-human bodies. Thus, Raksha is not just a demon, but a character who occupies multiple states at once. She is at once the protective, feminine body who guards the entrance of domesticity, the intractable disruptor who undermines and infects Rama with a sense of vulnerability supposedly 110 reserved for her body alone, and most importantly, the state of becoming for every character she encounters. What’s more, according to Wells, demonic characters are distinguished as “pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale” (28). As a result, her status as a pack animal is then reoriented into a discourse that is not as focused on defending and accumulating territory, keeping order, or feigning sustainability, as previously discussed, but appears to be more concerned with forming a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale that commences The Jungle Books. After all, in the moment Raksha encounters Father Wolf, Mowgli, and even Shere Khan, 33 hers and all of their appellations change, signaling her proximity as the avenue through which multiple couplings enter a shifting network of distinction, and proving that regardless of species, there is not a single character in this network who can evolve independently, but must abide by an interdependent kinship to identify themselves. In this sense, Raksha becomes a jumpstart for hybridity and an apt mother to a son who appears capable of morphing at will. Raksha’s ability to transform those around her bestows potency and power into these characters, rather than any inherent quality they might possess before her intervention. Thus, it is not that Mowgli is the only one capable of morphing at will, but that it is Raksha who debunks any reading of human, racial, and engendered exceptionalism and stakes her centrality to the tales. Nor does she sacrifice herself to trigger these transformations. Rather, we may even speculate that Raksha renames Mowgli to combat her own erasure, as her immediate recognition of his conventional humanity inserts her into an animal bestiary of fabulist mothers, such as the mother of Romulus and Remus. In this respect, Mowgli’s oppositional and conventional “humanity” marks her as just another placeholder or 33 Upon Shere Khan’s entrance, Raksha announces, “His mother did not call him Lungri [the Lame One] for nothing” (JB 8), appearing to bestow demonic prowess on not only herself, but on all mothers, both absent and present. 111 metonym for fabulist tales—a concretized State animal. To resist and reject this placeholder, Raksha renames and reposits Mowgli as a quintessentially transformative animal, which opens an avenue for not only Mowgli’s potential becoming but an avenue that refuses to insert Raksha into a conventional animal bestiary or story we have heard before. Furthermore, while all the other animals continue to recognize Mowgli as a human, especially when Bagheera announces that a human “may be a help in time” (JB 15), Raksha rejects this savior complex and shifts the site of agency away from Mowgli’s humanity and into his ability to become-with the jungle; an ability she grants him through his renaming. Therefore, Raksha proceeds to name Mowgli, frog. As I have already mentioned, his status as a frog rather than a tadpole might suggest that his species’ inchoate form is already metaphysically equivalent to the most evolved stage of a nonhuman animal and thus perpetuates an idea of human exceptionalism. However, given Kipling’s later promotion of a relatively flat or playful ontology, I would like to consider that such a reading may not rest neatly and has, in fact, been successfully debunked by Tess Cosslett. Rather, Mowgli’s subsequent trajectory discredits any linear avenue of evolution, as he claims “‘Mowgli the Frog have I been,’ said he to himself; ‘Mowgli the Wolf have I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before I am Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man’” (JB 338). Normally, ape would be preceded by man in a Darwinian chain of being, but Mowgli’s progression simply follows the trajectory of his kinship through which the narrative takes him, further supporting the idea that identity is established through interdependent companionship instead of individual, isolated, and inherent evolution. Raksha’s naming of her cub then not only signals the disruption she poses to Darwinian evolution and exceptionalism by discrediting the validity of any linear metamorphosis and thus any pinnacle of evolution but continues to signal the disruption she poses to other 112 ontological and hierarchal constructs. Raksha’s naming speaks to Mowgli’s ability and necessity to become-with whichever actors he encounters in the jungle throughout his life. Her significance then lies in her ability to relocate power from the human body to the body of a creature who is perpetually shifting and traversing through a variety of networks. It is not that she is awaiting the day man will step in and restore and reset the jungle's natural order, as might be the case with other characters who recognize and acknowledge Mowgli’s humanity. Instead, she awaits the day in which such order will be debunked—the day in which the frog will eat the frog-eater.34 However, The Jungle Books quickly proves its adroitness at reversing order, rather than debunking it, as we have seen in the dichotomous relationship between heteronormative couples, and that we will now witness in Raksha’s wish for Mowgli. Her wish for her frog to eat the frog- eater is mimetic of her desire for Mowgli to defeat Shere Khan, who believes it is his right to hunt and kill Mowgli. This right is embedded in a long line of fabulist tales, as noted in Wells’ summation of David Ingram’s analysis of The Lion King, to signal a “natural” order or the legacy of social Darwinism in which animal nature is deployed to justify human desire. Thus, Wells quotes, “nature . . . is similarly an economy in which those at the top of the food chain (lions humanized as middle-class Americans) are justified in their right to consume a nature which is guaranteed to remain endlessly renewing and abundant, as long as their power and authority is not usurped by their undeserving enemies, suitably marked as inferiors in terms of class and identity.” (160) Intriguingly, here it is Mowgli or humans instead of nature, who are positioned as the endlessly renewing and abundant resource. Moreover, as significant and faithful as this depiction might be, since it is indeed jungles and other species whom are critically endangered, this reversal still 34 Raksha states, “He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs—frog-eater—fish-killer, he shall hunt thee!” (JB 11). 113 upholds the human/animal binary. This depiction threatens to reposition Raksha back into a metonymic animal indicative of British anxiety (as she represents British sovereignty trying to retain land and governance from Shere Khan’s imposing usurpation). However, just when this metonymic rendition appears to take hold and threatens to reinstate a natural order—a sustainable jungle—Kipling introduces another character to ensure such instantiation never takes permanent hold. Thus, we meet a curious creature who is introduced by a “little shadow with a bushy tail” (JB 7). This character’s denotation is intriguing precisely because it combats the ontological constructs we have encountered thus far, and therefore invites a truly antagonistic reading of The Jungle Books’ mechanics. After all, Father and Mother Wolf appear to garner their sovereignty from the accolades of abiding by humanist constructs. Their predatory function provides an example of what Sune Borkfelt recognizes as the inimical consequences of applauding other species for operating within anthropocentric ideals.35 While the mechanisms that signal predation also bolster the wolves’ sovereignty according to Derridean philosophy, they also transform them into Cartesian machines and metonymic placeholders. This mechanism then translates their inaccessible thoughts and livelihood into an abstraction that merely intends to mark them with an insatiable hunger that supports human ontological superiority and dominion. In this respect, a species with a completely different sense of olfactory navigation becomes nothing more than a metonym of consumption, an empty and mutable vessel awaiting meaning, and a tool to express a Darwinian chain of order and predation like so many others, but not this little shadow. Rather, this creature’s depiction as a shadow continues to hold consequences for how we insert him into 35 In “Colonial Animals and Literary Analysis,” Borkfelt argues “it should be noted in conclusion, that even some positive animal stereotypes arguably do the animals an injustice through portraying them as symbols of certain human characteristics, thereby ignoring their ‘other’ nature” (567). 114 an animal bestiary, and perhaps signals how we are inevitably already-oriented to only consider this character as a shadow—a representation whose livelihood remains inherently inaccessible to our understanding. In this sense, we are not addressed with a “body” at all, but a specter incapable of being concretized, mortalized, and incorporated into a human-oriented narrative. In short, this shadow asks us to question whether it is possible to observe, understand, and classify other species and what their inscrutability can offer to how we examine these characters’ centrality. Therefore, I argue The Jungle Books most central characters are not only those who lie in the periphery, but as a result, are the ones whom we do not see or hear coming. Indeed, wolves have reigned supreme here, entering a long line of symbolic sovereignty—sovereignty to which Derrida pays crucial attention in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I. Yet, this little creature plays a significant role in a Derridean context, given he may very well be the avenue that escalates the novel’s subversive deconstruction of humanist notions. After all, the prominent role in which wolves reign supreme in a political context has much to do with their stealth—to be stealthy as a wolf. In Kipling’s opening chapter, however, the characters whom readers assume would be marked by stealth, such as Shere Khan, the wolves, or even Mowgli, do not embody this quality in a traditional sense. The wolves hear Shere Khan coming long before he arrives; Father Wolf hears Mowgli’s arrival in the bush before he appears; and perhaps most intriguingly, Father Wolf is unable to creep after his prey stealthily. This idea of stealth and sovereignty is critical to the narrative, especially given the entire hierarchy upon which this jungle rests is predicted to collapse the day Akela (a wolf) loses his stealth and is unable to kill his buck. Therefore, it is extremely curious the stealthiest character we meet at the commencement of the novel is none of the characters previously mentioned, nor is it even an apex predator. Instead, it 115 is a little shadow with a bushy tail—a creature none other than the jackal, Tabaqui. What I find exciting about this character is how despite his rather neotenic and harmless depiction (surely meant to diminish his danger, especially when proposed next to the wolves’ predatory qualities), his appearance is the stealthiest—completely overlooked and unacknowledged but packed with the potential to function as the most demonic character of all. His effervescent quality, almost shadowy and gossamer in his introduction, not only explains why he is so often marginalized, nor does it simply signpost his position in the animal bestiary as one destined for erasure but allows him to revamp what should mark his vulnerability into a weapon for resistance. In other words, this character’s function is not to uphold the “natural hierarchy” depicted at the commencement of The Jungle Books but to undermine it. He is neither wholly predator nor prey, and because of this interstitial space, he may prove to be one of the most significant threats The Jungle Books encounter. After all, it is he who sneaks up on the wolf, before and more successfully than any other character, and ambushes Father Wolf with words that may sound like one thing but mean another when he states, “Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this world” (JB 7).36 Moreover, such stealth is important for Derrida because in general it signifies: a sort of introduction, a discreet intrusion or even an unobtrusive effraction, without show, all but secret, clandestine, an entrance that does all it can to go unnoticed and especially not to be stopped, intercepted, or interrupted. To move à pas de loup is to walk without making a noise, to arrive without warning, to proceed discreetly, silently, invisibly, almost inaudibly and imperceptibly, as though to surprise a prey, to take it by surprising what is in sight but does not see coming the one that is already seeing it, already getting ready to take it by surprise, to grasp it by surprise. (Beast 2) 36 Mowgli later gains a suspicion that these animals’ language does not directly translate to simple flattery when Bagheera applauds his humanity, sovereignty, and potency by the end of the tales. 116 In other words, such stealth is important in this chapter because it is not the wolf to whom it is attributed, nor the conventional predator, but a marginal, seemingly vulnerable, and discredited character supposedly destined only to occupy the position of a denigrated scavenger. Despite all the other characters who may act as a foreshadowing of the impending disruption to the wolves’ reign, I argue it is the commensal figure of Tabaqui who grasps Father Wolf, 37 the predator, by surprise and impedes him from hunting, and who signifies an introduction and a discreet intrusion. The consequences of such a reading emphasize the disruption to the natural order the books ostensibly proposed. Instead, this intrusion is heralded by a relatively insignificant character who is not complicit to remain within strict predator and prey dichotomies, but instead functions to fracture vulnerability and potency from their traditional spaces. His description is utterly unthreatening, yet it also serves to mitigate the threat he exposes. In this respect, Tabaqui’s usurpation is not marked by predation or any carnivorous appetite. Instead, his description may be what allows him to skirt around this cyclic paradigm that seems to envelop all other paradigmatic characters. Instead, neither wholly predator nor prey, he occupies a scavenger’s interstitial space. Intriguingly, this space provides room for mutation, cooperation, and intriguing methods of displaying agency. It is a space so threatening that Tabaqui must be written as rabid—as a character who threatens to infect all other characters with the madness, chaos, or, more accurately, intractability he proffers. 37 I am using the description of commensal as it is defined in Terry O’Connor’s Animals as Neighbors, in which O’Connor describes commensal “to refer to those animal species that utilize the modified or constructed environment of human habitations for living space and food" (7). As I will soon discuss, Tabaqui fits into this description rather well, as he not only tolerates the nearby villages and sedentary establishments of neighboring human communities, but gains benefit from the access to food that results from the proximity of these communities (unlike every other animal discussed in the tales who avoid such environments). 117 Tabaqui’s threat of infection has numerous sociohistorical imbrications that must be addressed before exploring its potentially revolutionary qualities. Not intended to be an accolade, Kipling writes, They are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui, more than any one else in the jungle, is apt to go mad, and then he forgets that he was ever afraid of any one, and runs through the forest biting everything in his way. Even the tiger hides when little Tabaqui goes mad. (JB 8) By depicting Tabaqui as rabid, this jackal metonymically enters a complicated sociohistorical entanglement of race, species, and class wars that manifested themselves in the eradication of rabies. His susceptibility to infection (“more than anyone else in the jungle”) serves to belittle the prowess, intractability, and disruption he inflicts upon the narrative, and instead poses him as weak, defenseless, and lacking will. Not to mention that it serves to deindividualize him at the same moment it intends to isolate him. More importantly, this kind of reading serves to restrict him solely to the role of metonym. Tabaqui is no longer presented as a jackal but becomes subsumed in an animal bestiary to represent all that is abject. He is degenerative, foreign, and inferior. As Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys explain in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the threat of rabies was reallocated to a racial context since many cases of infection were supposed to have stemmed from the east, thus villainizing foreigners as carriers of disease. As a result, the wolves’ desire to protect their land and isolate Tabaqui’s potential threat is easily recognized as a metonym for how Britain hoped to protect its land, taking great pride and comfort in the fact it was an island that could supposedly control who entered. Burgeoning off race rhetoric and permeating into species, Tabaqui’s infiltration signals one of the most significant targets held accountable for rabies—that of the domestic dog—as Tabaqui enters the wolves’ den, and thus metonymically the domestic English hearth. Finally, this discourse is rearticulated into class since wolves and jackals are both canids and in great proximity to one another. Yet, it is only 118 Tabaqui who is apt to go mad, suggesting there is some inherent inimical quality about his species that the wolves lack to make him more susceptible. Such a quality might be his very hybridity, in that jackals have a more diverse ancestry than wolves, and thus may metaphorically represent interracial relations, or the dilution of English blood. In terms of class amongst species, Tabaqui may symbolize a taint in his pedigree, making him a lower-class mutt and thus a prime target for rabies. In a Victorian context, the pedigree or aristocratic wolves serve the same function as aristocratic dogs, whose nobility was heralded because they policed perimeters and deterred class mobility. Tabaqui can then be read as a representative of both the lower class and foreign dogs who perpetually threatened to enter and sully such spaces, making him nothing more than an empty vessel awaiting meaning. However, I want to emphasize that despite this reading’s evidence, Tabaqui is not solely and simply relegated to this sociohistorical entanglement but consistently exceeds the limits and roles the wolves and our metonymic readings have subscribed for him. Rather, it is his adaptability and hybridity that motions toward a new reading; a reading that calls for us to reimagine these fluid states as potential avenues for disrupting hierarchal conventions, Enlightenment legacies, and dichotomous constructions. Therefore, rabies infection is not the threat of the novel, but merely the veil that serves to discredit and limit Tabaqui’s potential. Instead, the threat of the novel is Tabaqui himself, and moreover, his commensality, that proves frightening to the protagonists, since commensality too does not abide by stringent parameters or borders. Instead, commensal species always reside comfortably in interstitial spaces (not to say humans’ attempts at eradication do not threaten them). They are neither wholly dependent upon human civilization nor do they shy away from such locations. Rather, they are opportunists who have learned to take advantage of human civilization without becoming bound to it (similar to how Tabaqui takes advantage of the 119 wolves’ den without promising any loyalty to this space). While the frustration of commensality means these animals are rarely considered with deference, nor do they fall under any right to life (as we see by the abject lens through which Tabaqui is depicted), the potential of these creatures reminds readers of the fallacious boundaries between civilization and wilderness, and how much power hierarchies and dichotomous structures can be circumvented. After all, Tabaqui gains his sustenance from both the jungle and the village heaps and appears to stealthily encroach into these spaces uninvited. What is important about Tabaqui is how his mobility does not merely designate encroachment (as it does for Victorian England and their imperial anxieties), but gestures toward how we can weave together spaces of fluidity and imbrication. The mobility he exercises, and more importantly, the choice he makes to traverse these spaces of his own accord (since unlike Shere Khan, he does not enter the village because he has been exiled, but because it is something he desires and finds beneficial), speaks to a conceivable future of hybridity, mutation, and adaptation for these supposedly domesticated and colonized creatures. Moreover, his commensality or liminality ensures he is neither entirely domestic nor completely wild; he neither depends on these spaces to display agency, nor does he shy away from their potential. Instead, he establishes a pseudo-feral identity that must surpass the dichotomies that intend to bind him as merely a product of British imaginary and governance. Therefore, I argue the critical aspect of his position forces us to rethink what coexistence and codependence look like after human ontology and imperial abstraction is disrupted and dichotomous boundaries are sewn together; an exploration that implicitly continues throughout the tales, but for now, is also signaled in Tabaqui’s very own name. As is the case with other demonic and intractable characters, Tabaqui is referred to by many names, and the first reading of his name follows the same format as Mother Wolf’s, Father 120 Wolf’s, and Shere Khan’s. That is, these aforementioned names all signal a ghost—a denigrating and deadly position in a Victorian imaginary, and Tabaqui is not an outlier in this respect. Rather, Tabaqui’s name serves to further belittle his character and diminish his threat, given Kipling adopted Tabaqui’s name from his father’s 1891 work Beast and Man in India, where a parasite is called Tabaqi Kutta, a Hindu phrase meaning “one who sponges” or dish-dog or dish- licker. Between Tabaqui’s name, his rabies infection, and all the other referents meant to establish and denigrate his character—madness, dewannee, and hydrophobia—the novel appears to persist in the limitations it hopes to set for Tabaqui. However, similar to every character in the novel, such figures are not content to remain within an empirical or colonial lens but persistently push back against our readings and ask us to reexamine the context in which we restrict their efforts. After all, even Tabaqui’s species can be considered as a form of resistance since jackals are contentiously categorized mammals, with disagreement surrounding whether they are true canids. This contention invites readers to reconsider how we perceive and categorize figures such as Tabaqui, and more specifically, asks us to reinterpret how we receive his name, his commensality, and his interdependence. In response, I argue such signifiers are only read as denigrating if we abide by the ontological constructs the tales posit as inevitable and immutable, and that play into a preordained paradox of speciesism. Rather than thinking of Tabaqui as parasitic, I would like to explore his dependency, dish-licking or dogged behavior, as essential avenues in displaying agency. After all, it seems only fair to recall how Mowgli (the conventional protagonist of The Jungle Books) is forewarned to never hunt alone, and is in fact, dependent on the help of other hunters and characters to survive in the jungle. Furthermore, he is applauded for such dependency, even when it borders on species appropriation. For