The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy

January 2014

Volume 129 Number 1

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••Editor

Simon Gikandi Princeton University

Managing Editor Judy Goulding

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Editorial BoardEvelyne Ender, 2014

Hunter College, City University of New YorkJulia Hell, 2015

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University of California, Santa BarbaraRobert J. Corber, 2016

Trinity College

(continued)

4 A Statement of Editorial Policy

5 Forthcoming in PMLA

5 Features in PMLA

7 Editor’s Column—Provincializing English

•• 18 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling’s Lamarckian Fantasy

Allen MacDuffie

35 “The Natural History of My Inward Self”: Sensing Character

in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such

S. Pearl Brilmyer

52 “Not Quite—Content—”: Emily Dickinson Retouches a Paint

Mixed by John Quincy Adams and Oliver Wendell Holmes

Phoebe Putnam

71 Ancient History, American Time: Chesnutt’s Outsider

Classicism and the Present Past

John Levi Barnard

••the changing profession

87 Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution

David James and Urmila Seshagiri

theories and methodologies

101 Maurice Sendak: A Tribute

Contributions by George R. Bodmer, John Cech, Derick Dreher, U. C.

Knoepflmacher, Philip Nel, Amy Sonheim, Jan Susina, and Maria Tatar

125 Forum

Thomas Claviez and Petar Ramadanovic

128 Minutes of the MLA Executive Council

134 In Memoriam

136 Index of Advertisers

159 Abstracts

Contents JANUARY 2014

THE PLOT OF “RED DOG,” THE PENULTIMATE STORY IN RUDYARD KIP-

ling’s second Jungle Book (1895), hinges on Mowgli’s attempt to save his surrogate family, the Seonee Wolf Pack, from a ram-

paging horde of wild dogs. Perched on the branch of a tree, Mow-gli taunts the dogs (known as “dholes”) until the leader of the pack makes a mistake: “At last, made furious beyond his natural strength, he bounded up seven or eight feet clear of the ground. hen Mowgli’s hand shot out like the head of a tree- snake, and gripped him by the scruf of his neck. . . . With his let hand he reached for his knife and cut of the red, bushy tail, linging the dhole back to earth again” (293). his moment is crucial to the narrative, since the dholes’ ha-tred of Mowgli will induce them to chase him into the elaborate trap he has prepared. But it is also important for the evolutionary questions it raises and how the implications of those questions af-fect our reading of he Jungle Books. For Mowgli does not just cut of the dhole’s tail, he mocks him with a vision of mutilated genera-tions: “Nay, but consider, wise rat of the Dekkan. here will now be many litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when the sand is hot. Go home, Red Dog, and cry that an ape has done this” (294). he idea of heritable punishment is a familiar conceit from fables and folktales, of course, but it also alludes to the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which was enjoying a resurgence of scientiic and popular interest while Kipling wrote he Jungle Books.

Although Just So Stories is commonly described as a collection of Lamarckian fables, he Jungle Books has long been associated with a Darwinian imaginary.1 In a contemporaneous review in the At-

lantic Monthly, the stories were hailed as an investigation of animal psychology and an imaginative elaboration of Darwinian thought

ALLEN MACDUFFIE is an assistant profes-

sor of English at the University of Texas,

Austin. His first book, Victorian Literature,

Energy, and the Ecological Imagination,

will be published by Cambridge Univer-

sity Press in 2014. This essay is from his

book project about Lamarckian evolu-

tionary discourse and Victorian fiction.

The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling’s

Lamarckian Fantasy

allen macduffie

[ P M L A

© 2014 allen macduffie PMLA 129.1 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association of America18

(“R. Kipling” 858). Kipling, however, declared himself repulsed by Darwin’s work: “I’ve been trying once more to plough through he De-

scent of Man and every iber . . . of my body revolted against it” (Writings 114). he seem-ing contradiction, I argue, demonstrates not so much the reviewer’s misreading of Kipling as confusion over Darwin’s ideas at this mo-ment. In some contexts, Darwinism denoted something speciic: evolution by natural se-lection. But in others it served as an umbrella term for any science or philosophy of evolu-tionary transformation.2 Given the lexical uncertainty, the Atlantic reviewer is not nec-essarily misguided to invoke Darwin’s name in reference to he Jungle Books. Neither are present- day critics who have linked Kipling’s work to Darwin’s.3 Seth Lerer has recently argued that “if the Jungle Books are Kipling’s Descent of Man, then the Just So Stories are his Origin of Species” (181).

Such an analogy frames Kipling’s sto-ries in broadly evolutionary terms, whereas, as I hope to show, The Jungle Books can be read as a participant in specific fierce late Victorian debates over alternative scientific paradigms of species change. If we define Darwinian more narrowly (as many Victori-ans did) to signify not “evolution” but “evo-lution by natural selection,” then we can see the ways in which he Jungle Books functions as a profoundly anti-Darwinian narrative and as part of a widespread neo- Lamarckian reaction against the troublingly wasteful, nonhierarchical, and nonteleological natural- selection mechanism.4 In what follows, I position Kipling’s Mowgli stories in the late- nineteenth- century resurgence of Lamarck-ism known as the “eclipse of Darwinism.”5 he fantastic quality of these stories uniquely expresses the cultural logic of Lamarckism, which played a crucial role in late Victorian imperial mythmaking about human and Eu-ropean evolutionary centrality. Lamarckian logic provided ideal underpinnings for nar-ratives of individual development because it

emphasized the value of experience, the direc-tive role of culture, and the potential for active self- shaping. hrough Mowgli’s Lamarckian narrative, the irst Jungle Book can structure a potentially wayward developmental trajectory, embedding Mowgli’s growth in a teleological narrative, stable taxonomic hierarchies, and ordered patterns of metamorphosis. But by the end of the second Jungle Book, as Kipling at-tempts to move Mowgli’s story into historical time, the space that has allowed for the happy convergence of myth and science, fantasy and realism begins to unravel. In this way, The

Jungle Books expresses the elaborate fantasies that underwrote the neo- Lamarckian project and exposes the deeper theoretical vague-ness those fantasies only partially concealed. In tracing these patterns and the relation be-tween scientiic theory and narrative conven-tions, I hope to suggest some of the ways in which a more capacious, less Darwin- centered picture of Victorian evolutionary discourse might open up new possibilities for our read-ings of the period’s literary texts.6

