The Elephant in the Room of The Ivory Tower

“What strange things, Gray thought, rich persons had!—and what strange things they did . . . ” (IT 107). When Graham Fielder contemplates the tribal behavior of Newport society and its ruthless materialism, his creator may only vaguely and ominously allude to activities on another continent that curious, decent Graham would find at the very least “strange”: “Every village in reach was burned and robbed . . . and then the ivory was loaded on the heads of the captured men and women, the slave yokes and chains put around their necks, and the march to the coast began” (Moore 53). We propose to connect the ivory tower of James’s title to its African origins. Following the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff’s model we track the ivory, the “white gold” of the imperialist imagination, tracing its trajectory from the elephant’s body to its marriage into the complexities of a human family, outlining some chapters in the cultural biography of a thing (see Fig. 1).

Kopytoff’s processual anthropology suggests several key questions for such a project: “What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in the thing’s ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far . . . ? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” (66). We begin the tower’s biography in the ivory trade of James’s moment, although we surmise a reason that Fielder wants to pre-date the tower. This fictional tower passes through an African history starting roughly in the nineteenth century, its material inseparable from the ivory/slave trade that included Zanzibar Muslim, British, German, Belgian, and American interests. A missionary described to the American ivory trader E. D. Moore the conjunction of human and elephant markets:

Figure 1.

“Men with ivory tusks, Dar Es Salaam.” Frank G. and Frances Carpenter. Public domain.

As they filed past we noticed many chained together by the neck. Others had their necks fastened into the forks of poles about six feet long, the ends of which were supported by the men who preceded them. The neck is often broken if the slave falls in walking. The women, who were as numerous as the men, carried babies on their backs in addition to a tusk of ivory on their heads.

(Moore 115)

George F. Kunz, a contemporary of James and specialist in ivory, does not hide the gruesome reality from his comprehensive study of the finished products. In Ivory and the Elephant (1916), he laments the “wholesale slaughter” of elephants for their tusks, noting that in King Leopold II’s domain of the Upper Congo “the principal units of value . . . are slaves and elephant’s tusks, a slave being generally regarded as equaling a tusk in value” (405). Other markets valued a tusk as surpassing a person’s worth (see Fig. 2).

Though the Newport tribe may seem outwardly to operate according to a different set of social customs from the African trade, in the eyes of the fictional Graham Fielder or even of Henry James’s friend Paul Bourget, the strange things people do in this American watering-hole also include blurring the boundary between persons and things. Bourget’s Outre-Mer: Impressions of America (1895) describes homes where the spoils of global travels shape self-perceptions, making their owners ossify into the hardened objects around them. Newport rich persons participate in a process of self-commodification Bourget describes as “this facility of offering oneself as a lesson of things” (49). In The Ivory Tower, we read of Graham Fielder, newly arrived at the port of entry as if he were a commodity for inspection and distribution.

Figure 2.

“‘A Fortune in Ivory,’ each tusk worth $50 to $100: Zanzibar.” George F. Kunz. Ivory and the Elephant in Art, Archeology, and Science. Garden City: Doubleday, 1916. P. 442.

Later, when he seeks a thing among the...