him, dependence is examined in terms of transformation, successful adaptation, and becoming-with 121 others, and he is only ejected from the jungle when he ceases to cooperate with these animals and instead isolates himself to his own species. Overall, the tales applaud such dependency, as the most successful, natural, and laudable characters are pack animals, thus illustrating a need to cooperate and depend on one another, especially across species. Ironically, even The Jungle Books itself is a collection of interdependent tales. Yet, when perceived in Tabaqui’s character, such dependency seems oddly isolated, outlandish, and denigrated. Hypocritically, the dependency that is admired in so many others signals an inexplicable loss of dignity for Tabaqui. Therefore, I argue Tabaqui’s most “repulsive” and vulnerable characteristic is not one to be shunned, denigrated, or thought of as an affliction. Rather, his presence asks us to rethink interdependency in the context of intra and interspecies relationships, not as a loss of dignity, but as a necessary condition for survival. As a result, I would like to reorient Tabaqui’s role not only as one that is demonic and commensal, but also under the context of Sue Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, one that asks us to consider how we respond to such interdependent networks and relations. As these scholars astutely argue, “dependency doesn’t intrinsically involve a loss of dignity, but how we respond to dependency certainly does” (84). Tabaqui’s dependency motions toward his success in communicating what he needs and adapting to his environment—a significant insight we must learn to acknowledge in our relations with other species, and not bogart as an exceptional quality of humanist making. As Donaldson and Kymlicka inform us, “if we don’t view dependency as intrinsically undignified, we will see the dog as a capable individual who knows what he wants and how to communicate in order to get it—as someone who has the potential for agency, preferences, and choice” (84). In this feral position, what becomes exciting about Tabaqui’s vulnerability and “parasitic” portrayal is how it may signal his agency and carve 122 out a resistance for himself. Moreover, Tabaqui can signal to us how best “to restructure society to enable their [nonhumans] potential functioning” (84), and how his restructuring of society harbors significant consequences for how we constitute life and subjectivity within these supposedly conventional and quotidian spaces. Therefore, I want to emphasize that Tabaqui’s commensality serves to elevate him from an ecological pest’s position and into the shared and laudable space previously seen as only reserved for the human or for Mowgli. Moreover, his transgression and vacillating migration into jungle and village heaps translate this ideological dissolution of human versus animal into physical and geographical spaces, disrupting the binary between what species belong in what spaces. While every other character (except perhaps Mowgli in certain moments) fears to cross the boundary separating the jungle from the village and thus maintains concrete boundaries between “human” and “animal” spaces, Tabaqui frequently enters the village heaps for sustenance. His journey throughout the jungle then marks him as a native denizen, while his journey into the village heaps for sustenance marks him as a threat to the other jungle inhabitants who fear such transgression, contact, and proximity with conventionally human environments. As a result, this ostensible ecological pest disrupts the distinction between bios and zoe (or the distinction between what bodies belong in the polis). However, more intriguing than Tabaqui’s migration is how his contact with other species further serves to dissolve conventional notions of what bodies constitute a polis. As discussed in a previous chapter, Derrida’s “Eating Well; or the Calculation of the Subject” questions responsible encounter, and more importantly, responsible ingestion, given that one must eat to exist, and thus recasts consumption as a site in which ethics is always heavily instantiated. Such ethics, or perhaps lack thereof, has been at the frontier of this 123 narrative. For Father Wolf and Shere Khan, sovereignty is established via predation and land accumulation, which is why Father Wolf despises Shere Khan for his encroachment. Shere Khan comes into Father Wolf’s territory to consume Mowgli, and this consumption metonymically signals a threat to the British empire and represents the potential for Indian sovereignty. What’s more, the commencement of the tales begins with the potential for hunting, signaled by the very moment Father Wolf awakes. Still, it is Tabaqui who disrupts this potential scene of consumption, as he sneaks upon Father Wolf before he ever leaves his den. In response to this encroachment, Father Wolf attempts to impede Tabaqui by telling him there is no food to be had there, and therefore tries to inhibit Tabaqui from showcasing the same kind of sovereignty upon which the novel and Derridean ethics operate. However, Tabaqui is there to challenge the definition of what constitutes life, political bodies, and the spaces they inhabit. In essence, he is there to question sites of agency and the bodies that resurrect themselves in these sites. Therefore, he responds, “For a wolf, no,” said Tabaqui, “but for so mean a person as myself a dry bone is a good feast. Who are we, the Gidur-log [the jackal people], to pick and choose?” He scuttled to the back of the cave, where he found the bone of a buck with some meat on it, and sat cracking the end merrily. (JB 8) Such a depiction traditionally depicts Tabaqui as nothing more than a beggar and a scavenger with the most denigrating and derogatory intention. Still, Tabaqui’s reply gestures toward more fruitful avenues that dissolve the boundaries between sovereign and subject, bios and zoe, and other dichotomous markers whose antithesis distinguishes “the human” or “life” in opposition to what it decisively excludes. Instead, Tabaqui initiates what Mel Y. Chen might recognize as a kind of animacy in which the boundaries between life and death become ideologically blurred within these zones of integration. Therefore, the result of this integration challenges our 124 definitions of what constitutes life and subjectivity and places the most invisible, vulnerable, and insensate life at the center of these tales’ mechanics. Returning to Animacies, Chen explains how matter that is considered “insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways” (2), and I argue Tabaqui can be read as the initiator of The Jungle Books’ animacies. By recognizing life and sustenance in what others have overlooked as nothing more than a carcass, devoid of all meaning and nourishment, Tabaqui’s feast is precisely what restores meaning into these overlooked sites. His response and actions are what relocates life, sovereignty, and potency into the most vulnerable of spaces and what renegotiates Tabaqui’s position as more than scavenger but a commensal paragon in his own right. Moreover, Tabaqui’s transgression and rebuttal aids in rethinking how life’s and death’s proper boundaries can yield redefinitions for the ‘stuff’ that matters in contemporary biopolitics or how such ‘matter’ fits into Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life.38 Therefore, Tabaqui is despised for this transgression precisely because he blurs the distinction between what constitutes life and thus threatens to dismantle how Eurocentric power and conventional sovereignty is established and thrives off of this supposed distinction between life and death. Significantly, such potent sites remain unnoticed or in the peripheries of the wolves’ reign. However, Tabaqui’s presence and consumption—his practice of perhaps eating well—serves to reposition bare life at the center of these sites of power, demonstrating what demonic characters have to offer when we consider how animals break away from our ontological constructs and channel their own roguish path through this polis. 38 See Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Achille Mbembe Necropolitics, and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer for in depth scholarship regarding the implications of such divisions. 125 In this respect, it is not that Tabaqui circumvents Derridean logic. After all, he does consume other bodies to ascertain his sovereignty. However, his curiosity and disruption reside in what bodies are consumable, or as I have mentioned, what bodies compose life. Therefore, it raises both questions and resolutions as to why Tabaqui’s display of sovereignty is seen as threatening to the wolves, a threat that poses Tabaqui’s own negotiations of his sovereignty as somehow antithetical to the wolves, despite the parallel alignment of how sovereignty pivots off consumption. Yet, this display is seen as perverse, perhaps because it seems as if he is a ruler of corpses, especially since he uses conventionally dead bodies to claim his right to life and assert his power and authority next to the wolves. Apparently, this display is meant to be juxtaposed to how sovereign subjects mete out a Foucauldian idea to foster life or disallow it to the point of death,39 yet undeniably both characters utilize other subjects and anatomo-politics to assert their sovereignty and power, making the wolves and Tabaqui strikingly uncanny. Therefore, Tabaqui is despised because he exceeds the conventional limits of Foucauldian power; he neither takes life nor does he disallow it to live. The dilemma of this dichotomous dissolution then raises questions for how we measure or gauge sovereign authority or agentic display, and as I have been stressing, how we are to establish the distinctions that identify, constitute, and protect “life.” As a result, Tabaqui does not merely feast on a bone’s scrap at the back of the wolves’ den but utilizes postmortem bodies as subjects to negotiate his existence and barter the spaces he is allowed or audacious enough to enter, which is unlike any other character in the novel. While the other protagonists are positioned in a cycle of usurpation to signpost their sovereignty, Tabaqui reallocates sites of agency into previously disposed and abject spaces, and thus dissolves 39 See Michel Foucault’s lecture on Society Must be Defended (1975-76). 126 the conventional distinction of what matter matters. It is this dissolution that makes the wolves admit their abhorrence for Tabaqui, “because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village heaps” (JB 7, emphasis mine). That is, it is once again his commensal position that is seen as threatening. It is not simply that he can adapt and express his sovereignty in alternative ways to the wolves, but that this alteration may be more sustainable and perhaps even ethical in the tales’ context. Rather than pushing these identities to the margins, perhaps even beyond the margins, as is the case with the wolves’ reign, Tabaqui’s notion of eating well and thus sharing subjectivity may function to signal the perversity and impending cessation of the wolves’ dominance. While the wolves’ consumption and reign may demarcate territories, abide by conventional constructs, and perpetuate Enlightenment legacies that define the parameters of life, Tabaqui’s diet resurrects and repositions these postmortem bodies as more than absent referents. Without him, these inevitable “heaps” would be unacknowledged, erased, ingested, commodified, and marginalized. Therefore, Tabaqui’s entrance and utilization of these spaces has consequences for the central matter of The Jungle Books. His metaphorical resurrection and centralization of the dead not only resists the conventional humanist tendencies to dismiss or marginalize deathly sites but holds consequences for how we conceive animacy and what bodies establish sovereignty. As Chen explains, our notions of animacy can “interrogate how the fragile division between animate and inanimate . . . is relentlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinction” (2). By conceiving of these inanimate bodies as continuous sites of importance and sustenance, Tabaqui blurs the distinctions of what comprises and organizes life and questions the matter that should matter in our perusal of these animals’ roles in our literature and culture. 127 While Tabaqui’s consumption of these absent referents may not allow these postmortem characters to garner the conventional forms of agency that their ingestion fuels for other animals, Tabaqui’s focus on these bodies does allow them to extend their vulnerability into sites of resistance and criticize how they are typically deployed. After all, the pieces of leather upon which Tabaqui feasts are created and taken from bovines, wildebeest, buffalo, and cattle; species whom the wolves do not respect and who always seem deployed as the most vulnerable and pathetic of bodies. What’s more, despite their denigrated position, these are the very species who are herded and manipulated to form the loudest pas de loup, as Mowgli and his wolf brothers chase them into a stampede to kill Shere Khan and reclaim their sovereign position. In this respect, their utilization never ascertains agency or sovereignty for themselves but is instead deployed to perpetually circumvent power away from them and into traditional sovereign figures, such as the wolves. From the wolves’ reigning position then, and I might add, the humans, these creatures are nothing more than helpless automatons, not simply in terms of how their bodies are deployed for power wars, nor even how their postmortem bodies are commodified and discarded in the village heaps, but in the manner through which the wolves view predation on bovine as pathetic because they are weak, or more explicitly, because they are already domesticated and subject to humans’ reign. This is precisely why they diminish Shere Khan in his hunt for such bodies since both the buffalo and other cattle have already been preyed upon by other forms of oppression, such as domestication. 40 Tabaqui’s trajectory into the garbage heaps then gestures toward the only permissible spaces for these animals under their current government and ultimately underscores the perversion of such spaces deemed as innocent 40 Intriguingly, Shere Khan’s simultaneous hunt for Mowgli also repositions humans as akin to their livestock over which they reign, perhaps signaling the ways in which humans also neatly fit under the label of domesticated animal, as noted by Mary Ann Raghanti’s interesting article “Domesticated Species: It Takes One to Know One.” 128 and natural in their inevitability. While the wolves and Mowgli may assert it is unethical to prey upon such creatures, Tabaqui’s consumption gestures toward other systems of oppression and predation that the masters of the jungle refuse to acknowledge and yet continue to perform throughout the text. Their centralization in the narrative demonstrates how these bodies are forced to comply with systems of power they cannot hope to disrupt and are thus always trapped and subsumed in a narrative of power that is never their own. Therefore, Tabaqui does not merely centralize these characters to barter his own position (as Mowgli and the wolves do). Instead, his diet simultaneously functions to gesture toward the vulnerable spaces in which these species continuously find themselves and revamp these vulnerable sites into spaces of resurrection and reimagination—perhaps into a rereading of how their inanimate and abject status can be mobilized to expand our notion of the animate and agentic subject. If the postmortem bodies and animacies matter in the anatomo-politics of The Jungle Books tales, then the subjects of these tales and of this polis have just become exponentially innumerable and inclusive—not just conceiving the polis as the bios over which we normally focus but established by its zoe and the abject life in more than just an exclusionary sense. Tabaqui’s consumption and sites of agency serve to drastically expand the number of “people” within this polis, not simply by blurring the perimeters of the jungle and the village, but by making this population immeasurable, and what’s more, inapplicable, because it completely unravels the definition regarding what constitutes a living or “human” subject. The significance of focusing on innumerability or the unknowability of political subjects is outlined by Jean- Jacques Delfour “Power of life and Power of Death,” in which he explains, To say that a multitude is innumerable is not simply to make the exercise of power depend on a technical [or numeric] knowledge that is not so difficult to obtain, but, above all, to imply the unknowable character of human subjects. Thus [in a religious reading] Solomon is saying that he cannot yield power if he does not know who the subjects of 129 that power are. It is identity, both historical – of acts and deeds - and psychical, internal, that is beyond grasp. (5) As a result, the pathetic, vulnerable, and post-mortem bovine bodies do not simply offer their existence to sacrifice but upset our notions of subjectivity, sovereignty, and power. Instead, the acts and deeds that inhabit these deathly sites disrupt how we organize and govern political life. In this reading, identity begins to dissolve to the extent that we no longer know what bodies exist and impact our cultural and political structures, let alone understand the creatures over whom we are governing or are interpreting in our literature. Ultimately, I argue The Jungle Books can be read as a gateway to reimagining hierarchical conventions, not simply for inanimate bodies, but for more-than-human animals’ livelihoods. With special attention on Tabaqui, these characters are not simply demonic, but gesture toward the need to develop new vernacular to explain their position in our zoocentric and posthumanist universe. As a result, one potentially applicable term through which we can consider their intractability or hybridity would be not to think of them as rabid, or even demonic or “feral” animals, but perhaps an amalgamation of these terms—as beings who enact their ferality. Intriguingly, ferality itself can be thought of as a demonic term in that scholars cannot agree on a concrete definition of what ferality maintains.41 According to Abraham Gibson’s Feral Animals in The American South, ferality deviates from the more ubiquitous term of feral. 41 In Feral Animals in the American South, Abraham Gibson’s writes, “According to this definition, feralization begins in that moment when two previously engaged actors start to drift apart and the bonds between them start to disappear. Some researchers have described the feralization process as ‘domestication in reverse,’ but that is not entirely accurate. After all, ferality is really more of a post- domestication state. Others think we ought to reserve the feral designation for animals who live and reproduce completely independent of humans, and thereby distinguish true feral animals from commensal ‘pariahs’ who live in human-built environments and who subsist on human scraps. Some complain that the feral label fails to convey the profound behavioral changes that attend feralization, and therefore use the ‘wild’ adjective when describing once-domesticated populations. Still others express concern that, unlike ‘wild’ which has ennobling connotations, ‘feral’ has negative connotations, relegating feral animals to the ‘low status of ecological pests.’” (3) 130 Instead, ferality does not simply refer to animals’ post-domestication, although it intersects with a post-domesticated state, and thus may even metonymically signal the tense postcolonial environment burgeoning between England and India at the time, but more importantly signals complex zones of integration—an interstitial and intricate space that is neither completely independent from civilization, nor entirely welcomed by it. As a result, ferality is a trans-species state of being, and thus fits in neatly with our ever-shifting network of actors. What’s more, it is an illustration of the new vocabulary that arises when considering animals’ demonic alterity, or what happens when we examine how animals attain and propose agency and distinction outside and interdependent to our own livelihoods or anthropocentric constructs. More important to remember in the tales is that ferality cannot expose itself on its own; it cannot commence completely independent of human civilization. Instead, it commences at a moment in which two previously engaged actors begin to drift apart, or the bonds that tie them together begin to dissolve. In this reading, the bonds in the midst of dissolution tie other-than-human animals to metonym, vulnerability, invisibility, and marginality. Lastly, ferality always signals a kind of death, and so appropriately settles within these spaces of resurrection. After all, the etymology of ferality intriguingly stems from the Latin adjective feralis, which means funereal—of or relating to the dead—and thus becomes an applicable term through which we can refer to creatures who shirk their own deadly and metonymic representations, and instead signal the potential for something more. Therefore, this section has striven to reveal how demonic animals and their ferality cooperate and function to upset ontological order and escape their bounded metonymic functions. Reading these animals against the grain, or as always already surpassing the parameters that censor and govern over them, reveals the epistemological promises they harbor. 131 Their centralization reallocates agency and potentiality into the perimeters of these narratives. Such readings invite us to remap how we read these animals’ actions, agencies, and animacies in the intersection of these liminal spaces and lenses, not simply considering how animals were deployed and imagined in a Victorian context, but how they contributed, and more importantly, continue to contribute to our geographical and ontological identity. After all, the tales do not end within the first few pages of The Jungle Books, but instead illustrate a constantly shifting interdependent network of actors, which eventually asks readers what it would mean to accept the dissolution of our dichotomous and unstable constructs, and to let in the jungle. Letting in the Jungle Before considering how the novel interprets “letting in the jungle” in a posthumanist sense, we must remember “letting in the jungle” is a motif common to adventure fiction. True to the genre, The Jungle Books follows a variety of didactic traditions that conflates civilization and wilderness by depicting nature as a blank canvas awaiting meaning, thereby inviting and manifesting the jungle in such a way as to appear familiar and accessible to domestic readers. Mowgli’s occupation in the jungle brings exotic lands to English readers, and as is the case with the wolves’ metonymic function, makes English readers’ voyeurism and encroachment of this foreign environment more palatable. Moreover, since adventure fiction acted as a coping mechanism in its anti-industrial theme for Victorians, Mowgli represents a boy who can escape capitalism or a caste system into which he would have inevitably been born if he abided and resided within a human-oriented landscape. 