[ i ]Lamarck’s theory, described in Philosophie

zoologique (1809), was a significant part of pre- Darwinian evolutionary and material-ist sciences and, in British radical circles in the 1820s and 1830s, an alternative to the precepts of mainstream Anglican natural theology.7 Although Lamarck articulated a comprehensive theory of the origin and direc-tion of life, the term Lamarckism eventually became synonymous with one component of that theory: the inheritance of acquired char-acteristics. A key to this mechanism was the role individual efort, responding to environ-mental pressures, played in shaping heritable traits, both instinctual and morphological. Lamarck writes:

he bird which is drawn to the water by its need of finding there the prey on which it

1 2 9 . 1 ] Allen MacDuffie 19

lives, separates the digits of its feet in try-ing to strike the water and move about on the surface. he skin which unites these dig-its at their base acquires the habit of being stretched by these continually repeated sepa-rations of the digits; thus in course of time there are formed large webs which unite the digits of ducks, geese, etc. (119)

Even ater Darwin articulated the more rigor-ous theory of natural selection in he Origin

of Species (1859), the inheritance of acquired characteristics remained, in principle, a viable evolutionary mechanism. Although Origin solved many problems central to a nascent sci-ence of species change, it also raised questions Darwin could not answer. Nature might “se-lect” one advantageous variation over another, but what caused variations to arise in the irst place? With characteristic modesty, Darwin acknowledges the problem: “our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound. Not in one case out of a hundred can we pretend to assign any reason why this or that part has varied” (155). These conceptual gaps opened space for Lamarckian explanations to take root. To some nineteenth- century biologists like Ernst Haeckel, the inheritance of acquired charac-teristics served as a necessary companion to natural selection, and his Generelle Morpholo-

gie (1866) sought to establish a working alli-ance between the paradigms. Darwin himself increasingly made concessions to Lamarckian mechanisms in The Variation of Plants and

Animals under Domestication (1868), he De-

scent of Man (1870), and his revisions to he

Origin of Species in the 1860s and 1870s.8 But if the inheritance of acquired char-

acteristics and natural selection were by no means incompatible, there were diver-gent opinions about which mechanism was the primary evolutionary driver and which supplementary. By the 1880s lines were being drawn between rival camps. Neo- Darwinians, led by Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann, argued for the com-plete sufficiency of natural selection, while

Lamarckians like Samuel Butler and Alpheus Packard, partly in reaction to Weismann’s perceived dogmatism, sought to relegate natural selection to subsidiary status in the evolutionary process (Bowler, Eclipse, esp. 59). By the 1890s the interest in Lamarckian ideas was so strong that Herbert Spencer, En-gland’s most prominent Lamarckian thinker, could argue in “he Inadequacy of Natural Selection” that “either there has been inheri-tance of acquired characteristics, or there has been no evolution” (346). Although most neo- Lamarckians spoke admiringly of Dar-win, many worked to establish Lamarck as the true progenitor of modern evolutionary science, as the provocative titles of heodor Eimer’s he Origin of Species by Means of In-

heritance of Acquired Characteristics (1888) and Packard’s Lamarck: he Founder of Evo-

lution (1901) testify. Indeed, Packard’s book engages in optative fantasies of an alternative course of Victorian intellectual history:

[H] ad [Lamarck’s] way of looking at this sub-ject prevailed, how much misunderstanding and ill- feeling between theologians and sa-vants would have been avoided! Had his spirit and breadth of view animated both parties, there would not have been the constant and needless opposition on the part of the Church to the grand results of scientiic discovery and philosophy, or too hasty dogmatism and skep-ticism on the part of some scientists. (373)

That last comment suggests the way in which many Victorians found the Lamarck-ian model attractive not just because of what it seemed to explain about evolution but also be-cause it could paint a less threatening picture of the natural world. Whereas under natural selection an organism was simply a vector of genetic transmission (in Gillian Beer’s phrase, “both vehicle and dead end” [Darwin’s Plots 38]), Lamarckian evolution did not abandon the individual to the itness of its inborn bi-ology; instead, as seen in Lamarck’s descrip-tion of the bird at the watering hole, it allowed

20 The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling’s Lamarckian Fantasy [ P M L A

for the active eforts of an organism to shape itself. he changes produced by those eforts are, in turn, preserved and passed down to its ofspring. he neo- Lamarckian psychologist Sylvia Bliss stated that “among the various responses of a developing organism to envi-ronment those proving useful would persist as habits and eventually become organized as instincts” (qtd. in Stocking, “Lamarckian-ism” 246). As David Livingstone has argued, Lamarckism’s developmental teleology pro-vided a source of “cosmic comfort” and an evolutionary paradigm more easily reconcil-able with natural theology (19).9

A second key component in the neo- Lamarckian paradigm was the idea that on-togeny (the development of the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the species)—what Haeckel referred to as the “biogenetic law” (140). In he Vestiges of the

Natural History of Creation (1844), the book that irst popularized Lamarckian evolution in the En glish- speaking world (Moore 143), Robert Chambers describes this mechanism: “each animal passes, in the course of its ger-minal history, through a series of changes resembling the permanent forms of the vari-ous orders of animals inferior to it in the scale” (198–99). Recapitulation theory thus established an implicit teleology and hierar-chy of developmental stages. Although the theory traces its conceptual roots to early- nineteenth- century German Romantic sci-ence (rather than to Lamarck), it became a cornerstone of neo- Lamarckian thought.10 Recapitulation suggested an essentially ad-ditive process whereby the more advanced organisms were those that had grated new, advantageous qualities onto the old; the La-marckian evolutionary model posited the mechanism through which these additions were obtained. Although it is a matter of on-going debate whether Darwin subscribed to embryonic recapitulation, its consolidating linearity sits uncomfortably with the aleatory, nondirectional logic of natural selection.11

hrough the process of acquiring char-acteristics, transmitting them, and recapitu-lating them embryonically, experience was imagined to be, in efect, “remembered” by the body. he seeming isomorphism between heredity and memory was not simply a con-venient heuristic for neo- Lamarckian think-ers; it was a theoretical linchpin. Since the process by which experience was converted into heritable material was unknown, the memory analogy had to bear a great deal of explanatory weight.12 In fact, it served as a kind of double analogy: the organism’s expe-riences were stored as instincts or changes to its morphology, and the transmission of those new characteristics to ofspring was a form of intergenerational remembering. Embryonic recapitulation, therefore, was the material chronicle of ancestral history. Laura Otis ar-gues that such theories of organic memory

promised the expansion of knowledge and, more important, the restoration of dignity and a sense of purpose. Darwin’s version of evolution had shaken Europeans’ conidence, but Haeckel’s and Lamarck’s teleological ver-sion and the organic memory theory that rested upon it glorified Europeans’ posi-tion in the universe. . . . In short, the theory promised eternal life. (25)

In this way, the anxiety about oblivion and forgetting that Beer has described as a central component of the Victorian cultural imagi-nary was assuaged by the automatic work of organic retention (“Origins,” esp. 63).

