"I Wonder What a Chimpanzee Would Say to This?": Speaking Apes in Late-Victorian Culture

In a famous caricature published in 1874, Charles Darwin, depicted with the body of a non-human primate, holds a mirror up to the face of an ape (fig. 1). The caricature invites interpretation of the ape's expression: the ape seems surprised, enthralled, perhaps even delighted by what it sees in Darwin's mirror. What the ape sees, however, is not visible to the caricature's viewers, who can only speculate as to what has caused the ape's eyebrows to lift, its lips to part, its right hand to adopt what might be an attitude of delicate disavowal or the beginnings of a gesture of touch.¹ Is the ape looking at its own face in the mirror or at Darwin's? Is this a moment of self-recognition or self-estrangement? Might the ape be pleased or displeased by Darwin's suggestion that the difference between apes and humans is one of degree rather than kind? The caricature offers a caustic take on Darwin's evolutionary theory by ascribing higher-order mentation—a cognitive capacity conventionally assigned to the human—to an ape, while attaching ape corporeality to the evolutionary theorist. By withholding the content of the mirror's reflection, the caricature also hyperbolizes the radical inaccessibility of the ape's mind, thereby admitting of a troubling limit to the compass of human knowledge. The caricature's complex conflation of ape and evolutionist was only one among a series of efforts, satirical and otherwise, to represent an ape's perspective on evolutionary ideas in the years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859), when arguments about the genealogical proximity of apes and humans made the ape's cognitive ability, and its imagined point of view, newly worth considering.

The notion of an ape's take on evolutionary theory is deployed to comic effect in the caricature, of course, and we argue that this humour emerges from a cultural discomfort not only with ape-human propinquity—what Susan D. Bernstein has called an "anxiety of simianation"—but also with the disconcerting inaccessibility of the viewpoint of this close kin.² Indeed, Darwin grappled with this inaccessibility in his own writing: in an 1858 letter to Joseph Hooker, Darwin criticized anatomist Richard Owen's assertion of a vast categorical distinction between humans and chimpanzees and then wrote, "I wonder what a chimpanzee wd. say to this?" (Darwin, Letter to J.D. Hooker). Darwin's phrasing is both playful and provocative;

Fig 1.

"Prof. Darwin." Figaro's London Sketchbook of Celebrities, 18 Feb. 1874.

Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0).

he mobilizes the humour of assuming an ape might be trusted to opine on Owen's taxonomical errors while simultaneously drawing on the undeniable similarities between apes and humans to undercut Owen's certainty about the gulf between human and non-human animals. At the same time, Darwin's phrasing foregrounds the restrictions on how much humans can know about other species because of the cognitive and communicative differences between them.

What a chimp might "say" about its own place in nature—and the question of whether an ape even had the requisite cerebral architecture to possess what could be considered "a perspective"—became a fraught issue in post-1859 Victorian culture.³ Indeed, granting particular cognitive and communicative capacities to apes was an ideologically resonant move that aligned apes more closely with humans at a time when the qualities of reason and speech were often considered the defining barrier between humans and apes. In this paper, we describe several discursive axes along which the ape mind became a synecdochal battleground for the evolutionary debates. In a range of genres and fields, Victorians turned to cognitive differences between humans and apes in order to trace the implications of evolutionary theory for their own place in nature and for broader ideas about which responsibilities to the natural world hinged on a potential genealogical affinity to...