42 Instead of wasting away in a workhouse, as any 42 Companionship with nonhuman animals is often meant to deploy this fantasy, and still populates our imaginary in our current narratives. For example, the 2019 film Jumanji: The Next Level romanticizes animal bodies in this fashion, as the character of Milo played by Danny Glover desires to remain a Pegasus and stay behind in the game while his human companions return to their human lives. While this Pegasus may then act as an ecocentric symbol of environmental reservation, as he stays to protect 132 orphan would in the heart of London, Mowgli can fuel a conventional form of masculinity signaled by supposedly harmless adventure, mischief, and wildness. In this sense, The Jungle Books operate in conjunction with fantasies of “rewilding” or returning to some kind of “primordial,” pre-capitalist, or original state, especially if we refer to the context in which George Monbiot discusses such fantasies in Feral, where he nostalgically professes, Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in the greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone (167). While this nostalgia runs adjacent to the Victorian obsession of finding, and specifically here, rewriting and depicting “feral” children in adventure fiction, 43 what is most notable is how it reorients these tales away from any ecocentric reading and back into anthropocentric fantasies, where nature is always deployed as an ideological background or blank canvas awaiting meaning Jumanji, Milo’s expressed exhaustion with his human labor role places animal bodies as somehow exempt from such labor (i.e. conservatism is then neither laborious nor a human responsibility), thereby ignoring the many ways in which animals assist in building and maintaining our notions of civilization. Not to mention, Milo’s desire to live forever, as his human body is sickly, shirks the violence of immortality and stasis that always seems to be reserved for more-than-human animals, as their bodies are always rendered into a perpetually ideal fantasy of anthropocentric making, often defined by an ironic lack of some characteristic or duty. 43 Sujit Suvasundarum’s “Imperial Transgressions” reveals an acute fascination with the children whom soldiers found residing in the jungle with wolves toward the end of the century, such as Amala and Kamala (the former did not survive). What became so fascinating about these children, especially for Victorian scientists, was not simply how they avoided capitalist indoctrination, but how they questioned the human’s place in nature entirely, and thereby illustrated the shifting fallacies of humanity. While their quadrupedalism and kinship with nonhuman animals was in direct contrast with the demeanor of English urban citizens and an imperial construction of humanity, their humanness was measured by oddly mutable markers, such as their eating habits, hygiene, language, sociability, and dress. Often denigrated as “missing links” because they did not strictly abide by Eurocentric ideals, all of these children (not recorded here) learned to use eating utensils, to dress (although most preferred to remain naked), learn words (although many preferred the communication to which they were accustomed before they were forced to endure a civilizing mission), and socialize (although all preferred the company of each other and of their nonhuman kin) to be considered as a civilized human. 133 making by the humans who occupy it. 44 However, this section aims to consider how “letting in the jungle” can also be a posthumanist idea, where the results of this conflation can actually grant autonomy back into formerly oppressed environments. Therefore, the rest of this chapter continues to read The Jungle Books from an eco- and zoocritical perspective by considering its didacticism as a critique rather than a neutral display. Similar to how the tales’ commencement ostensibly functions to support empire before it quickly signals its unsustainability, the narrative’s culmination follows the same format. As a result, the tales ask us to explore what it would mean to let in the jungle, question the binaries between civilization and wilderness and the appropriate occupants of these spaces, and thus encourage us to read these denizens from a space of cooperation and coexistence. Through this exploration, I argue The Jungle Books consistently reallocates agency back into the tale’s peripheries, only centering Mowgli to ground its criticism of empire and anthropocentric fantasy, and most intriguingly, propose possibilities for future interspecies entanglements. Mowgli’s trajectory out of the jungle and into his village conventionally mirrors a supposed physical and cultural evolution into a civilized space and thus conventionally posits him as a stand-in or representative for the ideal subaltern or feral child. While these interpretations are undeniably valid, such a reading can only operate within the limits that 44 Such readings remain ingrained in current adaptations of The Jungle Books, such as the most recent 2016 production by Disney. Rather than concentrating on an environmental lens, such narratives often revolve around this childhood fantasy of rewilding. As I have previously suggested, these tales may strictly intend to revolve around human fantasies, as they are supported by real historical events of British soldiers discovering “feral” children, and further motioning toward this fantasy of rewilding human nature rather than the species who suffer from the greatest ecological impact. I suspect such a gesture is signposted by the fact that the character of Mowgli is the only non-CGI character in the film. Played by Neel Sethi, the human experience appears to be the only “authentic” experience, underscoring his protagonism and fueling this fantasy of a wild child free from capitalist or class indoctrination. Meanwhile, all the other characters’ CGI productions are signaled by men in suits, underscoring the ways in which these nonhuman bodies are always produced in the imaginary, and rendered as nothing more than props to fuel these fantasies. 134 fracture and hierarchize wilderness and civilization, and thus fracture the animal from the human. From an imperial perspective, however, what is so intriguing about Mowgli journey from wilderness to civilization is that the tales do not romanticize nor even applaud this trajectory. Rather, Mowgli’s exit from the jungle is marked by tears, which does not simply showcase a natural affinity for his family and a fear of leaving them, but more importantly, marks a loss of speech and thus a lack, not in the animal body, but in the enlightened human. In other words, Mowgli’s “evolution” is not an obtainment of some pinnacle of human speech or communion but a source of loss that physically inscribes his body with the same “lack” generally reserved for nonhuman bodies by taking away his speech or the efficacy of his speech with his companion species. This lack of speech then has a number of consequences, the first of which is signposted by Christie Harner in “Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books,” in which she takes a posthumanist reading to how language is deployed in the tales. While it is often read as an imperial tool to gain power and control, she argues it exceeds the anthropocentric distinction between reaction and response and becomes a tool for alliance, especially in the learning of the master word. For her, these speech acts remain animalistic and undercut control, containment, isolation, or distinction between species, denying “speakers the authority to contain or govern either the effects of their own words or those of others” (Harner 191). Rather, it becomes a cross- species tool, bringing together multi-species encounters as a whole and adding the potential to build new diverse communities. As a result, she claims, “just as the project of imperialism is inherently that of remapping land ownership and cultural authority, cross-species interactions provide new possibilities of world-making” (202). In this sense, Mowgli’s loss of speech simultaneously signals a loss of world and an inhibition to the possibilities The Jungle Books could have entertained. His loss of language does not serve to silence him so much as it gestures 135 toward his evolution’s or human/animal binary’s incompatibility with interspecies spaces and concretizes the imperial mindset that all too often penetrates ecological environments. The second impact of this lack is perhaps even more interesting in that it reorients the human, rather than the more-than-human animal, as the figure who is defined by stasis, lack, and loss of language. In other words, it is important to remember that when in communion with his companion species, Mowgli and all the jungle inhabitants are mutable, constantly transforming and adapting to signal their hybridity and interdependence. However, Mowgli’s evolution appears to restrict him, limit the possibilities available for what it means to be human, and physically restrain him in an unimaginative and evidently independent (read: isolated) space. He must leave his family and friends and enter a hostile and restrictive space that molds species into an unfruitful Eurocentric replica. Finally, it is significant that it is not Mowgli’s choice to leave. Instead, Bagheera encourages and persuades Mowgli to leave the jungle shortly after Bagheera ignores Mowgli’s summons. Bagheera’s boundary then marks one of the most significant lessons of companion species—in these tales, the question is never whether the animal can speak, nor whether they can understand, but once again, whether they are ever obligated to respond. Bagheera refusal to respond to Mowgli’s fallacious authority erases the potency of language in these Cartesian spaces and allows Bagheera to remap and redistribute the jungle’s ownership and authority to those who can certainly choose to respond but may not obey. In this sense, the tales stay faithful to questioning where the human resides within this ecological network. Is the human the most static and isolated figure whose disappearance from the jungle then “flips the script” to marginalize human presence? Is the human the savior of the jungle for whom Bagheera may have hoped in time? Or is the human no more than the figure who endangers and pollutes the 136 jungle, bringing fire, death, and social Darwinism to this ecological network, and who must ultimately be expelled? The tales continue to push a more critical and subversive perspective of human encroachment and perhaps have never applauded Mowgli’s presence in these spaces. After all, Mowgli’s role in the jungle is predicated on killing and skinning Shere Khan with the help of his wolf brothers and the stampeding buffalo, anthropomorphizing and inscribing the jungle into a tale of class and race (similar to The Lion King), and thus dictating the only tale of interest to be one of anthropocentric making. Moreover, the red flower Mowgli creates kills many of his pack, for when he asks his brother whether all are well in the jungle, his brother responds, “All except the wolves that were burned with the Red Flower” (JB 62). Finally, when Bagheera responds to Mowgli’s call—“Indeed, yes: I hear, Man-cub,” he infamously exclaims, “‘Who is so strong as Mowgli? Who so wise?’ There was a curious drawl in the voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were making fun of him, for the Jungle is full of words that sound like one thing, but mean another” (354). Despite Mowgli’s dismissing this suspicion, this suspicion turns out to be correct, as Bagheera does indeed eject the character he supposed would save the jungle. It is not simply that Bagheera ignores Mowgli, but that shortly after this encounter (or lack thereof), the wolves come to Mowgli to lead them after Akela’s death, only to be denied by Bagheera. In this sense, Bagheera ensures Mowgli is not permitted to lead and redistributes power to the wolves when he says, “Nay . . . Ye fought for freedom, and it is yours. Eat it, O Wolves” (76). Finally, Bagheera is the one who kills the buck that paid for Mowgli so he may leave the jungle, bidding him farewell rather persuasively. In this sense, the tales aim to critique and undermine human centrality, along with its savior-complex, exceptionalism, and ego, and instead appears to tactfully place focus back on the jungle’s indigenous inhabitants— 137 namely on Bagheera, Hathi, and Kaa. Therefore, exploring Mowgli’s encounters with these former figures raises questions about sovereignty in interspecies networks, and thus deserves our attention about who the tales truly consider to be masters of the jungle. Despite Mowgli’s claims to be master of the jungle, his dominion appears to be consistently challenged, if not considered more as a collaboration (as Bagheera claims “we” to be masters of the jungle), thereby extending sovereignty and a kind of democracy to the various indigenous jungle inhabitants and questioning the human’s role in sustaining (or more acutely, endangering) this environment. Furthermore, it is important to note Mowgli does not bring language to the jungle, but must learn the language of each community, with Baloo, Bagheera, and Hathi as his delegators, since Kipling writes, Then he [Baloo] turned aside to tell Bagheera how he had begged the Master Words from Hathi the Wild Elephant, who knows all about these things, and how Hathi had taken Mowgli down to a pool to get the Snake Word from a water-snake, because Baloo could not pronounce it, and how Mowgli was now reasonably safe against all accidents in the jungle, because neither snake, bird, nor beast would hurt him. (JB 33) While Mowgli appears to be more exceptional than Baloo here, Hathi originally holds the master word, and is the one from whom Baloo and Bagheera must gain permission for Mowgli to stay. Moreover, it is not simply that Hathi holds the master word, but that his sovereignty is signaled through his revolutionary actions, as he takes back land for the jungle with the help of his three sons after he escapes enslavement. Carrying a scar (colonial wound) similar to Shere Khan, Hathi breaks free from the human village that enslaved him and flees to the jungle to heal. Once fully healed, Hathi returns to the “fields of those hunters” with his three sons: “What came to those fields at the next reaping, Hathi?” “They were reaped by me and by my three sons,” said Hathi. “And to the plowing that follows the reaping?” said Mowgli. “There was no plowing,” said Hathi . . . “As much good ground as I can walk over in two nights from the east to the west, and from the north to the south as much as I can walk over in three nights, the Jungle took.” (236-37) 138 While Hathi is certainly enveloped in the same circular narrative that commences the Mowgli tales and that is often embedded in animal bestiaries,45 I want to underscore how it decentralizes human engagement, and more importantly, dismisses any savior complex the tales may have initially proffered. Antithetical to the active aid humans may ensue to assist in rewilding, or the harmful side effects such efforts may incur (such as the pollution of tourism), Hathi’s successful reclamation of land demands the complete absence of humans. This is not to say the tales actively discredit human efforts nor entirely villainize conservation practices. However, it does urge readers to question the agenda, and more potently, the ancillary consequences of conservational exercises and human encroachment. More explicitly, by ensuring the jungle needs Hathi, and not Mowgli (as Bagheera may have previously suggested), the tales challenge the depiction of nature as a blank and helpless landscape awaiting and in need of human development and cultivation. Significantly, it is only Mowgli who considers the plowing, but here Hathi ensures human hands will not cultivate this space, and as a result, this space is not transformed into a makeshift garden. In this sense, Hathi’s reaping is juxtaposed to imperial and human cultivation and domestication since his method reintroduces wild and indigestible nature back into the five villages. Thus, Kipling writes, “and in those villages, and in their lands, the grazing-ground and the soft crop-grounds, there is not one man to-day who takes his food from the ground” (JB 237). In this respect, the jungle is depicted not as a resource for human development and imaginary construction but as an agentic figure that demands deference, authority, and re-instantiation. In this respect, the tales place these more-than-human characters in direct opposition to the metonymic renderings so often reserved for such creatures and propose a potent criticism of 45 Given it depicts revenge as a driving force and thus appears incapable of reimagining agency in any other terms but of conventional and dichotomous sovereign power and dominion. 139 our anti-industrial desires and imperial imagination. Focusing on these animals’ display of sovereignty (although such a display is certainly not any reimagination of how we consider sovereignty, agency, and resistance), still signposts the adverse consequences these fantasies have on indigenous bodies, especially with its focus on disparaging animal captivity and its emphasis on the colonial and physical wounds incurred by beings under imperial and humanist government. More importantly, these tales seriously entertain the notion that other-than-human animals can indeed assert their right to life and land possession, and position Hathi as an activist who establishes a sovereign community, as can be defined by Donaldson’s and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis. According to these scholars, there are four laws that establish a sovereign community, and The Jungle Books subscribe to all of them. The first outlaws hunting or intentionally committing violent acts. Therefore, it is important to note that Hathi does not kill anyone, thereby providing a striking distinction to Mowgli’s and Shere Khan’s revenge plot and perhaps even discrediting the conventional sovereign figures of the novel. Instead, Hathi’s actions may demonstrate themselves as efforts in positive intervention, thereby subscribing to the second and fourth law in which one must not participate in habitat loss and must aid in correcting such loss. Not coincidently, Hathi takes direct measures to reclaim the jungle’s habitat loss, even though this reclamation is alarmingly contentious. It is important to recognize that even though Hathi can be read as establishing a zoopolis, the imperial narrative to which he abides is one that uncomfortably shirks responsibility and culpability away from empire and tosses it onto the indigenous and colonial population. Indeed, Hathi reaps land away from human Indians rather than colonial spaces or outposts. In this sense, Hathi’s actions seem to uncomfortably align with forms of environmental fascism, overlooking the misdistribution of detrimental impacts primarily caused by imperial countries. Instead, he punishes less harmful and more cooperative 140 spaces of human and nonhuman entanglement, thus signaling the limits of the tale’s imperial attempt at imagining a posthumanist jungle. Finally, while still keeping a degree of suspicion regarding this environmental fascism in mind, if we consider such reaping, human ejection, and reclamation in mind, Hathi’s action, and even more so, Bagheera’s assertion that Mowgli must leave the jungle, may subscribe to the third law, which actively fights the effects of human- constructed spillover. As a result, this conventionally imperial narrative signals intriguing notions of independence, sovereignty, imperial and humanist ejection, albeit in a way that may problematically stress complete segregation and exclusion. At the same time that Bagheera persuasively encourages Mowgli to leave the jungle, Mowgli’s reason for leaving may mitigate some of the more uncomfortable aspects of this segregation and instead refocus the novel’s criticism on heteronormative and dichotomous relationships. It may not solely be that Mowgli must leave the jungle because he is human, but because the way he exercises his humanity upholds the human/animal binary and is thus incompatible with the ecological entanglements that would constitute a healthy and sustainable zoopolis. Therefore, the reasons for Mowgli’s evacuation are in utter alignment with Alice’s exit from Wonderland, and Lyndall’s and Waldo’s death; the humanist constructions, dichotomous fracture of human and animal ontology, and subscription to Eurocentric ideals is consistently critiqued and approached as unsustainable and inflexible restrictions that must ultimately end with the death or marginalization of the heteronormative human. Even the wolves whose heteronormativity was signaled at the commencement of the novel have dwindled to an unsustainable number, and it is Akela who tells Mowgli in his dying breath that it is “Mowgli [who] will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy people. Go to Man” (347). Therefore, Akela signposts Mowgli’s heteronormativity as a characteristic that will inevitably steer him toward civilization. 141 This redirection then positions civilization, rather than the jungle, as a more appropriate space for Mowgli’s characteristics, perhaps including the hyper-masculine fantasies that fuel adventure fiction in the first place. At the same time, this projection may also perpetuate the jungle as a fantasy and an escape—a space in which Mowgli could potentially have the opportunity to flex his sexuality, be asexual, or become a hybrid more conducive to this non-normative environment, and that evidently cannot be practiced in civilization. Thus, while the jungle is enveloped in these fanciful constructions, such non-normativity might also liberate the jungle from more domestic and heteronormative concepts that limit its future. As a result, Mowgli’s relationship with Kaa becomes even more significant than we might originally suspect, especially given that it is Kaa who sits on Akela’s throne at the end of the tales. Such a position designates the jungle and this sovereign community as one that has the potential to thrive in non- normativity and gestures towards a posthumanist future that desires the deconstructions of conventional human-animal ontology. To circumvent reasserting human ontology onto this jungle, it is important to not read Kaa in conventional terms of denigrating and derogatory asexuality and deception—conventions that stem from harmful animal bestiaries and Judeo-Christian constructs. Rather than considering Kaa’s presence on the throne as a sort of death-drive, a representation of the jungle’s inevitable retreat and extinction, or a signal that the jungle is a source of lack, I want to read Kaa as a figure who always surpasses the limits of our imaginary constructions. As a result, “the heavy, cold- blooded Kaa coiled around Akela’s empty seat” (JB 370), motions toward the kind of non- normativity the jungle requires to rid itself of imperial governance, surveillance, and intervention. Kaa’s presence possibly indicates the kind of human-animal entanglement that 142 Michael Lundblad astutely extracts from Mowgli’s and Kaa’s relationship in the following scene, when Kipling writes, That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa’s great coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli’s broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a living arm-chair. “Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect, said Mowgli . . . Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back. “The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay,” he said judgematically. “The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful to see—like the mottling in the mouth of a lily. (JB 275) The homoeroticism of the scene is thinly veiled, as Lundblad notes Mowgli’s mesmerized admiration of Kaa’s body, comparing it to a plant’s sexual orifice and potentially reminding readers of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic network illustrated by the mutualism of an orchid and a wasp.46 Therefore, rather than a death-drive or extinction, what Kaa represents in this scene, along with the ultimate scene of the novel, is a rhizomatic companionship and posthumanist future that is in direct opposition to the hierarchal patriarchy proposed by the heteronormative wolves’ dominion. This companionship then invites Mowgli to deploy his 46 In Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus : A Critical Introduction and Guide, Brent Adkins provides a clear explanation of their analysis of the mutualism between a wasp and an orchid. He writes, “There are species of orchid that look sufficiently like female wasps to male wasps such that the latter attempt to mate with the orchid. The result is that under the guise of its own reproduction the wasp ends up pollinating other orchids. To be sure, the most obvious way to describe this interaction between orchid and wasp is that the orchid through natural selection sufficiently imitates the wasp, so that the orchid’s genetic material is more widely dispersed. Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, that this is not the only way to look at the interaction. In order to see the orchid and the wasp as a rhizome, we need to abandon the concepts of mimicry and imitation. Mimicry and imitation suppose that the orchid is representing or signifying something, in this case a female wasp. Rhizomes, however, do not function according to representation. Nothing in a rhizome represents something else. There are only connections. Sometimes these connections are transformative, that is, create a line of flight. In the case of the orchid and the wasp the connections have been transformative over the course of millennia in a parallel evolution. The orchid’s line of flight is a becoming-wasp, and the wasp’s line of flight is a becoming-orchid. The becoming, though, does not happen on the level of extensive, discrete properties. It happens on the level of continuous intensities that circulate between the orchid and the wasp.” (28) In this respect, we may read this coupling not as Mowgli imitating a snake, or vice versa, but as a connection that establishes something new, and does not subscribe to preordained categories or identities. In fact, I think there is plenty of evidence to read against imitation in The Jungle Books, but these readings have not found the room to present themselves in this chapter. 143 precarity and hybridity in a manner that evokes admiration, respect, equality, and ethical partnership, rather than in any kind of appropriative manner that we have witnessed earlier in the novel. Mowgli’s invitation to become-with Kaa certainly disrupts the heteronormative and hypermasculine constructs we have seen throughout the tales. Despite its subversive intention, This becoming is made more palatable to a Victorian audience, perhaps in an attempt to normalize and conventionalize their relationship, by turning Kaa into a creature (or object) of comfort, such as an armchair. However, if we return to Chen’s notion of animacy, Kaa’s transformation is not solely objectifying or “normalizing”, but more intriguingly, may serve to continue queering this narrative. After all, Chen’s consideration of animacies invites us to question, challenge, and reimagine the subjects from whom we garner affection, comfort, and safety. Thus, Chen claims, “a cat or a chair or a friend or a plant or a stranger or [a] partner” all fall on the same ontological plane (202), which means regardless of whether we read Kaa as a friend, a lily, a partner, or a chair, Mowgli’s and Kaa’s ontological equivalency is not impacted. Rather, they each enter a consensual partnership that has the potential to allow Mowgli to remain in the jungle. Thus, Kaa asks, “‘Thy trail ends here, then, Manling?’ said Kaa, as Mowgli threw himself down, his face in his hands. “‘Cry thy cry. We be of one blood, thou and I—man and snake together’” (JB 370). Unlike the other characters, Kaa is the only one whose words cannot be misunderstood—he is not pushing Mowgli out of the jungle. It is posed as a direct question; a question that refers to their former coupling and acknowledges their equality, companionship, and understanding of one another. Here, Kaa serves as a reminder to Mowgli that there are other forms of pleasure, sensuality, joy, and hybridity that Mowgli can experience outside of heteronormative relationships and outside of civilization, and thus does not necessarily need to 144 fracture his humanity from his animal becoming. In fact, the novel emphasizes how Mowgli does not desire heteronormative relationships, since the former excerpt acknowledges that he would not rather couple with his name-bearer (read: those akin to him). As a result of this coupling and the final scene, I then insist the novel’s culmination is not meant to represent the jungle as a site posed for extinction, but as a fruitful lacuna that harbors promising forms of agency, kinship, and becoming, as Kaa sits coiled on the throne. Of course, too suggestive for a Victorian audience, Mowgli cannot take this route as such a coupling would too blatantly subvert the Judeo-Christian constructs with which this narrative started, thereby adding a sinister layer to the coupling of man and snake. However, this blatant homoeroticism (a relationship so illicit that even the most recent adaptation of the novel has a female, Scarlett Johansen, play the voice of Kaa to veil its undertones), between Kaa’s and Mowgli’s relationship holds a very significant meaning; one that suggests there is another possible future awaiting companion species that is not solely reserved for death-drives. Therefore, I propose this ending as an avenue through which we might begin to reexamine our relationships with nonhuman animals. Temporarily freed from the shackles and humanist constructs of our relationship with more-than-human creatures, these beings become autonomous and interdependent agents, with the ability to persuade, impact, consent, and resist our projections, ideologies, and ontological order. For Mowgli to stay in the jungle and unite the dichotomy between his identities, he must agree to a consensual relationship and detach himself from an imperial and patriarchal paradigm. He must recognize Kaa as his equal. Therefore, in the scene of their coupling, Mowgli does not consider himself master. Instead, he wrestles with Kaa, lifting the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was thickest . . . and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement . . . They would rock to and fro, head to head, each 145 waiting for a chance, till the beautiful, statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and- yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again” (JB 276). In this paradigm, agency is redirected back to the nonhuman, as it is Kaa who reads Mowgli’s body, understanding when their wrestling would “supple his limbs as nothing else could” and when to relax his hold (276). Kipling continues to depict these two as “They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water. ‘It is very good,’ said Mowgli at last, sleepily. Now, in the Man- pack . . . It is better in the Jungle’” (277). Mowgli does not disguise his satisfaction. Compared to the novel’s commencement and to the heteronormativity perpetuated throughout the tales, here it is civilization, rather than the supposed nonhuman space, that is defined by lack—that appears not-quite-whole or satisfactory. Mowgli and Kaa, despite their distinction in species, establish a relationship of consent and equality, and it is precisely because of this relationship that Kaa is the only one to motion to Mowgli that if he so chose, he may stay. The lesson these tales propose is vastly antithetical to the didacticism with which they begin and has multiple implications regarding the dynamics of successful cultural kinship and species interdependence. Mowgli’s evacuation does not signal the pinnacle of his evolution as much as it gestures toward his failure to unapologetically become-with his companion species, to recognize pleasure outside of the human/nonhuman binary, to traverse a non-dichotomous livelihood, and to fruitfully communicate with the kin with whom he was raised. Moreover, this failure suggests an ontological hierarchy such as one established at the outset is held culpable for the jungle’s lack of sustainability, as it is this hierarchical relationship (one that does not allow even Bagheera to look Mowgli in the eye) that solidifies Mowgli’s exit. Therefore, Bagheera’s mediation of our species stratification serves as a warning,47 and ensures the novel’s last speech 47 Moreover, it can be argued that Bagheera does not meet Mowgli’s gaze less so because he is “master” of the jungle, as much as it an effort to resist what Donna Haraway terms as “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” in the novel, or the gaze taxidermic animals were forced to hold in their specularization. 146 act is made by the nonhuman, reasserting that the jungle’s inhabitants are the ones most knowledgeable for their own governance. This ending then stresses, contrary to conventional readings, that Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books is in every aspect about the animal. The tales illustrate the very impossibility of stagnancy and opposition within species and the spaces they occupy by centralizing more-than- human characters and their ever-shifting networks. Additionally, the tales depict multiple transgressions, from domestic and wild to natural and cultural, thus displaying the failures and inadequacies of language and human superiority, and instead signal a necessary dissolution of our dichotomous sociopolitical constructs. As a result, the relationships these tales depict throughout emphasize the fragility of our cultural constructions and ontological epistemologies and instead trace an ever vacillating and metamorphic network within all species that demands an ethical response; a response that recovers the animal’s voice—their own stolen words—to demonstrate the harm we have produced as well as the potential rebirth we can accept. Keeping Bagheera’s and Kaa’s speech in mind, we are forewarned that it is only through an equal and ethical relationship that we can coexist with our companion species as well as release the human from its heteronormative and constraining perceptions. Letting in the jungle is perhaps an easier task than we perceive it to be, but only if we acknowledge there never was a natural division nor natural order in place. Thus, The Jungle Books presents a narrative that stresses a new relationship with our companion species; one that does not find Kaa a threatening symbol of centrality but a necessary one, one that must strive to consider the urgency and ethics of letting in the jungle, and one that grants considerate attention to what authors might mean when they make animals speak or allow them to refuse our encounter. 147 4. The Ferality of Wolves, Workers, and Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the personal belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey. In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation. When we got home we were talking of the old time—which we could all look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. The excerpt above is extracted from a note at the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, after the Crew of Light, composed of Jonathan Harker, Arthur Godalming, John Seward, Van Helsing, and the now-deceased Quincey Morris, murdered Dracula and returned to Romania. After such a climatic and adventurous ending, this addendum appears strikingly placid, and its stoicism indubitably signals a postcolonial silencing and erasure of marginalized bodies that is common to imperial encroachment. 48 While too many scholars to name have read Dracula through a postcolonial lens, such as those mentioned in the footnote, and most notably, Stephen Arata’s seminal work “The Occidental Tourist,” this chapter interprets Dracula through a zoocritical and ecocritical lens. By condensing the novel’s complexity to focus on and compare Dracula’s commencement and culmination, I trace the narrative’s trajectory as an exposé of the Crew of 48 In “Can the Vampire Speak?: Dracula as Discourse on Cultural Extinction,” Attila Viragh argues Dracula’s lack of centrality in the Crew of Light’s documents, as well as the apparent ease in which he has been forgotten, ultimately leads to Dracula’s own story becoming lost and finally extinguished. The resulting monologue then serves as an echo chamber that underscores the success and exceptionalism of white, industrial, mostly male, western humans, while marginalizing and effacing colonial bodies. Furthermore, Jamil Khader argues in “Un/speakability and Radical Otherness” that the inability of the Crew of Light to believe the events they experienced verifies and represents traumatic experiences as unspeakable at the individual level, but possible to recover at the collective level, but perhaps only for privileged bodies. Although the details of the trauma have been forgotten and appear quite incredulous to any witness due to a lack of concrete evidence, the survivors of these events can look back without despair given the perpetuation of Victorian domesticity. 148 Light’s environmental racism and ecological imperialism, 49 which in this context are coinciding ideologies that aim to place native, feminine, and earthly bodies on a less agentic (or not-quite- human) plane so as to conquer and consume these bodies in the making of the Enlightened human. As a result, I gather support for how postcolonial, ecocritical, and zoocritical studies are all focused on resurrecting marginalized bodies from beneath a colonial lens and explore how these disciplines can cooperate to underscore and, at times, dismantle systems of oppression for non- white, non-human, and non-male bodies. After all, it is not only that “‘the interconnection between cultural studies, identity politics, and critical animal studies assists in articulating how processes of normalization dehumanize and exterminate entities and beings’” (Heholt and Edmundson 8),50 but that these interconnections can also assist in centering and resurrecting such beings to find other ways of existing that do not simply replicate normative humanization. Thus, this chapter does not only illustrate how the novel pivots off environmental racism and enlightenment legacies but explores critical moments where the novel appears to show some sort of nascent awareness regarding these legacies’ devastating impact, and more excitingly, offers moments of resistance for marginalized bodies. Ultimately, this chapter suggests the novel’s epilogue may not be read simply as an example of postcolonial silencing, but given various critical moments sprinkled throughout the text, may serve as an admonition against imperial 49 While environment racism was established by the environmental justice movements, anachronistically occurring during the 1970s and 80s, its presence can easily be recognized in Victorian literature and culture. Such a lens illustrates how environmental injustice and imperial encroachment often occur within a racialized context, with ecological imperialism further fleshing out this connection. This latter term was first introduced by Alfred Crosby to argue that colonial settlers’ success and erasure of endemic peoples was less dependent on physical warfare and violence than it was made possible by the accidental or intentional impact encroachers had on the environment, especially while introducing new plants, animals, and diseases that disrupted the ecology of foreign lands. 50 Ruth Heholt and Melissa Edmundson are here quoting from Amber E. George and J.L. Schatz. 149 practices, environmental racism, unethical or unmindful consumption, and dichotomous ideology. Dracula is a prime and popular example to explore Victorian anxieties regarding what it means to be human as it illustrates the unstable boundary between the human and animal, foreign and domestic, masculine and feminine, bios and zoe, and animate and inanimate, with Dracula often positioned on the more monstrous, or more acutely, more vulnerable side of these binaries. Often the eponymous character is read as occupying a position that is antithetical to the Enlightened human (read: domestic, masculine, animate, bios). As Jeanne Dubino points out in “Mad Dogs and Irishmen,” Dracula serves as “the arch-symbol for many different kinds of Others: the Jew, the foreigner (or ‘foreignness itself’), the ‘primitive’ and ‘atavistic’, the colonized, all manner of disease and infection, the homosexual, the sex fiend, the criminal, and the monster” (199). In short, he is the scapegoat of the Victorian era, giving the nineteenth century the monster that it deserves.51 However, this chapter does not burgeon off readings that portray Dracula as any manner of Other. While most readings position Dracula as diametrically opposed to Harker, this chapter is interested in shifting Dracula’s position as that which is indicative and ideologically in alliance with the philosophies of the Enlightened Human, exemplified in this text by the Crew of Light. Aligning Dracula with Harker does not aim to displace or further marginalize Dracula in a postcolonial light by making him a simple mimesis of colonial occupation. Rather, this alteration in Dracula’s position allows us to perceive the more sinister impacts of humanist constructs, shifting the monstrosity from Dracula to the novel’s imperial exposé. In this respect, Harker (and all that his position symbolizes) is the first 51 As Susanne Scholz notes in “More Than Human: Dracula’s Monstrosity,” it is not only that “every culture gets the monsters it deserves, but every single spectator sees the monster he or she is afraid of” (278). 150 vampiric encroacher the novel introduces. His journey into Romania keenly illustrates how environmental racism aims to oppress others by aligning them with more vulnerable and earthly bodies (such as plants, dirt, and inanimation). Most significantly, the novel’s primary devotion to outlining Harker’s and Dracula’s imperial agenda illustrates a Victorian awareness that these patriarchal and imperial legacies of the Enlightenment are inextricably intertwined with the ecological destruction and diminishing diversity of the novel and the novel’s political climate, granting the statement of “Every trace of all that had been was blotted out,” an even more sinister tone. Situating Dracula’s horror through an ecocritical lens allows us to explore the environmental impact of imperial encroachment, global expansion, and colonialism, while responding to two significant calls in how we understand Victorian Studies. The first of which is to acknowledge how Victorians were not solely concerned with what it meant to be human, but that this very concern is inextricable from environmental concerns. Thus, as Lawrence Buell argues, we must feature canonical and seminal authors’ literary texts as concerned, if not invested in some form, with ecocritical issues—indeed, it is nearly impossible to ignore this investment. As Peter Adkins writes in his review of Dewey W. Halls’ edited volume, Victorian Ecocriticism, Given that the Victorian era was the period that helped to write the blueprint for industrial capitalism, rampant urbanisation and toxic pollution, it is unsurprising that nineteenth century literature is well-positioned to historicise and theorise ecological questions. (328) From the novel’s concern regarding the speed in which both living and dead flesh can enter English borders, to its anxieties about what constitutes living and dead matter and how this binary impacts the ontological space and making of the human, this canonical text posits itself as a prime candidate in revamping how we understand Victorians’ ecocritical climate. Moreover, reimagining Dracula’s 151 and Harker’s position and the novel’s trajectory overall neatly responds to how we must reframe the methods through which we understand Victorians’ ecocriticism. As Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer claim in Ecological Forms, In such a situation, the task of criticism cannot be simply to switch our attention to environmental themes or ecological motifs and carry on otherwise as usual. The challenge is not about content but about form, not about accumulating more information but about reframing the methods by which we understand it (4). Therefore, the form through which Dracula traces this imperial exposé of Enlightenment legacies is precisely what will allow us to revamp our understanding of what bodies matter in the midst of empire and imperial encroachment, and explore how these seemingly oppositional voices aid in exposing, critiquing, and reimagining cohabitation and cooperative existence amidst the Crew of Light’s ecocidal and postcolonial threat. Finally, decentering Dracula and Harker grants space to resurrect other identities from beneath this imperialist and humanist lens and center other matters that matter in this ecocritical intervention. Indeed, readers must ask themselves exactly what identities are blotted out by the end of the novel, as it is these identities that most threaten the novel’s ontological and imperial order. While the Crew of Light, and even Dracula are still highly present in the novel’s culmination, as I will argue, it is the women, wolves, and lower-class laborers that are suspiciously absent by the end, illustrating that it is these identities that surpass the limits of the novel’s humanist and dichotomous constructs. If Heholt and Edmundson are correct when they quote that “‘the uncanny, the disorder, the alien-ness that Gothic appears to express might be better seen precisely as evidence of what the genre is seeking to control’” (4), then we must focus precisely on what the narrative attempts to erase because it is this erasure that marks its expression as so uncontrollable as to remain beyond the limits of what the genre itself can even imagine. By culminating my discussion on the marginal characters that are so policed that they 152 no longer appear even in the margins of the novel’s end, I hope to reveal how such a focus invites a posthumanist turn that may diminish the Eurocentric, humanist, and engendered privilege upon which the novel operates, elevate vulnerability as the very condition that can combat Dracula and Harker’s imperialism and predation, and emphasize the urgency through which our very structure of thought and communication must change. Harker’s Environmental Racism and Imperialism Before we examine the novel’s potentially subversive criticism, we must first examine how the novel operates to establish an imperial perspective at its onset, and to do this, we must look at the novel’s form and framework. It is critical to understand how the novel’s opening memo establishes itself via a racist and imperial lens in its singularly anthropocentric and Eurocentric constructions, which is fallaciously divided from the polyphony of the soon-to-be subsumed nonhuman and nonwestern characters. Furthermore, the opening memo does not only operate through the lens of racism, as it has been often interpreted, but operates within an environmental racism’s perspective as well,52 as we witness upon the immediate onset of English solicitor Jonathan Harker’s journey. Here we discover his writing and observations are steeped in imperial practices that not only marginalize, racialize, and ridicule native (human) inhabitants but signal how such practices also intersect with environmental racism, ecological denigration, and harmful tourist tendencies. Harker writes: Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, 52 I am employing environmental racism to signal how environmental injustice and imperial encroachment often occurs within a racialized context, literally exemplified here in practice and writing. Additionally, while discussions around racism or postcolonial lenses are often contentiously aligned with ecocriticism and environmental rhetoric, given ecocriticism can illustrate a penchant for whitewashing or greenwashing critical issues in colonization and climate change, and postcolonialism can illustrate a tendency to overlook companion species and more vulnerable bodies’ marginalization and oppression, it is imperative to examine their intervention in this novel to fully unpack the novel’s form and criticism, however cautiously. 