Round Hawthorne’s Menagerie: Animality and Childhood

Nature needed, and still needs, this beautiful creature, standing betwixt man and animal, sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and interpreting the whole existence of one to the other.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

[T]he inhuman [is] produced by animalizing the human […] and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form.

—Giorgio Agamben

The marble faun in Hawthorne’s 1860 romance captures the fantasy of inhabiting a gateway, or threshold, between human and animal. From early in his career, Hawthorne was fascinated by the idea of inter-species communion, which he denotes by that romantic signifier, “sympathy.” However, at what point does the human become too much like the animal and vice versa? The mythological creature in The Marble Faun is described in mostly positive terms, since, as one character puts it, the faun “is not supernatural, but just on the verge of Nature, and yet within it.”¹ As Jennifer Mason has pointed out, Hawthorne, in crafting The Marble Faun, sharply distinguished between the mythological faun and the real-life monstrous crossing of ape and human that obsessed the scientific community and the entertainment industry of the nineteenth century.² In fact, at different points in his authorship, Hawthorne seems to have participated in what Harriet Ritvo identifies as the “human struggle against the chaotic and unfathomable variety of nature”³—a “struggle” that characterized natural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In this essay, I examine what Patricia Dunlavy Valenti has called Hawthorne’s “vacillating anxiety”⁴ in relation to the short story “Little Annie’s Ramble.” Anthologized in Twice-Told Tales (1837), this story explores the relationship of human to animal—but with a twist. The animals in the story—chiefly those of a travelling menagerie—are apprehended through the narrator’s obsession with a young girl. Little Annie inhabits the “wild world” of fairy-land, which is out of bounds for the adult. The narrator is fascinated by Annie’s childish wildness, but, keeping in line with Hawthorne’s own bias, he treats with revulsion the “ugly” and “queer” monkeys that he and Annie encounter on their walk (CE, 9:125, 127). Indeed, the unruly monkeys provide a counterpoint to the tamer animals that the narrator and Annie come across. Mason has noted that, for Hawthorne (and middle-class life in general), companion animals, dogs in particular, were contiguous with domesticity; for instance, Hawthorne gives equal precedence to feline and human births in one of his journal entries (CC, 56). But any animal that did not fit within Hawthorne’s domestic tableaux tended to be treated with suspicion, if not outright disgust. However, in addition to creating parallels across species boundaries, I show that the workings of metonymy in “Annie” and other Hawthornian texts function to disrupt the domestic/wild binary; in fact, metonymy sets up the intersecting narrative threads between child and (wild) animal—connections which also blend and cross positive and negative affects. In this way, the notion of intertextual metonymy reveals provocative similarities between animals and children. And like the “airy and unsubstantial threads” that Hawthorne “intermixe[s] with others, twisted out of the commonest stuff” (CE, 4:6) to build his romances, animality and childhood blend to form a textual hybrid that prompts questions of ontological concern that preoccupied Hawthorne from early in his career to the later romances such as The Marble Faun.

The blurring of ontological boundaries at the same time leads to a blurring of desire lines. Following this train of thought, I read Hawthorne’s tale about Little Annie as the representation of a certain kind of unconscious unruliness;⁵ it may indeed be that Annie has more in common with “the untameable” quality of the tiger than the faithful dog or the courteous elephant that she otherwise seems to connect with (CE, 9:126). Even more disruptive still, a shift occurs from the benign identification of...