[ ii ]We may read the story of Mowgli’s ascent to “Master of the Jungle” as not simply a story of growth but also a narrative in which a La-marckian mnemonics informs the develop-mental trajectory. At irst Mowgli must recall consciously the education he receives from Baloo, Bagheera, and various members of the wolf pack, and Kipling puts great emphasis


on the active work of remembering. In the early story “Kaa’s Hunting,” in which Mowgli is kidnapped by a tribe of monkeys, he uses his training in various animal languages to send word to his allies: “‘He has not forgotten to use his tongue,’ said Baloo, with a chuckle of pride. ‘To think of one so young remem-bering the Master Word for the birds too while he was being pulled across- trees!’” (34). he story hinges on discrete acts of recall and recitation, his ability to do the animals in dif-ferent voices. But by “Red Dog,” the climax of the second book, Mowgli’s lessons have be-come encoded in his very person, a fact con-veyed through his embodied metamorphic language: “‘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’” (291). he trajec-tory suggests Mowgli’s journey through he

Jungle Books as a whole, from embryonic “na-ked frog” (9) and surrogate wolf in the irst book to the threshold of human maturity in the second. It also corresponds to the vari-ous tasks he must perform in this particular story. “Red Dog” is thus explicitly framed as a narrative of recapitulation: Mowgli’s development through all the stories is to be consolidated in one inal test, and his attain-ment of mastery, in turn, recapitulates the developmental telos through which “Man” becomes Master of the Jungle. His success over the dholes hinges not on reciting speciic lessons or commands but on performing cer-tain learned physical actions that have been, in Bliss’s words, “organized as instincts.” His embodied remembrance of his training is put in the service of his conscious strategiz-ing, which will determine the evolutionary destiny of the entire pack; without Mowgli’s intervention, extinction awaits. If, as the early- nineteenth- century German anatomist Lorenz Oken argues, “the animal kingdom is but a dismemberment of the highest ani-mal, i.e. of Man” (494), then Mowgli’s story is

about remembering the human, in his mind and through his somatic constitution. Kipling here echoes another evolutionary children’s tale he knew well, Charles Kingsley’s The

Water Babies, in which an orphan boy reca-pitulates the stages of animal development in order to remember his full humanity.13

“Red Dog,” then, draws on Lamarck-ian fantasies of converting experience into instinct and tracing humankind’s path to becoming the culminating igure of the evo-lutionary process. Ater defeating the dhole, Mowgli has his supremacy ratified by the abjection of his former teachers before him: “the panther’s head dropped. Bagheera knew his master” (303). But to attain this position Mowgli not only calls on an explicitly neo- Lamarckian model of change—cutting off the dhole’s tail, recapitulating his own tra-jectory—but also confronts what looks like a challenge to this model, which ipso facto in-volves a threat to his aspirations to mastery. With the help of Kaa the python, he plans his trap for the dholes: he will lure them to the lair of the “Little People of the Rock,” the “fu-rious, black wild bees of India” (287). Kipling describes the location:

The length of the gorge on both sides was hung as it were with black shimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were the clotted millions of the sleep-ing bees. here were other lumps and festoons and things like decayed tree- trunks studded on the face of the rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of the windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy rotten trash had rolled down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock- face. As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a honey- loaded comb turning over or falling away somewhere in the dark galleries; then a booming of angry wings, and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the wasted honey, guttering along till it lipped over some ledge in the open air and sluggishly trickled down on the twigs. here was a tiny little beach, not ive feet broad, on one side


of the river, and that was piled high with the rubbish of uncounted years. (287–88)

It is a striking description, a vision of extrava-gant fecundity and biophysical disorder found nowhere else in he Jungle Books. he empha-sis on such qualities aligns the bees’ lair with a Darwinian picture of generation, elimina-tion, and natural ineiciency. Indeed, in Ori-

gin Darwin uses the bee to illustrate what he termed in a letter the “clumsy, wasteful, blun-dering low & horridly cruel works of nature” (“To Joseph Hooker”):

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates. . . . [W] e need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the as-tonishing waste of pollen by our ir- trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters. . . .14 (412)

For many Lamarckians, this picture epitomized the world of natural selection. Butler found that such a model “arouse[s] instinctive loathing; it is my fortunate task to maintain that such a nightmare of waste and death is as baseless as it is repulsive” (308). As the following passage from the Times indicates, the natural- selection mechanism was often confounded with the phenomena it was used to explain:

To this universal law of the greatest economy, the law of natural selection stands in direct an-tagonism as the law of “greatest possible waste” of time and of creative power. . . . [A] ges must elapse and whole generations must perish, and countless generations of the one species be cre-ated and sacriiced, to arrive at one single pair of [a new species]. (qtd. in Wallace 296–97)

his is not so much an argument as a visceral rejection of the idea of natural ineiciency. In contrast to the “law of greatest possible waste,”

the Lamarckian paradigm emphasized con-servation—indeed, Spencer explicitly aligned it with the conservation of energy.15 he indi-vidual life was not to be discarded in unfath-omable heaps of carcasses but to be stored in the living matrix of future generations.

The lair of the “Little People” in “Red Dog” opens a vista into the natural world that ref lects the generative nightmare and “in-stinctive loathing” occasioned by the natural- selection mechanism. As Kipling describes it, the lair is a place of waste and death, where intimations of oblivion, “the rubbish of un-counted years,” disrupt faith in the retentive power of the natural world. The anthropo-morphizing gestures (“velvet curtains,” “new cities”) are tellingly ringed with obscurity and disorder (“other lumps and festoons and things,” “huge masses of spongy rotten trash”). his is a place in which the human can ind no stable purchase, and the anthro-pomorphic, which has until now served the narrative as a means of ordering the jungle, becomes part of the indecipherable mass, swallowed up as another element in a hash of descriptors that allow the eye no comfortable center of focus. It recalls James Krasner’s ac-count of Darwin’s resistant representational techniques in he Origin of Species: “Darwin portrays the natural world as lacking distinct visual forms through the use of rhetorical techniques designed to confuse and disorient the reader’s mental vision—imaginative illu-sions that parallel the perceptual illusions of physical vision” (119).

No other locale in The Jungle Books poses such a challenge to the perceiving eye. And this scene, not coincidentally, presents Mowgli with the most potent challenge to his ascent to the top of the natural hierar-chy. “Tell me, Master of the Jungle,” Kaa asks him, “who is the Master of the Jungle?” To which Mowgli whispers, “hese” (287). he paradoxical question makes sense if we see in this scene a conlict not between competing species but between competing evolutionary


schemata. “Red Dog” is about the threat of

extermination posed by the dholes, but it is

also about the threat the “clotted millions”

pose to the very idea of order. In the bees

we have a species that, unlike all the other

animals of the jungle, cannot be threatened,

tricked, bargained with, or stared out of

countenance. hey reside beyond the novel’s

anthropomorphized natural paradigm and

pay no heed to Mowgli’s status in the organic

hierarchy or to his developmental telos.