153 from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule. (Dracula 5) Regarding this segment and the novel’s scheme overall, Stephen Arata writes, “Like late-century Gothic, the travel narrative clearly displays aspects of imperial ideology. Like Gothic, too, the travel narrative concerns itself with boundaries - both with maintaining and with transgressing them” (Arata 626). Therefore, Harker’s travelogue marks his journey east as antithetical to the organized and orderly London atmosphere; trains are late, penetration and heterogeneity become more normalized, and chaos and change become acceptable, even expected. Harker’s imperial angst then fuels Dracula’s threat as it signals Romania’s political turmoil and upheaval prior to the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Harker’s harmful tourist tendencies are marked by his distance from his surrounding environment as he witnesses a glimpse of the geography, a glimpse that is made more robust by his imperial assumptions, biases, and speculations. In this sense, imperialist and tourist tendencies are often intertwined, each producing a small facet of a Victorian imaginary regarding foreign, diverse, and distinct cultures and environments. For instance, we might assume Harker is stimulating Romania’s economy by dining in local restaurants and visiting this country, but even if this is true and not funded by Dracula or another solicitor, what becomes less disputable is how Harker now subsumes Romania into a literary postcolonial landscape, even if Romania is exempt politically. By writing of his travels for an English audience and through an English perspective, Harker brings Romania within the empire’s reach and control. This reach is then further articulated in Harker’s concentration on the Danube which connects the East and West, thus motioning toward a potential imperial threat, and the coinciding opportunities these threats have on ecological destruction, disregard for a 154 country’s ecosystems and resources’ sustainability, and foreign conflict (as exemplified in Harker’s and Dracula’s confrontation and opposition). Therefore, as Laura Wright argues in Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, examining “the ways that authors of fiction represent postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues, positions the discourse about both postcolonialism and environmentalism within the realm of the imaginary” (1). As a result, Harker’s assumptions come to the forefront as his notes mark this new environment as antithetical to English urbanity, civility, and government. In short, his travels depict this foreign climate as a blank canvas awaiting cultural, and more notably, Eurocentric imprint that is devoid of any local perspective or authority, further preparing us for the imperial silencing of native identities that we witness in the novel’s last note. Furthermore, Wright continues to explain how nature is depicted from an imperialist lens by outlining how these narratives are “dependent on notions of self and other that underscore and justify the West’s intrusion into non-Western cultures” (6). For a foreign traveler, Harker’s observations are based less on what he sees objectively and more on how he situates this environment within his colonial imaginary. It is critical to dissect on what Harker places his focus, and thus, what is consequently left out of his purview as it marks his place as an entitled imperialist who is eager to operate on an “Aristotelian system of binary thinking that differentiates humans from and privileges them above the so-called natural world” (Wright 5). That is, Harker places his attention on the trains and bridges; man-made structures that encourage encroachment, exploration, pollution, disruption, and globalization. By focusing on these structures, Harker gives the impression that he has a right to be there—after all, he was solicited and thus appears to be a welcomed avenue through which Dracula and other countries can metaphorically enter the future. What’s more, Harker notes that too many races to count have crossed the wide breadth of what he considers to 155 be this splendid Western bridge, “for there were many nationalities in the crowd” (Dracula 9), thus reinforcing a perspective that feeds his entitlement and presence in this country. In this sense, Romania is held accountable for Harker’s encroachment and appears to be antithetical to Victorian England’s xenophobic anxieties—perhaps even reprimanded for such open borders. While he pays a great deal of attention to the architecture that appears to welcome imperial encroachment, he further deploys a lens that is in keeping with environmental imperialism, since native identities are only included in their exclusion or in their oppositional location situated in this constructed Aristotelian binary. The locals, and more specifically, the women and working- class, are conglomerated with nature, which in this respect, is not indicative of a posthumanist entanglement (as Harker—a quintessentially Eurocentric human—is excluded) but are lumped together with the natural environment, as seen in Harker’s observations where both parties are “picturesque,” and “wanting in self-assertion” (Dracula 7). Moreover, the only time in which Harker describes any natural setting is when he observes the locals at an inn, with “its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the center of the yard” (Dracula 10), thereby conglomerating nature with its local human occupants. Finally, rather than garnering information from the locals (whom he often discredits and in whom he finds patronizing comfort, both of which serve to actively silence them in his omission), Harker receives the majority of his information regarding Romanian geography and culture from the British Museum, the very place from which Stoker drew his information and created the supernatural figure of Dracula, despite never having visited Transylvania. Romania, the Carpathian Mountains, and the native inhabitants are then depicted as wild and widely mystical, representing the imaginative whirlpool of an imperial construction. Ultimately, this system of 156 thinking allows Harker to posit Romania and England on opposite sides of a spectrum measuring wilderness and civilization from a postcolonial and environmentally racist perspective. In this sense, we can then determine and identify Harker’s colonial perspective through the lens of ecological imperialism. According to Val Plumwood, ecological imperialism denotes The dualistic thinking that continues to structure human attitudes to the environment to the masculinist, ‘reason-centred culture’ that once helped secure and sustain European imperial dominance, but now proves ruinous in the face of mass extinction and the fast- approaching ‘biophysical limits of the planet’. (4) In Dracula, Harker represents one side of this dualism, and moreover, represents the Crew of Light’s metonymic and eponymous reference to enlightenment ideology, thus attesting to this structure of thought. Supposedly on the other side of this dualism and opposed to Harker’s rationality and protestant beliefs, the locals are depicted as superstitious, since Harker writes, “I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting” (Dracula 6). Notably, this “imaginative whirlpool” directly reorients nature into an imperial imaginary that stirs together races, environmental bodies, and cultural distinctions into an inseparable and imperially convenient conglomerate, as we witnessed in Harker’s picturesque image. The image of the locals against the backdrop of oleander and orange trees then presents the locals as “one with the landscape,” somehow exempt from this Aristotelian binary through which Harker situates himself. Instead, he is protected by his ocularcentric position given he is able to turn his audience into a spectacle without taking any stock into how they look knowingly back at him. Furthermore, the fact that this scene is noted as he is leaving in his carriage suggests that he has completed some imperial mission to domesticate and bring Romania into the future, as the wilderness with which they have been concatenated is now cultivated into a neat little garden. As a result, wilderness and civilization appear in an Aristotelian dichotomy, and Harker 157 supposedly resides on the ocularcentric and rational side, while the Romanian civilians are intertwined with romanticism, superstition, and natural entities. To be more acute about the novel’s form, we can argue Harker’s observations and Aristotelian dichotomy fall well beneath the lens of environmental racism. According to Deane Curtin, environmental racism defines “‘the connection, in theory and practice, of race and the environment so that the oppression of one is connected to, and supported by, the oppression of the other’” (Huggan and Tiffin 4). The locals’ silence and marginalization amidst Harker’s tourism allows Harker to witness, critique, and partake in any behavior or custom he desires at will, or consider it as mere entertainment. Perhaps the most enriching example is the description of Harker’s first stop in Romania, as he dines on the local cuisine of Paprika Hendl. He records, I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called “paprika hendl,” and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. (Dracula 5) Harker discovers this meal is a national cuisine that he may obtain anywhere in the Carpathians, yet despite this limited region, Harker’s memo serves to grant the illusion of English totality, as Harker’s record of the recipe certainly points to a globalized market to which he must have access in order to prepare (or have Mina prepare) the cuisine in England. Not to mention it may also underscore the ways in which Western civilization’s tourism relies on an imperial state of mind that gives little consideration to the regional concerns of the environment’s inhabitants, as he never once considers the sustainability of the dish’s ingredients. Instead, the cuisine and the setting are aestheticized and commodified at will, and the human inhabitants of the area are silenced and specularized in a manner that posits them as replaceable, unnecessary, and extinguishable aspects of the environment, similar to the people among the oleander. 158 Moreover, this lens does not simply apply to the local human denizens, but to nonhuman animals, as the chicken is silenced beneath layers of constructions all carefully manipulated to ensure it cannot speak, death being only the most obvious. In lieu of the chicken’s and locals’ relative silence, attention is drawn back to Harker, his perspective, and his desire to have his wife simulate and recreate this experience for him whenever he pleases. Such a shift in focus highlights the phallogo- and Euro- centrism behind Harker’s narration. As a result, the opening premise of the novel can be read as following a model of Western imperial efforts in that the ideal of wilderness for England (and North America) points to a particular lack of inhabitation (denoted in the marginalized characters’ sparse appearance, silence, and predation), and a future promise of expansion and civilization that can only be proposed if such spaces are viewed as blank canvases awaiting cultivation and imperial resource management. To further support, validate, and normalize Harker’s observations, he records them in his journal, presenting a number of phallogocentric records from which we can pull to emphasize his imperial and rationalist stance. In other words, the meal in which he partakes is depicted to be more than just an innocent meal, but an example of how Harker’s consumption and literary record serves to privilege the male (Harker) as a controller, consumer, and distributor of language in a foreign country. This meal then turns his phallogocentric language into Derrida’s subsequent neologism of carnophallogocentrism, in which the properties of phallogocentric language are reified by the literary and physical consumption of more vulnerable identities. It is through this consumption that Harker attempts to distinguish himself as a masculine, imperial, and resourceful consumer of nature, posing dualistic identities as subhuman, vulnerable, silenced, and subject to predation, and establishing an ontological hierarchy in which the ideals of English domesticity and imperialism reign supreme. In proximity to his carnophallogocentric 159 representation of himself, subjugated depictions are not simply reserved for the locals whose responses are sparsely sprinkled throughout the text, but are posited onto women and nonhumans, as Harker records this meal so that his wife, Mina, may prepare it at home. Despite her own desire to travel abroad, Mina (while untainted by Dracula) is expected to stay in England and cater to her domestic duties, which would include providing her husband with a virulent meal. Within the gender dichotomy, Harker proposes a linguistic scaffold for himself that posits him as a patriarchal and imperialistic narrator. The opening then, while it might not be explicitly critical of Harker’s actions, certainly exposes the methods through which Harker and an imperialist writer can infiltrate and create a supposed binary of identities to distinguish himself from what is foreign, feminine, and natural, creating an Aristotelian dichotomy scaffolded by environmental racism. What I want to stress then is how Harker’s writing perpetuates a dichotomous narrative in which masculinity is associated with consumption, potency, and predation, while femininity and all its likewise marginalized identities are associated with vulnerability, victimhood, weakness, and vegetation—at least for now.53 Such a dichotomy then positions Harker and Dracula as more mimetic of one another, as David Del Principe elucidates in “(M)eating Dracula,” and what’s more, embeds Harker’s own form of vampirism as inherently imbricated within environmental racism. In “(M)eating Dracula,” Principe makes an astute and non-anthropocentric reading of Harker’s consumptive practices, noting them as cannibalistic when taken in lieu of a flat ontology between human and nonhuman bodies. Such a reading supports the ways in which Harker and Dracula are more reflective of one another than we might commonly believe, thereby 53 See Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat for more information on the relevance of meat- consumption for gender identity, as well as Paul Wells’ The Animated Bestiary for more information on how predation is indicative of sovereignty in our literary analyses. 160 making Harker, rather than Dracula, the first vampiric character we meet in the novel, especially when we focus on Harker’s description of his first meal. Principe argues that if we omit the human/animal binary, Harker is indeed dining on a cannibalistic meal that is more similar to Dracula’s diet than Harker cares to admit. However, Harker shirks these feelings by perhaps subconsciously taking comfort in the fact that the meal has been prepared for him, thereby ensuring his middle-class, urbanized role, and verifying that Harker cannot, as Dracula verifies, enter the feelings of the hunter. Despite this comfort and excuse, Principe urges readers to note that the meal has been exsanguinated, only to have the red coloring of blood replaced by the paprika; an ingredient that makes Harker thirsty. In addition to Principe’s reading of this thirst- inducing liquid is Harker’s etymological correction—he had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up in some way. Of course, I suspect this correction is meant to signal that he has entered a more rural, agricultural, and less urbanized environment where supper is eaten in the evening and dinner is eaten in the afternoon, but if we examine the etymology of supper, the connection between Harker and Dracula becomes even more irrefutable. After all, supper comes from the Germanic word sup, which means to take drink or liquid food by sips or spoonfuls. Here, Harker is not focusing on eating flesh then, but quite literally on imbibing drink, adding novel support to Principe’s argument, and reinforcing Harker as the first conventionally vampiric figure we meet in the novel. Nor is Harker’s and Dracula’s alignment isolated to this scene. Rather, I argue these characters’ mimesis is reinforced shortly after they meet, perhaps explaining why when Harker is shaving in the mirror while trapped in Dracula’s castle, he sees only himself, despite Dracula standing behind him. After all, Harker writes in response to Dracula’s greeting that “I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room 161 behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment” (Dracula 27). Intriguingly, Harker perceives his identity in direct opposition to the room or the objects around him. Through his perspective, he is distinct from any objectified identity, and yet, despite how often he objectifies Dracula, Harker does not see him through this lens at this moment. Rather, Harker only sees himself as Dracula places his hand on Harker’s shoulder. Even more curious is that Harker is the first person to draw blood, and to draw his own blood no less, illustrating Harker as the first vampire we meet, rather than Dracula. This switch is significant because it then shirks the more villainous qualities the novel showcases (aberrance, appropriative, predatory, imperialist colonizer) onto an English solicitor rather than a foreigner. In placing Dracula and Harker on the same representative plane, Dracula not only muddles the line between bios and zoë, or the enlightened, civilized, and political human on the same plane as all animal life, but more significantly holds legacies of the enlightenment and its coinciding constructions as responsible for Britain’s imperial dissolution. After all, Arata notes that “In Stoker’s version of the myth, vampires are intimately linked to its military conquest and the rise and fall of empires. According to Dr. Van Helsing, the vampire is the unavoidable consequence of any invasion” (627). From such a reading, we discover that in making Harker the first vampiric character we meet, it becomes Harker, and consequently, the Crew of Light, who become responsible for the rise and fall of empires; that these imperial humans are the unavoidable consequence of any invasion and thus held accountable for the forms of environmental racism that vampirism now serves to symbolize. Harker’s vampirism and environmental racism is not only signaled by his diet, his reflection, and his exsanguination, but through his motivation, infiltration, and penetration. Harker wishes to bring both this foreign 162 meal and Dracula to England, shifting his position as one who protects English borders to one who, like the splendid Danube, invites penetration and encroachment. Shifting the scapegoat from Dracula to Harker allows us to further explore Harker’s and the novel’s broader environmental racism by illustrating how the inherent identities of actors matters little in comparison to their proximity with environmental entities. After all, if consuming this exsanguinated cum re-sanguinated meal is enough to signal Harker’s predation and vampirism, then examining characters’ proximity and precarity to nonhumans in an ecological network is significant for understanding the novel’s subversive ecocriticism. Therefore, we must recall that Harker wishes to bring this meal (and Dracula) to England, regardless of whether he is aware of the consequences. His desire to “globalize” cuisine and bring resources back to England then displaces blame away from Dracula or any indigenous inhabitant, human or other, and instead places culpability onto the imperial encroacher and collector. As a result, any “disease” introduced by foreign bodies is more so a consequence of imperial expansion rather than attributed to immigrants voluntarily or involuntarily entering England. Intriguingly, the depletion of natural resources and the detriment to local inhabitants does not appear to manifest until the very end of the novel, as outlined in the utter silence of foreign life and habitation captured (or omitted) in the novel’s last note. In this sense, the novel appears to vacillate between two nineteenth-century arguments according to Miles Powell’s Vanishing America; one which argued that natural life and indigenous inhabitants must be eradicated lest they threaten or impede Eurocentric civilization and expansion (as most famously argued by Thomas Jefferson), and that species extinction was inevitable and natural preservation must be retained in order to sustain human life (as was argued most ardently by Buffon and Cuvier). Given the trajectory of the novel, which commences with a stark omission of Harker’s 163 environmental impact in Romania, a plot centered around xenophobic anxiety and eradication, and a chilling silence (and a deceased American) for a conclusion, the novel creates space for conversations regarding Victorians’ ecological awareness. In what follows, we witness how Dracula vacillates in shifting culpability for ecological devastation from Dracula and foreign countries to modernity, industrialization, globalization, and the imperial penchants that are now enveloped under the figure of the “vampire”—a container that houses both Dracula and Harker/The Crew of Light. Dracula’s Ecological Network Stoker’s “vampire” does not simply translate to military or physical conquest or muddles the line between bios and zöe, but in realigning these concepts and shifting culpability, recognizes the impact that “lesser” or more zoological/ecological entities have on the rise and fall of empires. In fact, Alfred Crosby argues in Ecological Imperialism that the success of European colonization can be more aptly attributed to the accidental or intentional introduction of foreign plants, animals, and diseases, rather than physical combat, thereby majorly shifting and damaging the ecological networks of colonized countries and causing population collapses to endemic peoples and entities. Such ecological awareness is showcased in Dracula, especially when perceived through the lens of reverse colonization. Dracula infiltrates England through physical immigration and conquest, but his success is more acutely demonstrated through a kind of biological warfare. His bite introduces a contagion that has a more devastating impact than his physical person can commit. Conventionally, this contagion is read as rabies or rabid-like in form, which has several consequences, mostly articulated by Jeanne Dubino, Maureen 164 O’Connor, and Neal Pemberton and Michael Warboys, respectively. 54 While viewing this infection as indicative of Ireland or the East is crucial to understanding Victorians’ xenophobic anxieties and environmental racism, it is important to acknowledge the species that introduces this infection is indeed a wolf before moving onto the novel’s human focus. After all, England had completely exterminated wolves on the island since the sixteenth century. This extermination showcases the argument that European civilization was the natural consequence of environmental degradation and dependent on the depletion of natural inhabitants and entities to flourish, and Dracula’s reintroduction as a wolf further validates the nineteenth-century argument that environment and human civilization are fundamentally at odds with one another. Once wolves or more environmental bodies (read nonhumans) are introduced back onto the island, especially from foreign locations, the anxiety of European degradation becomes the novel’s paramount concern, shifting matters of empire from an anthropocentric construction to a diverse zoological establishment. 