Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction by John Miller (review)

John Miller’s study is focalized around scenes of animal slaughter in the remote hinterlands of high British Empire. While Victorians were debating vivisection and the welfare of coach horses at home, they were also consuming lurid depictions of the killing of exotic mega-fauna such as elephants, gorillas, and tigers, perpetrated by biggame hunters and scientific specimen collectors. The scale of actual carnage was massive. An estimated eighty thousand tigers were killed in India between 1875 and 1925. African quadrupeds like the quagga and the blaubok were exterminated. Miller reads representations of the colonial hunt as symbolically vexed. There is, for example, the contradiction intrinsic to violence that claims to extend the law—to express, in the act of killing, a civilized humanity. There is also a persistent instability in “the figuring of animal being as an aspect of the human self” and in the associative principles according to which we animalize humans, as closer to natural innocence or savagery, and, by turn, humanize animals. Animals are, after all, regarded as self-evidently subject to violence—unlike, say, stones—for the same reasons that they serve as privileged emblems of human identity: because they are agential and animate, mortal and capable of being harmed. These “knotted strands of kinship and difference” are, Miller argues, “both central to imperial mythologies and a point at which [they] collapse” (3).

Miller’s primary object of analysis is Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction written to entertain and edify adolescent boys: works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. Manville Fenn, G. A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and John Buchan. He aligns adventure fiction with imperial romance, which promises economic opportunity and rejuvenating escape from English domesticity. In the jungle, however, heroic self-assertion intermingles with compassion and curiosity. The adventure-driven plot—exemplified by the hunt, in which “violence against animals appears inscribed in the narrative expectations of the form”—is unsettled by its immersive, exotic environment (31). If adventure finds fulfillment in profitable resource extraction and the “pleasures of the chase,” romance introduces the possibility that the “partially apprehended otherness” of wilderness “infiltrates back into the anthropomorphizing imagination” (3, 188). In some instances, the protagonists of these novels go from killing beasts to killing native insurgents; in others, the civilizing mission goes awry as they find themselves moved by the beauty of butterflies, fascinated by the intricacies of tropical ecology, or swallowed by a swamp.

The two middle chapters of Empire and the Animal Body examine the pursuit of biological specimens rather than hunting trophies. It is widely recognized that natural history offered material and conceptual support to empire, but Miller discovers a more fraught situation. While scientific classification may “provide a mark of ownership,” it is also a pursuit marked by “polyvocality” and “confusion” (65–66). This taxonomic instability applies not only to the objects of study but to the naturalist’s gender (his is an “errant masculinity”) and discipline (95), where “serious-minded scholarship” proves inseparable from “tawdry spectacle” (67). In chapter 3, Miller focuses on the “Gorilla Controversy” of the 1860s, which began in earnest when the adventurer Paul du Chaillu brought twenty stuffed gorillas to London two years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had sharpened “the question of human exceptionalism” (97). Du Chaillu’s moldering corpses, however, did little to resolve the status of these mythic primate relatives, so attention turned to du Chaillu’s accounts of first-hand encounters in his Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861). A particularly fascinating scene, which reappears in a number of other travelogues and adventure novels, occurs when du Chaillu describes his initial meeting with a gorilla, who looked him “boldly in the face” with “fiercely glowing deep grey eyes” before being shot and killed (qtd. in Miller 105). In Miller’s analysis, this episode “pivots … on its failure to erase this animal’s...