The title of Butler’s final book on evo-

lutionary inheritance, Luck or Cunning, en-

capsulates, as Peter Bowler notes, the entire

difference between the neo- Darwinian and

neo- Lamarckian paradigms (Eclipse 74). For

Butler a Darwinian world was wasteful and

mindless, governed solely by chance. A La-

marckian world, in contrast, was a world of

cunning, in which purposeful, conscious ac-

tivity increasingly came to shape individual

and evolutionary history. Mowgli’s plan for

the dholes arises only after he hears an old

story about a buck that escaped a pursuing

horde by running past the lair of the bees. he

buck’s survival was a result of mere chance: he

“came hither from the south, not knowing the

Jungle, a Pack on his trail . . . made blind by

fear” (288). But the story is remembered by the

Jungle and transmitted for future use. hus,

ater infuriating the dholes with his tail trim-

ming, Mowgli follows the pattern of the ear-

lier narrative, leading them on the same chase

to the hives and allowing the insects to once

again overwhelm the pursuers. his new story

recapitulates the old, but this time the actions

are deliberate. A plot governed by chance be-

comes a plot governed by strategy and efort.

he red dog is cousin to the wolf, and, as

Darwin tells us, “competition should be most

severe between allied forms, which ill nearly

the same place in the economy of nature; but

probably in no case could we precisely say

why one species has been victorious over an-

other in the great battle of life” (Origin 77).

But here the mindless (and narratively indis-

tinct) forces of invasion, warfare, and exter-

mination that play such large roles in Origin’s

selection plot are managed by the agencies of

memory and thought. he proligate natural

power embodied in the bees is instrumental-

ized by Mowgli’s planning, and the narrative

logic of “Red Dog” presses disorder and waste

into the service of a coherent narrative of in-

cipient mastery. In this way, Mowgli’s direct

reference to recapitulation and the Lamarck-

ian mutilation he visits on future generations

of dholes reveal his conscious embrace of

an evolutionary paradigm congenial to his

dreams of command; meanwhile, his mas-

terly use of the wild Indian bees overcomes

a vision of natural selection inimical to his

sense of hierarchy, order, and exceptionalism.

[ iii ]Although my argument has thus far been

centered on the representation of the

human- animal relation in Kipling’s work,

the Lamarckian inheritance paradigm had

signiicant implications for the understand-

ing of human cultural and racial difference

in nineteenth- century anthropological dis-

course. As Lewis Petronovich argues, a good

deal of Victorian evolutionary anthropology

was “based on the assumptions that strict

Darwinism had no relevance to the under-

standing of social evolution. Inheritance of

acquired characteristics was considered the

important, and perhaps chief, cause of hu-

man social evolution, with natural selection

of little importance” (42). For many Lamarck-

ians, including Spencer, Lester Frank Ward,

and W. B. Carpenter, Western culture had

created a virtuous, accelerating inheritance

cycle—as Bowler describes it, “a higher level

of culture stimulates greater use of the brain

and thus increases the race’s mental capac-

ity, which in turn paves the way for further

cultural growth” (Non- Darwinian Revolu-

tion 138). Conversely, the supposedly indolent

savages had created a self- fueling negative


feedback loop. Kipling’s father, Lockwood,

describes this Lamarckian dynamic in his es-

say “A Word on Indian Progress”: “Languor

is the normal physical state of the town- bred

Indian mother, and resignation is her chief

characteristic. . . . [B] y the iron law of hered-

ity, the peculiarities of their character and the

limitations of their mental powers are faith-

fully transmitted to their children” (qtd. in

Havholm 163). In this way, as George Stock-

ing argues, neo- Lamarckian anthropology en-

dowed culture with “a crucially determining

role” in human evolutionary history because

it “helped to explain and to validate the cul-

tural progress of mankind in biological terms”

(“Lamarckianism” 256). Culture thus func-

tioned as sign and cause of racial diference.

In a related way, the recapitulation the-

ory that was so often a component of neo-

Lamarckian thinking also biologized racial

hierarchies. Stephen Jay Gould writes:

For anyone who wishes to airm the innate in-

equality of races, few biological arguments can

have more appeal than recapitulation, with its

insistence that children of higher races (in-

variably one’s own) are passing through and

beyond the permanent conditions of adults

in lower races. If adults of lower races are like

white children, then they may be treated as

such—subdued, disciplined, and managed.

(126)

his, of course, is the kind of thinking that

undergirds Kipling’s “he White Man’s Bur-

den” and its infamous description of the

native subject as “half devil and half child”

(359). Gould (132) and Stocking (“Lamarck-

ianism” 253) single out the poem as a crucial

instance of the way Lamarckian conceptions

of species formation and racial divergence

underwrote European paternalism. Reca-

pitulation drew a biological cordon sanitaire

between imperial and native cultures, while

fashioning a kinship that rationalized struc-

tures of domination.

If “The White Man’s Burden” dwells on

the thankless task of educating a recalcitrant

population, The Jungle Books stages a more

complex (though still troubling) negotiation

between the forces of nature, culture, and evo-

lutionary patrimony. “Kaa’s Hunting” tells the

story of Mowgli’s schooling and acculturation

into the ways of the jungle and (not coinciden-

tally) raises the kinds of questions about so-

cial development that were also the subjects of

neo- Lamarckian evolutionary anthropology.

he story signals its Lamarckian allegiances

early on, in a reference to Mowgli’s heritage:

“Mowgli, as a woodcutter’s child, inherited all

sorts of instincts, and used to make little huts

of fallen branches without thinking how he

came to do it, and the Monkey- People, watch-

ing in the trees, considered his play most won-

derful” (27). It is a fanciful moment, but the

idea that a parent’s professional skills would so

directly encode themselves onto the bodies of

ofspring was at this time widely held. Grant

Allen, in a discussion of heredity in 1890, ar-

gues that “a talent for music is developed and

transmitted in musical families” and that

“special muscles and muscular aptitudes are

developed and transmitted in the families of

acrobats and tumblers” (537). his Lamarck-

ian moment in “Kaa’s Hunting” is pivotal, be-

cause it sets the terms for the complex allegory

of inheritance that the rest of the story devel-

ops. Notice that at the very moment Mowgli

activates his native inheritance, he draws the

attention of the “Monkey- People,” who put in

their own claim on his body by asserting kin-

ship and, later, by physically seizing him. If

Mowgli’s hut- building instincts represent the

positive legacy carried in his native “blood,”

then the Monkey- People (also known as the

“Bandar- log”) represent the dark side of that

background, the shitless elements that lurk in

the jungle and represent the genetic drag on

his development. Baloo tells Mowgli:

