The progressive animal: Evolutionary fictions and the discourse of the American jungle

This study examines the explosion of literary and cultural representations of animals, human animality, and the discourse of the jungle from the 1890s to the 1920s in the United States. Building upon critical work in American literary and cultural studies, ecocriticism, and the history of sexuality, I argue that the discourse of the jungle becomes a new way to explain human behavior according to what is supposedly most natural for animals: violence in the name of survival, and heterosexuality in the name of reproduction. Once psychoanalysis travels to U.S. shores and fuses with social Darwinism, a new construction of animal instincts and evolutionary logic influences the way Americans think about three key frameworks each explored as a chapter of this study: heterosexuality, corporate violence, and savage cruelty. I juxtapose close readings of literary works, such as Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," Jack London's The Call of the Wild, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Frank Norris's The Octopus, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, with the writing of contemporary figures, such as Sigmund Freud, Andrew Carnegie, and William James. In addition, I examine the cultural logic of Progressive-Era reform through humane society tracts, capital punishment and lynching debates, and newspaper coverage of cultural events, such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island. Many of these texts simultaneously resist and contribute to the growing dominance of the discourse of the jungle. Exploring representations of the progressive animal can ultimately lead to new ways of reading not only literary naturalism but also legacies of progressive advocacy revealed in recent studies of animality from scholars as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Peter Singer. Critical attention to the discourse of the jungle can thus reveal how representations of animality are both more complex and more central to constructions of American identity than previously imagined.