54 For Jeanne Dubino’s “Mad Dogs and Irishmen,” Dracula’s environmental racism can be traced back to Ireland and England’s socio-political purview of Irishmen. During the union, Ireland’s rebellion against an English union posed them as mad and hysterical; characteristics that Michel Foucault has demonstrated posed insanity as borrowing its “face from the mask of the beast”, and thus animalizing madness. While Maureen O’Connor’s The Female and the Species traces a historical trajectory in which, dating back to Spenser, “the face of madness was that of a raving native Irishwoman partaking in unspeakable ‘beastliness’” (8), England’s claims that Ireland was a rabies-infected country polluting London streets becomes a prime example of environmental racism for Dubino. The supposed dirty and bestial habits, along with any kinship or companionship Irishmen had with their agricultural animals, fueled a postcolonial, ecocritical, and imperial logic that called for Ireland’s union. This logic of domination over nature depicted Ireland as effeminate, childish, savage, and in need of patriarchal governance. Thus, the Irish were often thought of as “The Missing Link”, “‘a creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro’ which ‘belongs to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo’” (11). Meanwhile, for Pemberton’s and Worboys’ Mad Dogs and Englishmen, disease and dirtiness were not focalized to any specific region but to various races and classes, allowing Dracula to stand in as a placeholder for any number of demographics—human or nonhuman. Read as a rabies-infested encroacher, Pemberton and Warboy argue the environmental racism depicted in the novel supports English nationalists’ blame and accusations directed toward Continental Europe for bringing in "carriers of disease." 165 Intriguingly, by locking away Harker so that he cannot return to England with Dracula, the novel circles back to displacing and blaming imperial deterioration and Eurocentric downfall onto other countries as it tries to veil or mitigate Harker’s responsibility for voluntarily or intentionally bringing any foreign agents into England. The moment Dracula disembarks the Demeter as a potentially and metaphorically “rabid” wolf, the novel positions Romania or any foreign country as responsible for the diseases they introduce, thereby further concretizing how the plot relies on environmental racism to villainize Dracula. As Huggan and Tiffin explain, the phenomenon of environmental racism is exemplified in the environmentally discriminatory treatment of socially marginalized or economically disadvantaged peoples, and in the transference of ecological problems from the ‘home’ source to a ‘foreign’ outlet (whether discursively, e.g. through the more or less wholly imagined perception of other people’s ‘dirty habits’, or materially, e.g. through the actual re-routing of First World commercial waste. (4) By depicting Dracula as rabid or disease-infested, England is then able to shirk their own environmental concerns as ancillary to other countries’ infiltration. Although never proven to come from any specific source, let alone any source from abroad, England’s rabies infestation is always attributed to foreign countries, as various animal studies scholars, such as those previously mentioned, have analyzed. This blame then illustrates how Victorian England’s perspective on rabies is embedded in environmental racism as its source is always insupportably attributed to Ireland or the East. Moreover, since the focus is not on the infection itself, but on the source, Dracula’s infection may not only serve as a stand-in for rabies but signals another concern for England that was directly attributed to Romania—a parasite that infected the gut after ingestion. After all, the novel signals the significance of ingestion (especially ingesting red-colored flesh or sustenance) numerous times, with the paprika hendl only serving as the first instance. 166 Shortly after, Harker notes that he dined on “what they call ‘robber steak’—bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London cat’s meat!” (Dracula 9). The addition of red pepper, while linking this meal to Harker’s first supper, is less notable here than Harker’s disparaging tourist comment of equating this national dish with the horseflesh that was sold for cat’s meat in London. More crucial to this description, however, is how this horseflesh scandal in London was attributed back to Romania, according to James Koranyi’s 2013 article “Britain and Romania.” Shifting focus from rabies to other foreign “carriers of disease,” Koranyi notes that such carriers could be focalized in Romania’s abattoirs, as the “horse-meat scandal” sweeping across London streets was traced back to Romania, despite the lack of concrete or supportable evidence. According to Koranyi, the manner through which Dracula infects the purity of English citizens’ blood can be read as resonant of the ways in which the Romanian abattoir called CarmOlimp supposedly infected the English gut with disease. While Dracula struck at night, consumers of meat from CarmOlimp experienced intestinal distress in the evening. While no concrete evidence could be found, such widespread panic was indicative of British anxieties regarding open borders and open trade with a nation who was not part of the British empire. England’s own responsibility for its polluted and disease-riddled streets due to industrial pollution was shirked onto one foreign country’s abattoir, or more broadly speaking, shirked to the environmental conditions of foreign countries, overall. Intriguingly, while the novel goes to great lengths to accurately record meals abroad, such as when Harker writes, “let me put down my dinner exactly,” the novel never explicitly records meals within the domestic space. Such an omission then further allows the narrative to shirk disease and unsanitary conditions as solely the problem of other countries. The novel makes a keen effort to circumvent the fact that with growing industry and urban civilization, agricultural 167 food sources are pushed to the outskirts of cities and become increasingly unregulated, as is summarized in Chris Otter’s “The Vital City.” Otter’s article provides vital insight into examining the novel’s concentration on food consumed abroad and linking these meals with infectious avenues. While not focusing on Dracula, Otter notes how such anxiety becomes glaring when we consider that after the 1880’s, refrigerated meat could be transported into England from around the world to feed the burgeoning number of London workers. Such refrigerated meat then allowed foreign bodies, flesh, and contagions to be shipped on trains and steamboats to the island, thus allowing Dracula’s transportation via ship to be symptomatic of infected meat coming into England unsupervised and exposing English citizens to contaminated bodies never before consumed, CarmOlimp serving as only one example. Moreover, while the novel appears to applaud how quickly information is spread through railways, telegraphs, phonographs, steamers, and other higher-speed transportation methods, it simultaneously signposts Victorian anxieties as to the rapidity in which disease and flesh could also spread throughout England through technological transport. As a result, the novel illustrates the transportation of bodies as inevitable, uncontrollable, and detrimental (as Harker can barely enjoy the scenery because the train is moving so rapidly), and carriers of disease (represented by Dracula) are introduced and carried throughout the novel via capitalist and steam-driven engines. Therefore, the novel can be read as quite critical toward flesh transported from abroad, whether this flesh is read as meat, foreigners, or some semblance of foreign bodies in general, with any and all ecological entities included. After all, at the time Dracula was written, very little food was actually produced within the city at the fin-de-siècle, most coming from British outskirts and overseas. As Otter quotes, such an influx caused Herbert Spencer to claim in 1891 that England has 168 spontaneously evolve[d] that wonderful system whereby a great city has its food daily brought round to all doors or stored at adjacent shops . . . [while] production as well as distribution is similarly carried on with the smallest amount of superintendence which proves efficient. (518) Notably, the Crew of Light’s main concern is to monitor and eliminate Dracula, who despite all their efforts, always succeeds in striking domestic locations. Like food deliveries, Dracula’s efforts appear consistently efficient as he enters Lucy’s and Mina’s home, almost with nothing more than luck appearing to favor him (such as when one of the servants removes Lucy’s cross). Furthermore, despite the Crew of Light’s efforts to regulate and impede his entrance, they always appear too late. He persistently succeeds in “infecting” Lucy and Mina, thereby linking the ease in which foreign contagions could permeate English bodies in the most unsuspecting ways. By pinioning this blame on other countries rather than the soiled conditions of London affairs, the novel supports and maintains the carnophallogocentric narrative with which it started. Dracula never appears to place culpability on London for not reconsidering its own food industry, the local environmental degradation that forced London to obtain its food from abroad, or the fact that Londoners became the largest consumers of beef in the world (and thus the most susceptible target), as noted by Thomas Walley, principle of Edinburgh Royal Veterinary College (Otter 526). As Otter informs us, instead of marking that by 1874, there were 1,400 slaughterhouses and abattoirs in London alone, a number which was still not enough to feed the growing number of beef-eaters, especially when beef consumption became symbolic of British masculinity, status, and national vitality, thereby demanding flesh to be transported from overseas to feed a growing nation, the novel prefers to attribute blame to Romania or other foreign countries. As a result, Romania and other locations are to blame for England’s imperial deterioration, attacking the nation’s vitality through biological and ecological systems. Dracula’s vampirism is then not as 169 indicative of military conquest as it is an attack of a nation’s health through industrialized and globalized consumption. Finally, such culpability appears rather shocking and deflective given Britain consumed 380,000 tons of meat annually, a portion of which came from local abattoirs that were often revamped wooden sheds or cellars, filthy and unregulated since many were on private premises and thus not legally regulated or inspected. According to Otter, In Stirling, Chadwick recorded, ‘the slaughter-house is situated near the top of the town, and the blood from it is allowed to flow down the public streets’. Slaughterhouses cast a morbid shadow, or ‘moral taint’ which coloured the character of the surrounding area. (527) In Dracula, readers gather no such depiction or any form of wet-markets. The “moral taint” or “morbid shadow” is shirked abroad (much as “The Ecology of Disease” shirks responsibility on the food industry to conditions in “poor countries”). Intriguingly, the meat upon which Seward dines in London simply appears on his dinner table without any inkling or explicit remark as to its source (and he is incapable of finishing it once the madman Renfield bursts in to contaminate it). For Harker’s travels abroad, however, his meat consumption in Romania seems almost raw, still sanguine-colored and leaving him thirsty or metaphorically infected with the vampiric virus. What is significant here is that although Britain is clearly gathering the resources of other countries in its imperial exploits, the culpability by which Britain may be infected is thrown onto the shoulders of other nations. The contamination of meat is instead associated with other races, other classes, and other aberrant representations of humanity, leaving Victorian London free to judge, regulate, and blame others for their imperial and environmental degradation. As a result, the novel’s carnophallogocentric form underscores Harker’s and Victorians’ environmental racism, creating a dichotomy that fragments nature from Eurocentric humanity, and establishes a paradigm in which Harker and Dracula become nearly synonymous. 170 However, it is not simply through consumption that Harker and Dracula become mimetic of one another. In a system that appears to distinguish bios from zöe while simultaneously muddling this binary, Dracula polices the avenues through which one can be recognized as bios or as a political animal—as Man. Thus, Dracula has no other choice but to mimic Harker in order to be recognized as a sovereign subject, to enter England and walk the streets unquestioned as his own master in a political arena. Like Harker and enlightened subjects in general, who defined themselves in Aristotelian opposition to zoe, Dracula must utilize other animals to become human, whether this utilization is in the form of biological warfare or carrying nonhuman contagious entities, establishing wolves as his pets, or mastering a distinct communal language. It is through nonhuman precarity that one such as Dracula becomes human. By policing the avenue of human modernity and ensuring Dracula acts as Harker’s reflection, the novel illustrates how other countries, peoples, and identities have no other choice than to mimic Eurocentric habits and attitudes to remain visible and relevant in the heart of empire. The Victorian Human Positioning Dracula within animal studies is often misconstrued as an attempt to situate Dracula as a stand-in for the animal, and it is easy to recognize why conventional readings interpret this abject figure as such. After all, the novel’s culminating message appears to verify the human/animal binary as the British empire stands seemingly safe and secure, the Crew of Light remains relatively intact, and Dracula, along with the ecological network in which he was embedded, is destroyed, only signaled in their barren and sterile image. Yet, the danger of positioning Dracula as an animal is that it validates this illusion that the human/animal binary is a concrete distinction, resulting in a perfect symmetry that heralds humanity in the wake of nature’s death. In this ideological and empirical modernity loosely quoted from Bruno Latour, 171 readers gain the impression that the powers of empire “have been able to save their peoples . . . by destroying the rest of the world” or the abject identities that most threaten its stability. 55 The consequence of this reading also results in disseminating the impression that other societies must follow suit—that this distinction and exclusion of nature is the only way anyone can become human. Imitating the west or imperial ideology is inimically the only avenue in which one can be recognized as a sovereign subject, making the figure of the “Human” synonymous with the notions of the vampire—a consuming, enveloping, infectious, and appropriative parasite threatening a diverse global network. And yet, the novel’s plot centers around destroying the vampire, contributing a more nuanced argument that may reimagine what it means to be human in the heart of empire. Therefore, I argue Dracula is not the inverse figure Harker sees in the mirror but a reflection of himself, and more acutely, a recognition of how humans formulate an image of themselves according to the orientation of “objects” and other life with which/whom they surround themselves. Thus, I would like to position Dracula as a stand-in for the making of the modern human or as a representative of the ideology I outlined above. Understanding how the novel is not strictly a product, nor entirely supportive, of Enlightenment legacies expands the novel’s significance in posthumanist and ecocritical conversations, excavating human and animal identity as precariously intertwined. It demonstrates how the orientation of the human is not simply defined against the backdrop of animal life but adopted as a mechanism that consistently triangulates itself and all its coinciding constructions—race, class, ability, gender, and 55 In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour writes, “The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its people to abject poverty” (9). 172 sexuality—according to its ever-shifting and precarious relationships with other species. In essence, it is through, with, and against other species, that one becomes human. Dracula does indeed use other species, such as the wolves with whom he surrounds himself, to situate himself as human and to stake his place in modernity. By orienting these wolves as his pets, Dracula brings himself into the cultural cliché of bourgeoise society, as Kathleen Kete validates when she suggests, “it was in the nineteenth century after all, that the family dog became a cliché of modern life” (1). Rather than situating the human as entirely fractured from nature, created in a vacuum free from any earthly entity or wholly isolated from the geographical, racial, species, and cultural distinctions Victorians encountered at home and abroad, Kete argues that pet-keeping allowed Victorians to stake their entrance into modernity in a technological, philosophical, and ontological respect. She writes, Petkeeping involves us in the culture of ordinary people. In explaining it we suggest how the nineteenth century took shape, in everyday events, in ordinary life, and argue that the experience of modernity by ordinary people was as complicated, and just as complicit in its shaping of reality. (Kete 2) Thus, Dracula appears rather unremarkable, staking his sovereignty in ordinary life through his adaptation of Victorian pet-keeping. Such a practice is signposted in Dracula’s appellation of the wolves, referring to them while speaking to Harker as “children of the night” (my italics, Dracula 21). Referring to these wild creatures as children verifies their domestication and pet status, as Yi- Fu Tuan discusses the synonymous underpinnings between children and pets. This status allows Dracula to position other animals as ontologically inferior to his humanity, thereby staking his own status as equivalent to Harker (if not superior since Harker cannot control or master nature as an ideal Victorian man would). Evidently distinct from Dracula’s own adulthood, enveloping this species under an anthropocentric hierarchy then allows him to diminish their adult status as members of their own species, and thus posit them on a lower 173 hierarchal plane to signpost his mastery and dominion over them. 56 Once oriented as his pets, Dracula can employ them to police his territories’ boundaries, such as when he keeps Harker in the caleche while he wanders off into the woods to collect treasure or when he keeps Harker in the castle, when he calls his wolf to consume the mother who comes onto his property demanding back her child, and when he disembarks from the Demeter to claim his territory as the wolf he has ontologically and physically appropriated. In this paradigm, the wolves are positioned as Dracula’s domestic servants/pets, allowing him to enter modernity through the practice of Victorian pet-keeping. In other words, it was not simply nonhuman presence that brought humans into modernity, but how humans employed other species to delineate and protect their modernity. As Kete mentions, The family pet presented an interface between the home and the outside world and maintained the isolation of the family unit as effectively as architectural ‘strategies of isolation.’ As locks, peepholes, later doorbells did, in the bourgeois imagination, the family dog functioned as a statement of privacy and control. (48) Dracula employs his dogs to protect and maintain property, delineating the space in which he serves as sovereign. Moreover, utilizing the wolves as strategies of isolation explains why, besides from acting as a supernatural trick, Harker is surprised to find there is not any physical barrier (no key or doorlock he needs to unhinge) to escape the castle. After multiple attempts in 56 Often because of the ways in which we define labor and civil rights, adulthood is not a common stage for fully-grown members of other species to obtain. We often forget in our pet-practices that our nonhuman companions are adults of their own species after a certain age of maturity and sexual development, and have been conditioned to surrender their desires and independence in lieu of their humans’ desires and convenience. Thus, they are often infantilized—a perpetual child whose maturity is further stolen through chemical or physical sterilization. An individual is not born a pet but must have someone establish dominance (often disguised as affection, as Tuan argues), and in doing so, revokes the pet’s agency, autonomy, and independence. This is not to say other members, especially wild species, do not achieve adulthood, as we often hear “the adult male” when referring to members, but is meant to underscore the ways in which these wolves, once they become pets, must in the very definition of that status, give up their self-sufficiency and independence. 