I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle

for all the peoples of the jungle—except the


Monkey- Folk who live in the trees. hey have no law. hey are outcasts. . . . hey have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great afairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. (26)

he forgetfulness of the Bandar- log suggests a cultural vacuum and, in a Lamarckian paradigm, a state of evolutionary stagna-tion in which no lasting progress can occur. hus, three vectors of inheritance compete for Mowgli’s body in this story: the useful knowl-edge encoded in his woodcutter’s genes, the insipid anarchy of the monkeys, and the order transmitted through training in the “Jungle Law.” he allegory is structured by the con-licts between and among these various forces.

he Bandar- log at irst fascinate Mowgli, since they represent an alternative to Baloo’s disciplinary regime: “When Baloo hurt my head . . . I went away, and the gray apes came down from the trees and had pity on me” (25). But this fascination quickly ends, and when they carry him off, the initial affec-tive or psychological captivation becomes a mere physical bondage from which he seeks to escape: “For a time he was afraid of being dropped; then he grew angry but knew better than to struggle, and then he began to think” (29). This moment echoes the recapitula-tive trajectories we have seen elsewhere, as Mowgli’s reaction “evolves” from basic fear through anger to conscious strategizing and emotional management rooted in cultural training. As Beer has shown, in late Victorian evolutionary discourse emotional reactions like fear were oten coded as simultaneously childish and primitive, to be “controlled, sup-pressed, outgrown” through the maturation of the individual and the species alike (Dar-

win’s Plots 220). Mowgli’s training involves his knowledge of the “Master Words” of the jungle, which he uses not simply to commu-nicate with other jungle creatures but also to insist on ties of mutual responsibility based in

biological commonality: “We be of one blood thou and I,” he says to Rann the kite, to the cobras he encounters in the ruined city, and to Kaa the python, who rescues him (29, 39, 40). Mowgli’s facility with these various lin-guistic codes indicates not just the mastery of diferent kinds of cultural knowledge but also the embedding of that knowledge into his very self so that culture and biology, train-ing and blood, knowing and being become indissociable. If, on one level, the insistence on shared blood indicates a broadly conceived evolutionary point of view in which com-mon ancestry unites organisms as dissimilar as men, birds, and snakes, it also suggests a Lamarckian understanding of the malleabil-ity of an organism’s genetic architecture and the transformative dialectic between train-ing and instinct. hus, the allegorical world of the beast fable, in which diferent animal types embody diferent moral qualities, meets the transformative dynamism of Lamarck-ian evolution, in which the willed exercise of those qualities produces that embodiment.

The Bandar- log represent a threat to Mowgli precisely because apes claim the clos-est ties of blood kinship to humans. Likewise, insofar as they are meant to represent a na-tive human civilization, they threaten his de-velopment because their genetic ties conjure the specter of cultural atavism, or simply raise the fact of an unwanted consanguinity.16 But “Kaa’s Hunting” is about uncovering these ties to reconfigure them. Mowgli’s inner states, and the forces competing within him, must be fully externalized so they can be managed through identiication, habit, and will. By sto-ry’s end, we are let with the counterintuitive (but, under this paradigm, explicable) notion that Mowgli shares more blood with a python than with an ape. “Have a care, Manling,” Kaa tells him, “that I do not mistake thee for a monkey some twilight. . . .” To which Mow-gli replies, “We be of one blood, thou and I. . . . I take my life from thee, to- night” (43). The monkey in Mowgli has become a mere


shadow, a matter of supericial resemblance,

while a new origin is established for the fu-

ture course of his life. If, as we have seen, the

inheritance of acquired characteristics was

grounded in the idea of organic memory,

“Kaa’s Hunting” reveals the way in which that

memory could function selectively, allowing

unwanted features of an organism’s genetic

history to be “forgotten” through the right

kinds of future- oriented habits and discipline.

As Cannon Schmitt (50–56) and Rose-

mary Jann (288–93) have shown, Darwin’s

anthropomorphic tendencies allow him to in-

dulge in his own genealogical fantasies at the

end of he Descent of Man. Darwin writes:

He who has seen a savage in his native land

will not feel much shame, if forced to ac-

knowledge that the blood of some more hum-

ble creature lows in his veins. For my own

part I would as soon be descended from that

heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded

enemy in order to save the life of his keeper,

or from that old baboon, who descending

from the mountains, carried away in triumph

his young comrade from a crowd of aston-

ished dogs—as from a savage who delights to

torture his enemies . . . treats his wives like

slaves, knows no decency and is haunted by

the grossest superstitions. (689)

Here the conversion of the concept of ge-

nealogical “descent” into the narrative act

of “descending” turns moral heroism into a

means of resisting the power of potentially

degrading genetic ties. The spatial meta-

phor of ancestry is momentarily remade into

a narrative world not unlike Kipling’s, in

which willed movement through an imag-

ined space expresses and produces freedom

from genealogical burdens. Both narratives,

it is worth noting, are stories of emancipation

from captors. But Kipling’s genealogical alle-

gory in “Kaa’s Hunting” is more elaborately

imagined and his genetic model more radi-

cally malleable than Darwin’s. Because the

Monkey- People can represent the savage hu-

man and the bestial parts of animal nature,

while the Jungle- People represent the law-

like human and the “heroic” aspects of the

animal, wanted and unwanted moral quali-

ties are connected and separated across the

human- animal divide. In this way, the sav-

age and the bestial can be equated and elimi-

nated through the transformative rigors of

biocultural training. Darwin is ultimately, as

Schmitt argues, insistently (if reluctantly) his-

torical about the line of descent, clearly fram-

ing his genealogical wish as a counterfactual

fantasy (50). Kipling, on the other hand, is

invested in the processes of self- creation and

self- transformation and in the ailiations and

managed bloodlines by which (some) human

beings construct their evolutionary future.

