The Aping Apes of Poe and Wright: Race, Animality, and Mimicry in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Native Son

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!"

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Can an animal be held accountable for its actions? No matter how counterintuitive, this question follows inevitably from the revelation that an orangutan is the agent behind the horrific deeds perpetrated in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."¹ As Akira Mizuta Lippit suggests, "perhaps there has been no crime at the house on Rue Morgue, after all—only death."² Accountability implies the capacity to reason, to comprehend right and wrong, to think causally in order to connect deeds to an authorial subject. It presupposes, in other words, a consciousness that humans have historically denied to animals. In his "Discourse on the Method," for instance, René Descartes characterized animals as automatons, machines that can sometimes imitate humans—as do parrots who learn to mimic human speech—but nevertheless lack the faculties of reason that elevate humans above all other organisms.³

Notwithstanding the Cartesian division between animal reaction and human response, the premodern legal practice of prosecuting and exterminating animals for their crimes presumed precisely this capacity for accountability. In The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), E. P. Evans catalogued a number of such cases from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries, including one in the early sixteenth century that involved an unspecified number of rats who destroyed the barley crop of a French province.⁴ When the defendants failed to appear in court, their attorney explained their absence by citing the "serious perils" that accompanied their journey, "owing to the unwearied vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats" (19). For Evans, this practice reads not only as a symptom of anthropomorphism, but as characteristic of a legal system that "ignored the origin [of crimes] altogether. . . . The overt act alone was assumed to constitute the crime" (200). The law criminalized animals not so much because they were understood as culpable, but because the effects of their actions were harmful. Whereas premodern jurisprudence appeared to treat animals as humans, modern law often portrays humans as animals, "acting automatically or under an insane and irresistible impulse to evil" (193). Modern law thus evaluates human accountability by weighing "gradations of culpability" and calculating "delicate differences in the psychical texture and spiritual quality of deeds" (194).

This construction of the human criminal as animal is often traced to Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man, first published in 1876, which lamented the traditional legal focus on the crime rather than the criminal.⁵ Lombroso developed a theory of criminality based on the supposedly atavistic characteristics of human criminals, and in the third edition of Criminal Man (1884) went so far as to assert that human criminality owes its origins to the criminal transgressions of animals and even plants. Carnivorous plants, for instance, "release the victim once dead and partially digested, thanks to an acid that is similar to our own pepsin" (167). Eschewing the presumption of free will, Lombroso contends that "crime, from its first manifestations in the lower species, is a product of any organism's physical constitution" (174). Ironically, Lombroso's emphasis on the criminal rather than the crime does not posit the criminal agent as the origin of his or her actions. Rather, human criminals recapitulate the animalistic impulses of their progenitors in a deterministic fashion.

Similarly to Lombroso, in the Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche seeks to reverse a culturally imposed "sundering from" our "animal past."⁶ According to Nietzsche, "we modern men are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia" (95). As Walter Kaufmann notes, the original German employs the term Tierquälerei, or "animal torture," which implies a violent mortification of the animality that resides within the human. Although Nietzsche does not subscribe to Lombroso's biological determinism, he does seek to problematize the construction of the human as a calculable, volitional, causal agent. Against the strict Cartesian division between human and animal, Nietzsche characterizes humans as precisely animals who have been bred...