174 drawing back the bolt and attempting to open the door, Harker fails, imagining there must be some key he is missing to ensure his escape. In response, Harker notes, After a pause of a moment, [Dracula] proceeded in his stately way, to the door, drew back the ponderous bolts, unhooked the heavy chains, and began to draw it open. To my intense astonishment I saw that it was unlocked. Suspiciously I looked all round, but could see no key of any kind. (Dracula 49) This passage then emphasizes how canine pets were used to manage strategies of isolation, as Dracula opens the unlocked door, only to have the wolves meet Harker and deflate his desire to venture outside. More effective than any object serving as a barrier, it is the wolves who transform this antiquated castle into a replica of the modern Victorian home, determining who may or may not enter, and more intriguingly, who may or may not reap the benefits of the land’s resources. These wolves then not only serve as physical barriers to defend Dracula’s property but they also police the class boundaries that separate Dracula from Harker. Quoting from Laure Desvernays in a series of Little Handbooks for the Home, Kete notes that “an essential function of the bourgeois pet was guard duty . . . What more important service may we demand of our dogs than to defend our homes and ourselves?” (48). Desvernays continues to explain that, for Victorians, the bourgeoise dog appeared to have a natural sense of visitors’ class status and kept away those who were “unworthy” of entering such lavish estates. Dracula certainly demands this essential function from his wolves cum pets as they patrol the land that surrounds his castle and police the persons who can enter and exit his abode, but more intriguingly, like the bourgeois dog, these wolves also inhibit Harker from elevating his class. As I briefly mentioned above, Dracula can easily leave the caleche to follow the blue flames and collect the treasure buried within the forest only because the wolves create a perimeter upon which Harker cannot encroach, but that Dracula can cross at ease. As a result of his canine companionship, Dracula is not only 175 able to maintain his property but to sustain his wealth. In other words, not only is Harker physically incapable of leaving the caleche, but the fear these wolves instill (along with the supernatural events, or what we might more acutely read as the illusory constructions that Harker does not quite conceive) inhibits Harker from recalling the location of this treasure later. The wolves’ border patrol ensures only Dracula may collect the buried gold and maintain his upper- class status while Harker is inhibited from elevating his own status or accumulate any wealth at Dracula’s expense, thus solidifying the wolves’ role as class barriers and border protectors. Thus, Dracula’s domestication of his canine companions is a direct reflection of Victorian pet-keeping practices, becoming the first avenue we witness that not only brings Dracula into modernity, but consequently, signals his humanity. In this sense, animals become less marginal to Dracula’s plot and more integral to the making of the modern human. With a sweep of Dracula’s hand, the wolves progress and retreat, serving as the doorway through which Dracula may station his humanity. This effortless control not only signals Dracula’s humanity in an ontological sense but also signals his masculinity from an English perspective, as masculinity was designated by the mastery and control of animal elements (be that passion or other species’ physical bodies). Yet, this is not simply a one-way street for humans to reap all the benefits. After all, to illustrate these wolves as wholly complicit and obeisant is to diminish their autonomy and agency in their domestication, as well as to impose a binary that views English masculinity as indicative of the human, and passive vulnerability as strictly relegated to the realm of other animals. Viewing them as “pets” then dismisses their efforts to bring themselves into this same modernity—a modernity they established through what anthropologists and other scientists refer to as self-domestication. Certainly, Dracula and his wolves may subscribe to the “garbage-dump” model that proposes 176 wolves lost their fear of humans and domesticated themselves for increased access to food (which Dracula provides in offering the mother). Keener to this narrative’s reading, however, is how their relationship reflects a more indigenous model proposed by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg. They argue that this domestication began 100,000 years ago rather than the more widely recognized 15,000 years ago. Instead, if we follow their suggestion to move beyond colonial history and examine some indigenous relationships with wolves, we discover Dracula may reflect this interspecies historical entanglement better than any colonial replica. According to Pierotti and Fogg, aside from feeding and playing with wolves, humans observed wolf packs to learn new techniques in securing food. Together they cooperated their hunting techniques to provide greater access to resources, allowing both families to travel less and set down roots. Intriguingly, while a wild wolf pack would travel most of the day, realistically covering anywhere from 200-500 miles on average, these wolves appear to be anywhere Dracula needs them at any given moment; either trotting alongside his caleche or bursting into his home upon invitation. Thus, these wolves enter the narrative less as submissive pets forced to mete out Dracula’s wishes and propose themselves as active and cooperative participants in the making of civilization and domesticity. It is because Dracula cooperates with wolves that he is able to claim, maintain, and gather new territory, which is why once he enters England, it is in the form of a wolf. Rather than play an ancillary role in Dracula, the novel then demonstrates that it is through the companionship and cooperation of other species that both the human and civilization is made. Acknowledging that wolves or other animals assist in the making of the human and its coinciding polis often acts as a double edge sword, as it both affords them visibility while marking this visibility as vulnerable to humanism’s anthropocentric concerns. That is, for the 177 wolves to assist in establishing modernity for both humans and their own species, they must be situated as pets, which inherently demands a surrender, or more accurately, a negotiation of their sovereignty. At the same time, this appellation simultaneously affords them a modicum of protection under liberal humanism that they would not be granted if they were wild animals. For instance, Stoker’s first description of them from Harker’s perspective is that of the wild, ferocious, and foreign beast when he writes, As the door began to open, the howling of the wolves without grew louder and angrier; their red jaws, with champing teeth, and their blunt-clawed feet as they leaped, came in through the opening door. (Dracula 49) This companion species is then oriented as a synecdoche for all that is violent and abject, with Harker’s colonial lens focusing strictly on predatory traits—red jaws, champing teeth, blunt- clawed feet, all growing louder and angrier. However, Dracula’s domestic relationship with them mitigates this abjection. His reference to their howls as music, while perhaps belittling, repositions their vocality and presence into a translatable communication that takes the readers’ focus away from their imbrication in a violent colonial bestiary. No longer positioned strictly as oriental or working dogs who were thought to be a direct juxtaposition to the bourgeoise dog, Dracula’s domestic companionship brings both figures into domestic modernity. As Kete mentions, while oriental dogs “supposedly led unstructured, more natural, and less cultured lives,” bringing these wolves into the home, into petdom, and into a more indigenous companionship allows both Dracula and the wolves to enter the empty vessel of the modern human and their canine companions. Of course, this paradigm once again ensures that all other societies and models follow a Western construction of the human. Dracula’s indoctrination into humanity via canine domestication allows him to adopt the western placeholder of “the sovereign and the beast” but 178 does very little to reimagine this dichotomous confrontation. Not to mention how the novel does not seem to applaud this replica but instead signals its impending instability and extinction, given both Dracula and the wolves are either vanquished or completely dismissed by the end of the novel. While this void may indubitably intend to illustrate an imperial agenda and perpetuate Western domination, it is not the only form of companionship the novel solicits. Although also destined for erasure, examining the locals’ relationships with the wolves may very well offer alternative avenues for human and nonhuman companionship and cooperation, especially given that their dynamics do not submit such relationships into the logics of domination disguised as affectionate pet-keeping. In this respect, the locals distinguish themselves from Dracula’s colonial tendencies and thus suggest that there are indeed other models and ontological formations that do not pivot off the imperial logic that those in power must have while those in submission must have not. Thus, shifting our focus from the aristocratic character who yearns to enter the streets of England in place of Harker, to the locals who more acutely protect their lands, narrative, and culture, offers a resistance to the Western domination the novel appears to project, and instead proposes a more egalitarian relationship between humans and other animals. Therefore, it is not Dracula who first accompanies and guides Harker’s journey, but a local driver whose relationship with the neighboring wolves surpasses the master/servant dichotomy of Victorian pet-keeping. While touring the countryside, Harker quickly expresses his desire to stop the caleche and walk, but the driver disallows such a wish. Harker states, “I wished to get down and walk up [the hills] as we do at home, but the driver would not hear of it. ‘No, no,’ he said; ‘you must not walk here; the dogs are too fierce’” (Dracula 12). While the local’s references to the wolves as “dogs” may at first seem to perpetuate their pet status in a similar method to Dracula’s orientation and control of these wolves who police the boundaries of 179 privacy and isolation for their human, their subsequent description—you must not walk here because the dogs are too fierce—troubles the modern ideal of a dog as an obeisant pet. Nor does it simply reorient the modern pet into the trope of the rabid dog. Rather, the driver emphasizes the wolves’ ferocity as a token of cooperation. That is, the manner through which this citizen cooperates with the local wolves to keep Harker from freely roaming their territory and abstracting it into a replica of Harker’s imperial homeland, stimulates nonhuman agency, centrality, and equality in a way that simple pet-keeping customs do not. Both the wolves and the working-class denizen are the gatekeepers of their land, restraining the imperial tourist from walking the hills as he would at home. Thus, the familiar appellation of “dog” in this context demonstrates a cooperation between human and canine companion that does not operate within the realm of dominance disguised as affection (as it does with Dracula), precisely because the dogs’ ferocity dismisses any notions of vulnerability or passivity. While Dracula has a remarkable penchant to control and diminish the wolves to the role of pet, the unnamed local does not seek any hierarchal privileges over the wolves, and perhaps this is because both he and the wolves share a marginal space, each oppressed in their own way by Dracula; after all, both characters remain unnamed, fairly deindividualized, and at another’s service. Instead, the driver shares his authority with the wolves, since it is he who commands Harker (rather than the wolves) not to walk among the mountains. In the very first pages of the novel, we witness how humans and other animals cooperate to share authority over spaces, reaffirming each other’s sovereignty in a manner that does not rely on hierarchal and dominating ontological constructs. Furthermore, unlike the visual and violent description of the wolves that we witness later in Dracula’s castle, where Harker fragments these animals into a Tennyson representation of 180 nature, red in tooth and claw, Harker and the driver do not actually witness any wolves in this scene, although we hear their call throughout. This lack of visual presence denies these human characters any ability to assert their dominance by reducing these animals to a mere spectacle. Rather, the wolves completely escape Harker’s purview, and both the locals and the wolves command authority over their own land by policing who enters and traverses the landscape at leisure. More importantly, rather than subjecting themselves to Harker’s gaze, the wolves stake their presence vocally in a manner that is not diminished or belittled by musicality, inferiority, or any dominance that seeks to control them. Instead, like a wolf pack, they are able to traverse at leisure, unspecularized and untranslated, but nonetheless integral in how Harker must compose himself. The wolves’ ferocity and cooperation then indoctrinates them into a space of ferality. To consider an animal as feral—or more acutely, in terms of ferality—is to once again borrow from Abraham Gibson’s Feral Animals in the American South, and to recognize ferality as a necessary neologism to acknowledge the degrees of interdependence, familiarity, cooperation, and inaccessibility that such animals can occupy simultaneously. In other words, “ferality” becomes a much-needed idiolect to start exploring such ontologically diverse characters who no longer or have never quite fit into dichotomous structures or categories. In fact, their ferality may even signal how they consistently surpass the anthropocentric spaces reserved, delineated, allocated, or denied to them. As a result, this neologism does not hope to serve as a container itself, but as far as possible, to offer itself as a non-container, or to abate any signifying vessel with which we might normally examine more-than-human species. Moreover, ferality only comes to fruition post-domestication, perhaps as a posthumanist term to understand the limits of our anthropocentric thought. It must inevitably recognize interdependence and anthropogenic 181 influence while marking the distance such animals have from humans; a distance that releases them from any obeisance, petted, or controlled status. Such distance also gives us the space to understand the more negative impacts and connotations these precarious relationships have on one another. In this manner, ferality allows us to acknowledge how these animals have a historical tie to their ecological network and to the humans who share that network. It posits the wolves as having always been there, and thus imbricated into Romanian history. They are inevitably entangled with humans, with ecological predation and border patrol, regardless of whether that human is Dracula or the working-class denizens. And for Dracula in particular, their perpetual presence situates them as indigenous to this land and as an inevitable participant in his conquest.57 In this sense, Dracula, the working class, and the wolves are not simply tied together in war, domesticity, border patrol, agency, and sovereignty, but share the stakes of a deathly future. As noted in the previous chapter, ferality is derived from the Latin word feralis, meaning funereal; of or relating to the dead. Understanding these wolves’ ferality underscores precisely what is at stake if these dichotomies and colonial histories are not reoriented. As Other (which includes Dracula, foreigners, and wolves), these figures are vulnerable, effaced, appropriated, and hunted. As figures of ferality, however, there is a glimmer of hope and an active effort to transgress and disrupt these dichotomous constructs. In noting the ferality of the wolves’ relationships with their human companions, we “witness,” in no spectacular terms, how the wolves are free to transgress spaces at their leisure (not always by invitation); how they bring dirt 57 In Wolf, Garry Marvin traces the interesting sociohistorical and literary history of wolves. He writes, “There is a relationship here between the poetic and the real: not only were wolves accused for their natural predation on livestock, they were also commonly blamed for unnatural predation on human bodies by opening recently dug graves and scavenging the corpses of soldiers on battlefields” (50). 182 into the home and thus concretize natureculture’s idealism; 58 how they translate ideals of domesticity and apply them to wild spaces in the policing of their territory in an effort to disrupt dichotomous projections of civilized and wild spaces; and how they assert a more fluid and central identity for themselves in the novel’s plot. Their purpose is not to make the human but to carve out alternative avenues that do not lead us down a single and anthropocentric path of identity in empire. Ultimately, this reading argues that while such nonhuman characters have assisted in the making of the human and of modern civilization, it is not their sole purpose or the limits of their impact. They are neither supporting characters nor are they looking to be ancillary figures who yearn to be enveloped under an anthropocentric umbrella—an umbrella that has always covered them while providing little to no protection. Rather, these figures are looking to reposition the ontological scaffold that such an umbrella appears to veil as equivalent, inclusive, encompassing, and inevitable. To fully understand why Dracula ends in an ecocritical silence after offering so much potential for other ways of beings and cooperating, we must continue focusing on how this umbrella ontologically orients all forms of oppression, be it animal, foreign, or as I will now discuss, female. Humanimal Vulnerability and Resistance In the making of the human, canine companionship heavily influenced gender constructions, involuntarily aligning masculinity with more active and potent traits precisely because their animal body shared and oriented the oppression of other marginal identities. Thus, Keridiana Chez writes that other-than-human life is utilized as a prosthetic to humanity to complete notions 58 An ideology that recognizes nature and culture are so tightly interwoven that they cannot possibly be separated. 183 of masculinity in Dracula, explaining why Dracula is often positioned as hypermasculine, while Harker’s proximity to the wolves effeminizes him in his cowardice. What is significant about this dichotomy is how it arranges masculinity, strength, animation, agency, action, sovereignty, and autonomy in the realm of the human, while traits such as femininity, vulnerability, weakness, stasis, passiveness, inaction, servitude, and obeisance are all concatenated and associated with the animal body. Yet, if Dracula can position wolves as cooperative agents in the making of the human, then it stands to reason that it must continue reorienting the ontological constructs that position these traits as dichotomous and juxtaposed. This section is devoted to exploring how Dracula manipulates each of these traits to disrupt Enlightenment legacies, further expanding or ambiguating what it means to be human. Intriguingly, exploring nonhuman companionship allows us to disrupt these legacies more efficiently precisely because they serve as prosthetics to humanity. When Chez keenly articulates this assistance, what she denotes for me are three insightful consequences. The first of which suggests that humanity is inherently defined by lack, rather than any of the coinciding constructs these legacies attempt to project onto the human. That is, some entity, characteristic, or even sentience, must always be lacking and in need of a substitution to be completely “human.” Second is that the need for a prosthetic also means that to be human is to never be isolated in self-sovereignty but to always be vulnerable to the environmental actors with whom we surround ourselves. Finally, to be human does not mean that one is inherently equipped to represent some form of idiosyncratic resistance to these prosthetics, but that resistance is only possible by accepting vulnerability as a precondition of environmental entanglements. The disruption to enlightenment legacies and their coinciding ontology then penetrates these dichotomies, playfully and insightfully reorienting vulnerability, strength, resistance, 184 agency, stasis, and animation as concatenated conditions of one another. Never split into dichotomous realms nor concretized to one body or ideology, these conditions manifest themselves throughout the novel to predate and validate posthumanist notions of Being. Such manifestations consequently illustrate that however unconsciously or subconsciously, Dracula showcases the frustrations inherent in liberal humanism and notes how identity markers always surpass the limits of what Victorians imagined for themselves, both at home and abroad. By shifting our focus over Dracula, Harker, Quincey Morris, and most acutely, Lucy, Dracula underscores the critical entanglement of these ontological traits and thus evacuates more conventionally potent traits from the container of the Enlightened Human. While a great deal of focus has already been granted to Dracula, it is worthwhile to briefly return to his connection with environmental entities. This is not to refer to his canine companionship but to the other entity that marks him as Other, foreign, and abject, such as his association with dirt. In a conventional sense and to Victorians, dirt is disorder. It is foreignness, disease, unclean, infection; it is the imperial logic of environmental racism. As Sabine Schülting writes, Dirt is not an ontological but a relational and spatial category, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has stressed in her seminal definition of dirt as “matter out of place.” Matter is conceived as dirt when it disturbs order and threatens to pollute what a social group cherishes as clean and pure bodies, objects, spaces, or texts. ‘As we know it,’ Douglas writes, ‘dirt is essentially disorder. Dirt offends against order.’ (7) In this sense, Dracula is dirt, which is why once he grants Mina his baptism of blood, she cries that she is “Unclean, unclean! I must touch [Harker] or kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear” (Dracula 264). Dracula does indeed disturb the order of England, and more succinctly, the order of the Crew of Light as their lives are interrupted and rerouted to pursue and eradiate Dracula— 185 basically dedicated to cleansing their land of this dirt. But more intriguingly, is Dracula’s association rather than metonymic representation of dirt. That is, he must travel in a casement of dirt that is constantly mobilized and relocated, verifying that dirt is indeed “matter out of place.” What is so striking about this definition is how it realigns animation, mobility, and action with a network of environmental entities. Dirt is not a body nor is it an ontological position precisely because it is a relational concept that can be adopted and transfixed to any member of its ecological network. It is dirt that makes Dracula vulnerable, as he is unable to move when he lies in his casement during the day, and simultaneously, what makes him a threat since it is the reason that he is so easily mobilized, capable of crossing borders and entering new territories. The ambiguity of this ontological displacement or relationship is why Harker plunges into madness after trying to kill Dracula. Stoker writes, This was the being I was helping to transfer to London . . . The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box. (Dracula 51) When Harker views Dracula in this casement of dirt that he is helping to transfer to London, Harker assumes that Dracula is at his most vulnerable and so takes this opportunity to kill him. Yet, what Dracula reveals is that dirt does not align him with vulnerability, stasis, and paralysis. In fact, from this relational position, Dracula can gaze upon Harker, paralyzing him so forcefully that he drops his weapon. In mere moments, Dracula’s and Harker’s ontological positions switch. Despite occupying the oppositional side of Dracula’s encasement and standing in as a product of the Enlightenment, it is Harker who is made vulnerable, immobile, and insane, confirming humanities fictions and reframing what it means to be an active and potent being. 