For neo- Lamarckians, environment or

culture could directly introduce new elements

into an organism’s “blood,” allowing for the

possibility of hybridization without sexual

congress. Although Stephen Arata does not

mention Lamarck, this concept forms the

backbone of his discussion of the hybrid ra-

cial category “Anglo- Indian” in works by

contemporaries of Kipling’s like J. A. Froude,

Andrew Lang, Edward Carpenter, and John

Strachey. All these writers imagined that

alien cultural experiences could produce last-

ing biological changes in native En glishmen:

[I] n practice race operated more as a biocul-

tural than a biological category. This fuzzi-

ness allowed writers like Lang and Carpenter

to talk of the “hybridization” of the Anglo-

Indian, though neither had anything like sex-

ual promiscuity in mind. Instead, their interest

lay in the efects wrought on the individual by

a wholly alien cultural and physical environ-

ment. At this level, the fantasy of a healthy

“mixing of bloods” could be entertained with-

out awakening taboos of miscegenation.

(Arata 16–17)

As Robert Young has argued, the ques-

tion of sexual hybridity was at the heart of

nineteenth- century racial discourse (esp. 86–


93), but the Lamarckian world of he Jungle

Books allows Kipling to play with the kind of

cross- fertilizing racial dynamics many theo-

rists found so compelling, while temporarily

bracketing the trickier questions of sexual

reproduction and the viability of mixed- race

ofspring. he text’s elaborate anthropomor-

phism helps keep the dynamism of Lamarck-

ian change within carefully controlled limits:

insofar as the diferent animals Mowgli en-

counters symbolize diferent human cultural

groups, with a wide array of linguistic codes

and cultural practices, the text ofers possibil-

ities for an excitingly fertile biocultural inter-

change. But because those cultural diferences

are encoded as species diferences, an uncross-

able reproductive boundary always separates

Mowgli from his compatriots. In this way,

the anthropomorphism of he Jungle Books

creates a seemingly fantastic world of biocul-

tural openness, while quietly inscribing ixed

biological distinctions between groups. As we

will see in the next section, this tension be-

tween the desire for developmental openness

and the need to maintain ixed boundaries ex-

poses unresolved paradoxes in the Lamarck-

ian fantasy as the text nears its conclusion.

[ iv ]Since the inheritance of acquired character-

istics was a theoretical principle with empiri-

cally undeined parameters, it could be lexibly

deployed to suit the demands of a variety of

arguments. As a transformative mechanism

that described the adaptive interplay between

organism and environment, biology and cul-

ture, this principle could be used to argue for

rapid evolutionary change and extraordinary

genetic plasticity. But as an archival process

in which the past experiences of a species

or nation were encoded in the bodies of its

present- day members, it could also be used

to emphasize the genetic drag of accumulated

history and, thus, the near impossibility of

signiicant future transformation. Where hu-

man evolution was concerned, the question of

where the emphasis was placed—on the up-

ward dynamism of heritable acquisitions or

the inescapability of the ancestral past—piv-

oted on the race of the subject under consid-

eration. For the Lamarckian political theorist

Walter Bagehot, the modern savage lacks an

“abiding capacity” for progress because his

mind is “tattooed over with monstrous im-

ages” from the history of his race (135, 120).

Bagehot’s metaphor, in his popular Physics

and Politics (1872), suggests a Lamarckian

interarticulation of culture, body, and mind

that, in this case, has produced a hopelessly il-

legible genetic palimpsest. Because of this stra-

tegically unresolved tension between lux and

ixity, the inheritance of acquired characteris-

tics could rationalize European domination in

the name of a progressive evolutionary ideal,

while positing intractable barriers to change

that are permanently inscribed by cultural-

biological history. As Stocking argues:

he peculiar advantage of a more Lamarckian

evolutionism was the opening it let for an up-

liting philanthropic meliorism. Civilizing ef-

forts on behalf of dark- skinned savages could,

over time, eliminate savagery from the world,

not by destroying savage populations, but by

modifying their hereditary incapacity. In the

meantime—which might be shorter or longer

depending on the weight one gave to present

as opposed to cumulative past experience—it

was both scientiically and morally respectable

for civilized Europeans to take up the white

man’s burden. (Victorian Anthropology 237)

In the context of Bagehot’s remark, we can see

the pernicious catch- 22 for colonized peoples:

the “hereditary incapacity” that was to be

changed was oten imagined as the hereditary

incapacity for change. Paradoxically, then,

although neo- Lamarckian thought empha-

sized the transformative possibilities of pres-

ent experience, it could at the same time be

used in the service of a conservative genetic

determinism when applied to non- European


peoples and other marginalized groups.17 John Haller notes, “Ironically . . . the envi-ronmentalist tradition became weighted with hereditarian ideas as soon as race analysis focused upon the non- Aryan peoples” (ix).18

his indeterminacy in the neo- Lamarckian paradigm between progressive dynamism and racial- biological fixity troubles Kipling’s de-piction of Mowgli’s development toward the conclusion of he Jungle Books. In stories like “Red Dog” and “Kaa’s Hunting,” the inheri-tance of acquired characteristics allows for rapid change through increased control over potentially unruly forces within and with-out. We have seen that use inheritance serves as an instrument of punishment, as a means of knowledge acquisition and consolidation, as a conceptual bulwark against the wasteful processes of natural selection, and as a way to manage one’s blood through training and discipline. Because Mowgli at irst resides in a vaguely deined jungle world, during an un-speciied historical time, he can represent Man, who recapitulates in his ontogenetic bildung of increasing self- mastery the phylogenetic narra-tive of human ascendancy over nature and the animal. Mowgli’s superiority is foretold from the irst conlict with the apex predator Shere Khan (“he shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end . . . he shall hunt thee!” [5] ), thereby organizing his various Lamarckian acquisitions in a mytho-logical recapitulative teleology. In “Letting in the Jungle,” however, the narrative introduces the first concrete indicators of nineteenth- century En glish historical time, bringing about a new “stage of development” beyond Mowgli’s capacities. With the introduction of Europeans, he can no longer function as rep-resentative Man or, indeed, as “Master of the Jungle.” he emphasis begins to fall on the de-velopmental limits of his native- born identity rather than on the transformative possibilities of his experiences.

his shit in emphasis is focused through his relationship with his biological mother,

Messua, and thus through the grip of his ge-netic past. Persecuted as a witch by the other villagers, Messua seeks redress in a sphere be-yond village and jungle: “If we reach Khani-wara, and I get the ear of the En glish, I will bring such a lawsuit against the Brahmin and old Buldeo and the others as shall eat the village to the bone” (197). he word lawsuit comes as a mild lexical surprise in a text that has been so far all about the unwritten codes of honor and self- discipline, and it signals an important change in the frame of refer-ence. If, in other stories, the “Jungle Law” that Mowgli internalizes is set in contrast to a blind Darwinian “law of the jungle,” here the contrast is drawn between “Jungle Law” and “lawsuit”—that is, between the local practices that govern behavior in and among tribes and the apparatus that provides large- scale insti-tutional order. There is clearly a new, more complex way to manage violent energies and thus a new way of “mastering” the jungle. he villagers themselves believe that “when the Jungle moves, only white men can hope to turn it aside” (208). Signiicantly, it is at the same moment that Messua introduces the need for this larger apparatus of order that she claims an unbreakable biological kinship with Mowgli: “I gave thee milk, Nathoo; dost thou remember? . . . hey [the villagers] said that I was thy mother, the mother of a devil, and therefore worthy of death” (193). If Mow-gli’s escape from the Bandar- log symbolized emancipation from a burdensome genetic past, here the emphasis on milk and memory suggests his enmeshment in personal and biohistorical genealogies that undermine the control he has previously exercised over his own developmental narrative.

