Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus by Susan Nance (review)

Entertaining Elephants narrates the history of circus elephants in the US, from the importation of the first two Asian elephants in the late 1700s to the births of the first US–born elephant babies in the 1880s and their subsequent deaths in the early 1900s. Integrating cultural history, business history, and contemporary animal science, Nance shows how elephants and their human captors co-created the nineteenth-century circus as both a speculative, profit-driven venture and an arena for the constitution of American consumer identity. She argues that the circus elephant helped citizens develop personal and patriotic identities by spending on entertainment, while introducing Americans to a mode of capitalism linked to expanding human supremacy over other animals. This is a fascinating but gruesome history, replete with injuries and deaths suffered by both elephants and humans as they struggled, with unequal degrees of power, to sustain the circus industry amidst the growing complexity of American capitalism.

Key to this story is Nance’s distinction between individual agency, which elephants possessed, and human social and political power, which they lacked; “this was the crucial fact that made their captivity possible” and enabled circuses to become enormously popular forms of entertainment (9–10). Nance shows that elephants, though “domesticated” by the circuses, were often unable or unwilling to submit to the conditions of confinement, deprivation, and human domination that defined their existence. Elephants exercised agency when they submitted to human commands, which they did most of the time, but also when they refused to perform tricks, broke out of their shackles, and occasionally attacked or killed their owners and trainers. Such elephantine agency was always superseded by human power as the elephants’ captors, compelled to keep the shows running on an increasingly rigid schedule, responded with “re-breaking” methods intended to convince the offending elephants—as well as the larger American public—of the necessity and righteousness of human domination over non-human animals.

Thus, Nance convincingly demonstrates that the study of animals is important not only for its own sake, but also to more fully illuminate the complexity of human cultures. Less well evidenced is Nance’s argument that the genial circus elephant helped American citizens writ large to define personal identity and mark the boundary between humans and non-humans. Though she clearly shows how circus personnel engaged in these processes, she offers relatively little evidence about how the circuses’ primarily working-class audiences responded to what they saw. This is not so much a shortcoming as a necessary outcome of her methodology, which prioritizes circuses’ business and management decisions in response to elephants’ behavior; it also suggests the importance of reading this book alongside other studies of human-animal relations and consumer culture in the nineteenth century, to which this book adds much.

Theoretically sophisticated, exhaustively researched, and elegantly composed, Entertaining Elephants will appeal to a broad range of readers, who will find themselves thinking in new ways about not only circuses, but also the myriad other humananimal relationships in American consumer culture, past and present, from rodeos, zoos, and aquariums to meat, pets, Disney characters and other fictional animals.