186 However, the Crew of Light’s objective is to maintain these Enlightenment legacies—an objective that they disguise as some noble pursuit to cleanse their land and protect their women. But this is a battle for power and a battle to maintain the dichotomies that invest power into the Crew of Light and oppress those who stand on the other side, including the female English aristocrat, Lucy. By battling over Lucy, Dracula shows the extent to which these fictions can be manipulated, and more critically, illustrates what is at stake. After all, villainizing a foreign vampire might be an easy task, but if a domestic, financially stable, white woman can be made prey to these legacies, then what can these imperial constructs not efface or eradicate in the name of purity, progress, or humanity? By noting what the Crew of Light values in Lucy, we discover what they hope to save are the enlightenment legacies to which they want her to abide— conventional notions of femininity, industry, rationality, and monogamous heteronormativity, to name a few. Her restlessness with her submissive station, as well as her subversive inquiry, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Dracula 58), along with her courting Quincey Morris, Arthur Godalming, John Seward, and even Dracula in a sense, makes her a target the Crew of Light must vanquish rather than save. Therefore, in analyzing the Crew of Light’s internal monologues while they consider whether it will be ethical to kill her, to exploring her death scene, Dracula underscores the imperial and humanist logic that the Crew of Light deploys to determine who (or what) is killable, who has the right to life, and how easily and arbitrarily these boundaries can be shifted to justify maintaining these conventional containers, completing the predatory mimesis between Dracula and the rest of the Crew of Light. Women are then the most oppressed identity in this triad since Lucy’s proximity to the Crew of Light and Dracula are what signals her impending death. After having lost the battle and 187 no longer capable of retaining her monogamy/fidelity to their legacies, the rest of Lucy’s limited protection quickly unravels, even to Dr. Seward’s surprise. Before opening the coffin to look upon Lucy’s body—now metaphorically turned into an empty vessel that can be filled with any abject quality the Crew of Light might project to justify their actions—Seward admits “The sight was almost too much for me. It seemed to be as much an affront to the dead as it would have been to have stripped off her clothing in her sleep whilst living” (Dracula 183-84). What is significant is how Seward momentarily recognizes the arbitrary delineation that has been recurrent throughout the text and in the Crew of Light’s encounter with Dracula and deathly beings. Here, a corpse does not seem to be any different than a sleeping sentient body, thus obfuscating, and thereby critiquing the parameters we use to determine what makes one human and what bodies demand deference. Yet, it is how easily these containers are displaced and manipulated that serves as the affront to the Crew of Light’s agenda. Thus, the Crew of Light shift their perspective in order to justify murder, which significantly, only takes a slight adjustment in their language to make anyone killable, regardless if this person is a foreign man or an English woman. In this sense, we discover humanities fictions or Enlightenment legacies are unsurprisingly sustained by the paramount distinction between bios and zoe since it takes nothing more than a shift in language to make one killable. Once again, it is Seward who marks this distinction while pacing in his office, pondering on what the Professor said regarding Dracula’s murder: “The Professor says that if we can so treat the Count’s body, it will soon after fall into dust. In such case there would be no evidence against us, in case any suspicion of murder were aroused” (emphasis mine, Dracula 311). There are a few critical facets about the language the professor uses; first, transferring the objectified noun of “it” onto Dracula devalues the amount of personhood Dracula may harbor and so 188 releases the culpability of murder the Crew of Light would possess in his killing. Second, the body must no longer be a body or even a corpse to be murdered, but must turn into dust, a transformation that forces readers to question whether having a body is enough to grant someone the right to life, or in other words, to be recognized as murder in their killing. Third, such language verifies my earlier analysis of marginalized identities’ displacement in their alignment with nonhuman entities. In other words, his transformation into dust post-murder not only serves to further feminize, racialize, and objectify him, as this alignment with dirt, debris, and disease is only projected onto marginalized identities, such as the three vampiric women whose room is filled with dust and who transform into dust itself when traveling, but validates dust as matter out of place, or as matter that has no sanctuary in Dracula. If Dracula’s body turns to dust, and more acutely, if they can make it so that they can treat Dracula’s body in such a way, then the Crew of Light can convince themselves that they are only serving their purpose and their nation by removing matter out of place. Furthermore, Carol J. Adams’ astute connection between language and murder is showcased in the Crew of Light’s logic, when she writes, Language distances us further from animals by naming them as objects, as ‘its’ . . . The generic ‘it’ erases the living, breathing nature of the animals and reifies their object status. The absence of a non-sexist pronoun allows us to objectify the animal world by considering all animals as ‘its.’” (46) While “it” may have a promising non-gendered tone to it, the use of “it” by the Crew of Light does not function to underscore Lucy’s polygamy or Dracula’s gender fluidity, 59 but to their potential prey status. It is a word that threatens to turn its target into an absent referent—an 59 There have been insightful readings performed regarding Dracula’s “baptism of blood” as gender transgressions that allow him to stand in as a “perverse” form of breastfeeding, identifying him as a mother figure, as well as the many ways in which he is depicted as feminine or not staunchly adherent to masculine roles. 189 effaced entity whose death can be looked upon as neither a murder nor the result of the being who is absent. In other words, Dracula’s significance, agency, and influence may be stricken from the narrative; his murder does not refer to the murder of an ancient, aristocratic vampire because it does not refer to a murder at all. Instead, the professor’s deployment of “it” disenfranchises the count’s body from a subject of possession into an object that cannot have possession of its own body. After all, as Adams keenly notes, objects cannot have possessions; a chicken cannot have its wing and so a chicken’s wing is deindividualized and objectified into chicken wing or a leg of lamb, thus offering increasing evidence as to how systemic acts of violence often promote a conceptual misfocusing to relativize and normalize such acts in the precarious rhetoric of murdering nonhuman life. By switching the Crew of Light’s intentions from Dracula to Lucy, the novel reveals another layer of oppression, namely how easily femininity is made prey to these Enlightenment legacies and dichotomous constructs. Curiously, the novel is quite transparent in explicating how Lucy’s feminine status already relegates her to the realm of the nonhuman and thus to the realm of an effaceable object long before her ostensible transference to thinghood occurs. In this respect, unlike the consuming and generalizing he used to designate all potent forms of life (such as the Crew of Light and at times, Dracula), she is constructed as a minor power and a non-threat (read: women and nonhumans). Thus, Adams writes, “He” is used when “whatever its size, the animal is presented as an active power and a possible danger to the speaker.” “She” on the other hand signals a “minor power.” . . . “She” represents not only a “minor power,” but a vanquished power, a soon-to-be-killed powerless animal. (54) Hence, Lucy’s feminization “naturally” translates into a soon-to-be “it,” and the novel does not disappoint in demonstrating how easily these legacies can marginalize bodies in their exclusive language. By the same systemic violence enacted on a supposedly antithetical body, Lucy—an 190 engaged, heterosexual Englishwoman—becomes an “it”; an absent referent that motions toward her loss of agency and autonomy in her infamous murder/rape scene. In fact, her absent referent saturates her death scene, predating Haraway’s explanation of how, “Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic” (Cyborg 16). Lucy’s naming is an obvious signpost of her demotion in the Crew of Light’s affection as they deploy their language to devalue Lucy’s role as an animate and biological being. Whether Lucy is referred to as “she” or “it,” her death and penetration does little to fracture her vulnerability from its engendered inferiority and nonhuman precarity. Focusing on the language the Crew of Light deploys through a posthumanist lens, or more specifically, through the intersectional lens of gender and animal studies, allows readers to discover that these legacies have always already established Lucy as both an object of affection and a repulsive being that this logic is made to kill. It is not Lucy’s infection but her resistance to heteronormative and humanist constructs that make her death already a given. Finally, to verify this criticism the novel offers one more integral scene in Lucy’s death to staunchly align her on the more vulnerable, or conventionally, the more animal-side of the Enlightenment’s human/animal binary. Before murdering Lucy, the Crew of Light enter her tomb, where Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he made assurance of Lucy’s coffin. (my italics, Dracula 183) Emphasizing Van Helsing’s actions, or the seemingly inconspicuous and accidental dropping of the sperm on Lucy’s coffin, not only validates the readings that extract the gender violence in this scene, but as I mentioned, literally solidifies Lucy’s alignment with the animal, and thus killable, body. The sperm of the candle implies Van Helsing is holding one of the most common 191 candle substances for Victorians, spermaceti, which could only be obtained from the Sperm Whale’s penetrated skull; an animal hunted to near brink extinction for its resources. As a result, the way in which Van Helsing holds the candle brings attention to the absent referent or livelihood from which the candle was created, thus further ingraining the concomitant vulnerability of feminine and nonhuman life in the hands of Enlightenment legacies. Neither the Sperm Whale nor Lucy have any way to speak against the violence performed on their bodies, each appearing marginal in their own death scenes. By focusing the reader’s attention on the way this sperm congeals onto Lucy’s coffin, the novel can not only be read as reifying the violent and penetrative rhetoric that has occurred in this scene but assures that by aligning Lucy’s feminine identity with the nonhuman animal (and most significantly, already vanquished body), Van Helsing also assures Lucy’s silence and inevitable death. Whatever appellation the Crew of Light might hope to bestow on her, the carnophallogocentric rhetoric engaged here ensures Lucy cannot be read as occupying any state other than vulnerability while in the hands of the Crew of Light. Yet, this chapter is not simply dedicated to illustrating how the human/animal binary is promoted through Enlightenment legacies but is intent on revealing the ways in which these uncontainable traits perpetually hover and attach to all forms of being to fracture and suspend our humanist ontology. Like the wolves’ ability to stake their sovereignty and agency despite Harker’s and Dracula’s oppressive lenses, and like Dracula’s ability to paralyze Harker while encased in dirt, Lucy is also able to challenge the framework that aims to position her as vulnerable, passive, and weak, namely by reframing the significance of her entanglement with other forms of being. In other words, her correlation with abject matter or matter out of place, along with all the marginalized identities that are conglomerated into this side of the animal 192 binary, does not necessarily denote vulnerability, passivity, or weakness as the only traits Lucy can possess. Rather, if we take into light Judith Butler’s notions that vulnerability is not the antithesis of resistance but that it is the necessary condition of resistance, we come to understand how Lucy can stake her agency in the moments where she is most oppressed. It is only by the Crew of Light’s conventional binary that we come to accept that “Dominant conceptions of vulnerability and of action presuppose (and support) the idea that paternalism is the site of agency, and vulnerability, understood only as victimization and passivity, invariably the site of inaction” (Vulnerability 10), but what might happen if, like this chapter intends, we disrupted these notions? What about our ontological and epistemological framework would change “if vulnerability were imagined as one of the conditions of the very possibility of resistance” (10). Lucy would not represent victimhood and oppression but would propose new and alternative methods for displaying agency and autonomy in the wake of gender and ecocritical violence, as we witness in her subtle battle with the Crew of Light. The scene in which the Crew of Light enter Lucy’s tomb is indeed a battle for power, as the Crew of Light’s carnophallogocentric language attempts to diminish Lucy to the supposedly weakened realm of object status. Significantly, this object status is also ensured by surrounding Lucy with the Holy Sacrament, trapping her in a Judeo-Christian construct that serves to immobilize her. However, this immobilization and objectification does not necessarily stage her vulnerability nor mark her impotence. Instead, Lucy can only be identified as vulnerable if we continue to consider immobility and object status as an inferior state excluded from human exceptionalism. If we fracture and reframe these dichotomous penchants and instead adopt a more ecofeminist lens, then we discover that such inanimation offers significant consequences for what it means be a living, sentient, and sovereign being. Thus, Lucy is not helpless in this 193 vegetative state because, according to Adams, to be vegetative was not always synonymous with weakness, vulnerability, femininity, and stagnancy, but once meant to be lively and active; a state that did not operate within dichotomies of masculinity and femininity or animate and inanimate life, but fruitfully laid between or outside these binaries. What frightens the Crew of Light then is that this non-dichotomous existence is possible and that it directly exposes the fictions that these Enlightenment legacies produce. In unshackling these constructions from their dichotomous containers, both Dracula’s and Lucy’s ostensibly vulnerable states are critically reoriented into moments of resistance. Their presence in the novel challenges the heteronormative, able-bodied, humanist constructions that are projected onto them by more privileged bodies and allows us to crucially expand the purview of what counts as life in these imperial encounters. Regardless of the Crew of Light’s ardent attempts to immobilize and silence these characters, readers still observe their inherent right to life, and come to understand that it is only by the Crew of Light’s violence and assault that these marginal identities become “dehumanized” in a conventional sense. Rather than abide by the Crew of Light’s ideal hierarchies, what is exciting about Dracula’s and Lucy’s presence is how they offer alternative livelihoods. Certainly, the Crew of Light hopes to see “the traces of care and pain and waste” (Dracula 197) on Lucy’s body because of the state it occupies, but instead they are revolted by the degree of recognition, vigor, and resistance emanating from an immobilized and supposedly vulnerable form. As a result, while these moments are all too quickly removed from the narrative, centralizing these moments’ potential allows us to reimagine life outside of dichotomies, disturb binaries of human/nonhuman life, extend our recognition of livelihood, recognize vulnerability as a condition of resistance rather than a mutual opposition, and offer up other animacies that linger in Dracula’s peripheries. 194 Dracula then once again predates another posthumanist concept coined and explicated by Mel Y. Chen and entertains frightfully imaginative alternatives for life in the midst of empire. That is, both Dracula and Lucy showcase the potential of understanding life through degrees of animacy rather than through dichotomous realms of life and death. Chen explains, Using animacy as a central construct, rather than, say, “life” or “liveliness” . . . helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times, particularly with regard to humanity's partners in definitional crime: animality (as its analogue or limit), nationality, race, security, environment, and sexuality. Animacy activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/ death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural body/cyborg. In its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might theorize them. (3) While Lucy’s and Dracula’s degree of animacy might attempt to objectify, victimize, and diminish their personhood when perceived through the more conventional dichotomies of the Enlightenment, rewriting the potency of these animacies allows Dracula to playfully revise and subversively critique imperialist penchants and engendered constructs. Examining their animacy disrupts the normative lenses through which we view their victimhood, and as a result, unbinds us from thinking of them solely as abject or peripheral, but as central to a posthumanist future. However, the novel’s ultimate lack of diversity is perhaps the most significant insight the novel has to offer and why Critical Entanglements finishes its posthumanist exploration with this canonical text. While this project resurrects alternative methodologies and narratives that arise when we center nonhuman life, it does not hope to erase the human/animal binary. Instead, as I have argued, erasing the distinction between humans and other species risks assimilating, appropriating, sympathizing, and thus effacing the diversity of this biopolitical sphere, and Dracula illustrates just how easily and normalized these penchants are. After all, Dracula, and all that he stands for in his difference, is not vanquished but inoculated into the Crew of Light’s 195 progress. In baptizing Mina, Dracula allows the vampire to live on, but in reinserting Mina into a heteronormative and imperial family structure and narrative, the Crew of Light ensures they can police, direct, and utilize her potency for their own agenda. This reinsertion ensures that her final description is that of a “gallant” woman, a description which might seem as if she has broken through conventional engendered binaries, but in reality, has just been inaugurated into the realm of the bios to which the Crew of Light serve as gatekeepers. Unlike Lucy and Dracula, Mina does not perpetuate the disruption to Enlightenment legacies and dichotomous constructs, but adopts masculine constructs to mark her visibility, freedom, and privilege within the Crew of Light’s circle, thus mitigating the threat these radically distinct identities once offered. Mina is not the only symbol of this inoculation but bears a son who appears to be the result of this human/animal hybridization. Born from a member of the Crew of Light and a gallant woman who has Dracula’s blood coursing through her veins, baby Quincey does not stand in as a posthumanist emblem but an admonition. His amalgamation of names signifies the Crew of Light’s imperial penchants to consume, assimilate, consolidate, and thus eradicate identities that pose a threat to the British empire, which is why his name is simply abbreviated as Quincey—the deceased American. Furthermore, his birth is what allows Harker to culminate Dracula in a strikingly monologic note of domestic bliss and heteronormativity. This contrast to the radical events, identities, and frameworks the Crew of Light encountered, posits this bliss as an immunization to these imperial threats. By bearing and naming Quincey, Dracula illustrates how effacing the human/animal binary does nothing more than diminish the distinct presence, autonomy, and agency of non-human life. In the wake of their oppression, humanism becomes more than human. In this respect, Dracula subversively and insightfully illustrates imperialism’s 196 propensity to fetishize the animal body and posthumanism’s danger of holding such identities as talismans for human salvation. In astutely exploring the fetishization and immunization of the animal body, Shukin writes, The logic of immunization involves injecting a “sick” bit of an animal’s body into one’s own in order to build immunity in the event of future contamination. Derrida links the defensive logic of immunization to the act of autobiography, which marks a desire to inscribe the individual as a distinct, self-same subject. He points to the immanent dangers of an immunological logic of self-defense at work in attempts to secure both the autos of the individual and that of the species. ‘Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living would be an immunizing movement (a movement of safety, of salvage and salvation of the safe, the holy, the indemnified, of virginal and intact nudity), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing, as is every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, autonomous, auto-referential movement. (221) This defensive act explains the monologic of the novel’s final note and form throughout, serving as an autobiographical catharsis for Harker. The fact that Harker can hardly believe such threats once existed marks his and the Crew of Light’s salvation. It appears neither the wolves, nor the women, nor other countries can now threaten English livelihood, given all threats to their domestic bliss have become innocuously injected into England as a future defense. Instead, the vampiric qualities of imperialism and anthropocentrism live on in the wake of foreign and environmental genocide; disarming the threat, placating and supporting an imperial agenda, and consequently silencing any radical alterity readers may have found in the novel. Bram Stoker’s Dracula then offers exciting and enriching posthumanist potentials, subversively showcasing Victorians’ frustrations with the constricting containers of Enlightenment legacies and liberal humanism. The novel’s playful attempt to showcase animacies’ ontological network does not solely reveal anxieties regarding racial, class, domestic, foreign, and interspecies relationships, but extends a critical polyphony to the characters it 197 ostensibly attempts to silence and marginalize into a metonymic perspective. Yet, the most significant insight the novel may have to offer is how we address, wrestle, and interact with these forms. Regardless of whether Stoker intended to villainize Harker and the Crew of Light in their environmental racism and imperial tendencies, what is significant about this text, and all the canonical works this project explores, is how nonhuman bodies posit their sovereignty, cooperation, resistance, and agency in a manner that does not mimic humanist constructs but in fact intervenes in humanism’s supposed universalism. Such subversive criticism then might pose itself as an admonition for the turn of the century and our present moment; extending a humanist umbrella over these characters does not grant them more visibility or protection, but effaces them entirely, only serving to further privilege the already central identities that claim to be their allies or profess to protect the borders of their biopolitical climate. Rather than applauding the Crew of Light’s efforts, Dracula, regardless of intention, does not posit the Crew of Light as “white saviors” but as culpable of genocide and environmental degradation. Such a criticism adds nuance to the novel’s supposedly placid culmination; “All that has been was blotted out” takes a sinister connotation in this reading, especially for a novel concerned with record-keeping, communication, cooperation, progress, and travel. The once richly populated novel now lingers over a lacuna of endangered identities who are either so entirely consumed by the novel’s vampirism (most adroitly practiced by the Crew of Light) that we witness an ostensibly harmless hybridity—a hybridity that barely pays any homage to its referent’s origins, ancestry, or history and instead serves as directionless ersatz—or an unsettling wasteland of which baby Quincey is not even cognizant. The novel’s culmination is then indicative of more than a distress on the Crew of Light’s memory. Instead, Dracula’s focus on ecocidal, species, race, gender, and class trauma displays a subversive yet urgent call—one that resists the homogeny of the narrative and 198 the hegemony of empire and instead orients empire into a diverse and polyphonic history that modernity can never fully erase, not even a century later. Instead, Dracula’s multifaceted trauma asks us to cautiously sit with these dilemmas and explore the urgency of ethically engaging with the critical entanglements of this diverse biosphere. Despite the xenophobic tendencies, class concerns, and dichotomous gender constructs that are explicit in each of these canonical works, I have honed in on moments of resistance that ask us to reframe our readings through an interdisciplinary perspective. Following a narrative methodology that reads literature through an umbrella of broadly defined posthumanism, or through an intersection of Victorian studies, ecofeminism, postcolonial, ecocritism, and zoocriticism, does not result in an attempt to speak for the voiceless but attempts to expose the frameworks and legacies that fallaciously illustrate these identities to be silent in the first place. 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