Once he frees his mother, a wrathful Mowgli decides to “let in the jungle”—to re-cruit elephant and antelope herds to trample the village. This plan seems to echo earlier narratives like “Tiger! Tiger!,” where his skill in organizing violence signiied a progressive mastery of environment and self. But now


that Messua is safe with the En glish and the

conlict resolved, such a plan has become nar-

ratively excessive. Bagheera makes this clear:

“Now, Little Brother, there is nothing more to

do. . . . he man and woman will not be put

into the Red Flower [fire], and all goes well

in the Jungle. Is it not true? Let us forget the

Man- Pack” (201). But in this Lamarckian

context, “forgetting” is precisely the problem.

Mowgli’s wish to destroy the village expresses

the futile desire to obliterate his own origins

and displays a loss of self- command through

his desperate attempt to assert it. Indeed, this

story is notable for its emphasis on the invol-

untary physical reactions (“Mowgli had hardly

time to catch his breath—he was shaking all

over with rage and hate” [205]) that serve as

a pointed contrast to the successful manage-

ment of the “primitive” emotions of fear and

anger he displayed in “Kaa’s Hunting.”

In the changing narrative circumstances

of he Jungle Books, then, we see the paradox

that Stocking and Haller identify more broadly

in the application of Lamarckian evolutionary

mechanisms to questions of racial diference.

he inheritance of acquired characteristics was

embedded in a hierarchical evolutionary telos

that subordinated animals to humans and na-

tives to the civilized; in each binary structure,

the superior term was imagined to be dynami-

cally progressive and the inferior term limited

and relatively ixed. he crucial point is that,

with the appearance of the En glish in “Letting

in the Jungle,” Mowgli operates as a term in

both binaries at once: superior in one, inferior

in the other. he crisis this engenders is most

vividly apparent in his conversation with Ba-

gheera near the end of the story:

“Art thou the naked thing I spoke for in the

Pack when all was young? Master of the Jungle,

. . . [w] e are cubs before thee! Snapped twigs

under foot! Fawns that have lost their doe!”

The idea of Bagheera being a stray fawn

upset Mowgli altogether, and he laughed and

caught his breath, and sobbed and laughed

again, till he had to jump into a pool to

make himself stop. hen he swam round and

round, ducking in and out of the bars of the

moonlight like the frog, his namesake. (205)

For Bagheera the raw exercise of power com-

pletes Mowgli’s ascent to mastery and adult-

hood (the animals are now all “cubs” before

him). For Mowgli another level of power on

the margins of his comprehension redeines

him as evolutionary child in the biogenetic

schema. The recapitulation narrative that

had previously endowed his story with an

allegorical centrality (note Bagheera’s com-

ment that when Mowgli was young, “all was

young”) now suddenly frames him as belated,

marginal, and behind “bars”—captive in the

metaphoric tide pools of his biological past.

heodore Koditschek argues that through a

vague neo- Lamarckism . . . the superior

races (i.e. Anglo- Saxons and, to a lesser de-

gree, other Aryans) were deemed to be fast-

evolving, and therefore capable of acting

purposefully and progressively in history. By

contrast, the more or less inferior races were

relegated to the longue durée timescale of

evolution. Where the former were historical

subjects, the makers of history, the latter were

conceived as the objects of evolution, to be

classiied, managed, and restrained. (14–15)

Mowgli’s loss of self- command and narra-

tive power in “Letting in the Jungle” suggests

precisely this loss of developmental subject-

hood. He slips back down the phylo- and on-

togenetic rungs, his body and narrative both

subject to forces beyond his control. Whereas

in earlier stories the relation between internal

state and environmental conditions had been

imagined as dynamically transformative,

here the phrase “letting in the jungle” (not

unlike “heart of darkness”) bitterly ironizes

the relation between within and without. As

Mowgli commits savage actions in the name

of punishing savage actions, we see that the

jungle does not need to be let in, because it

is in him already. In a sense, the conlict be-


tween progressive dynamism and genetic ix-ity is embedded in the title, since by story’s end the grammatically progressive “letting” ironically comes to express something un-changeable and limiting about Mowgli’s cultural- biological identity.

But the conclusion of he Jungle Books is not a straightforward tale of Kipling’s putting the native boy in his place. As John McBratney argues, Kipling’s depictions of hybrid protag-onists like Mowgli and Kim are riven by con-licting allegiances and desires: they represent exciting possibilities for pluralism and new embodied vectors of knowledge, even if they threaten the clear racial distinctions on which the imperial project depended (Imperial Sub-

jects 128–29). If “Letting in the Jungle” brings to the surface conflicting teleologies in the igure of Mowgli, two stories—“In the Rukh” and “he Spring Running”—represent rival visions of the ultimate evolutionary issue of his experiences. he conceptual split in neo- Lamarckian thought between the ixity of bio-racial categories and the plasticity of genetic material can be seen in the forking paths rep-resented by these two diferent conclusions. In “In the Rukh,” written irst and independently of the other Jungle Book tales, a grown Mow-gli marries, raises a family, becomes a ranger in the British Department of Woods and Forests, and seems happily reconciled to his subordinate position as imperial functionary (his ambition is to earn a pension). Evolution appears here less as a dynamic process than as a classiicatory regime in which the grown wolf child can be plotted as an object of study: “he is an anachronism,” notes the German- born inspector Mueller, “for he is before der Iron Age, and der Stone Age. . . . [H] e is at der beginnings of der history of man” (344). he recapitulative teleology that had structured Mowgli’s fantastic upward development in earlier stories here cements his status as an-thropological curiosity, a freakish, but valu-able, evolutionary artifact the empire can use. In this way, the story achieves resolution by

ixing Mowgli as ideal native subject—child-like but not childish, animal but not bestial, intrepid but not unruly—who gratefully sur-renders his personal developmental narrative for the sake of imperial development.

Modern editors, perhaps inding the style too discontinuous and Mowgli’s submission too total, usually consign “In the Rukh” to an appendix or omit it altogether.19 In “he Spring Running,” the story that concludes The Jungle Books in most modern editions, running becomes a metaphor for the dy-namic reproductive energies in Mowgli that can ind no outlet or inal form. he animals “run” with their partners during the mating season, leaving him to dash aimlessly through the jungle: “Mowgli’s muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather. When a rotten log or a hidden stone turned under his foot he saved himself, never checking his pace, without ef-fort and without thought” (310). His train-ing has been “internalized as instinct,” but here it is exercised without issue. As we have seen, the unresolved tension between hered-ity and plasticity in neo- Lamarckian thought allowed for a strategically lexible account of racial diference, but it introduced congeneric conceptual problems about intergenerational transmission: how was individual experience translated into the stable genetic matrix of the species (Bowler, Eclipse 61, 77; Loison 69–75)? he theory only made sense in the context of a shared environment in which many organ-isms interacted with the same conditions. Despite the rhetorical emphasis many La-marckians placed on the individual, the in-heritance of acquired characteristics, to work as a plausible evolutionary mechanism, even-tually had to subordinate individual gains to collective trends.20 Mowgli’s story, sui ge-neris as it is, provides no coherent reproduc-tive context in which his attainments can, in Paul Kammerer’s words, “enter into the life- sap of generations” (qtd. in Koestler 28). Mating with the animals is impossible, while


a European female would raise the specter of miscegenation. Natives, meanwhile, have been consistently portrayed as culturally and biologically stunted and would threaten to submerge Mowgli’s various acquisitions back into what Kipling wants us to regard as a swamp of superstition, cruelty, and child-ishness. “In the Rukh” solves this problem by linking Mowgli’s career serving the Raj with the family he raises on the British- managed territory: biological reproduction thus merges with the reproduction of empire. “he Spring Running,” unwilling to make this bargain, can offer no stable resolution. Mowgli ’s glimpse of a mysterious girl in a white cloth (319) intensiies rather than addresses this un-certainty: “he Red Flower is in my body, my bones are water . . . I know not what I know” (321). his is, as W. W. Robson puts it, a “mar-velous and delicate evocation of the upsurge of new life” (xxxii), but it is also an indication that Mowgli’s metamorphic past might strand him without a coherent reproductive future.

Indeed, the troubling possibility remains that the only available form of reproduction for Mowgli is ictional, through the potentially inexhaustible variations of his childhood ad-ventures: “the things that he did and saw and heard when he was wandering from one people to another, with or without his four companions, would make many many stories, each as long as this one” (278). Kipling then describes all the tales we could hear but will not. he untold (in both senses) tales reinforce the Lamarckian idea of acquisition through repetition, but they also suggest something akin to Zeno’s paradox, where the ininitely divisible imaginative space of storytelling turns development into endless process and, thus, not into development at all. As Baloo tells Mowgli, “[T] he Jungle is full of such tales. If I made a beginning, there would never be an end” (165). In this way, he Jungle Books is an evolutionary fable that follows its logic to a developmental dead end. If “he Spring Run-ning,” as Jane Hotchkiss argues, “refuses clo-

sure” (436), it does so not so much in the spirit of open- endedness that George Levine de-scribes as a principle of Darwinian narrative but as a result of the impasse brought about by the unresolved conlict between lux and ixity, dynamism and hierarchy, and the pos-sibilities of the present and the accumulated weight of the past in late- nineteenth- century neo- Lamarckian thought.21

NOTES

I am grateful to Neville Hoad, whose careful reading im-proved this essay immensely. I would also like to thank my research assistant Casey Sloan for her help.

1. History- of- science texts today oten use Just So Sto-

ries to illustrate Lamarckian logic (Hayes 494; Alder 81; Piel 323–24).

2. Bowler discusses the diferent meanings of Darwin-

ism at this moment (Non- Darwinian Revolution 6–14).

3. Arata 16–17; Hotchkiss 442–43; McBratney, “Impe-rial Subjects” 280; Borkfelt 565; Stevenson 374.

4. Although the term neo- Lamarckian was coined by Alpheus Packard to refer to a group of American scien-tists, I use it here to refer more broadly to post-Origin European and American thinkers who argued that the inheritance of acquired characteristics (rather than natu-ral selection) was the primary driver of evolution.

5. he phrase is Julian Huxley’s. Bowler borrowed it for the title of his book on the subject (Eclipse 5).

6. Morton and Glendening separately have also made productive inroads into this territory, especially with re-gard to Hardy and Wells.

7. For a discussion of this radical background and of the status of Lamarckian thought in En gland before the publication of Origin, in 1859, see Desmond 59–77.

8. For more on Darwin’s concessions to Lamarck, see Desmond and Moore’s biography (580, 617).

9. Livingstone’s essay provides an excellent account of how Lamarckian thought helped reconstitute a sense of teleology and purpose in nature following the challenge to providentialism leveled by Darwin’s Origin.

10. Gould notes that recapitulation “achieved great-est popularity among Lamarckian thinkers. Its two nec-essary principles . . . received easy explanations within theories supporting the inheritance of acquired charac-teristics” (100).

11. Richards, Endersby 76–77, and Bowler, Non-

Darwinian Revolution 75, provide excellent starting points for Darwin’s understanding of the relation be-tween natural selection and embryonic recapitulation.


12. For a good discussion of the connection between

memory and heredity in neo- Lamarckian thought, see

Gould 96–100.

13. For more on this topic, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots

123–29, and Straley 593–97.

14. In “he Vortex” Kipling describes bees as develop-

mentally arrested: the queen “had paralysed locomotion,

wiped out trade, social intercourse, mutual trust, love,

friendship, sport, music . . . , and yet, in the barren desert

she had created, was not one whit more near to the evolu-

tion of a saner order of things” (398).

15. For this connection, see esp. his Principles of Biol-

ogy (1897) 256.

16. The idea that the Bandar- log represent a native

population is widely accepted (Stevenson 374).

17. Thus, the idea of inherent incapacity, brought

about by the transmission of inherited experiences, was

also oten applied to social class and gender (Jones 83–85).

18. As Nancy Stepan has argued, physical anthropol-

ogists undermined their own putative commitment to

evolutionary dynamism by their desire to construct ixed

typological categories. he result was a project commit-

ted to shoring up racial divisions at the expense of its

own conceptual coherence (102–04).

19. E.g., Penguin Classics (ed. Karlin) omits, while

Oxford World’s Classics (ed. Robson) appends.

20. For an excellent discussion of the relation be-

tween individual and collective development in neo-

Lamarckian thought, see Gissis 89–101.

21. For Levine’s inf luential reading of Darwinian

open- endedness, see Darwin and the Novelists 85–97.

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