Narrating, displaying and spectating the animal: Frank Norris, Jack London, and the urban zoo

Using the urban zoo and the writings of literary naturalist authors, Frank Norris and Jack London, this dissertation demonstrates that in late-nineteenth century America the animal and animality took on profound and relatively unaccounted for cultural significances. Although animals were disappearing from the wild, they were proliferating as subjects and objects of representation. This was not simple nostalgia; representations of animals participated in a widespread, often implicit, debate about the place of the animal in a modern, and increasingly urban culture, and about the place of animality within the modern, human subject. Post-Darwin the imagined relationship between the animal and the human, and the genealogy of the human became less certain and more urgent.; The urban zoo and the writings of Frank Norris and Jack London offer important answers to these questions. The zoo and literary naturalism show how evolutionary thought attainted broad narrative and popular cultural visibility; they narrated, staged, and displayed the animal in widely divergent ways that illustrate the range of cultural possibilities that the animal allowed for. For the zoo, the displayed animal exhibited the civility and power of the human and the zoo's physics of caging asserted a clear separation between the animal and the human. The zoo displayed the animal so that it could participate in human and humanizing stories. Norris and London, on the other hand, saw no clear separation between the animal and the human; their metaphysics of caging suggested that the human self contained a primitive animal within. According to these authors the modern subject is internally divided and must watch over the animal within itself.; More broadly, this dissertation elucidates the varied workings of the animal as a culturally constructed concept; this moves us towards richer, historically specific senses of the animal and the human. Representations of the animals were important for America during its nascent modernity, as they were an amalgam of modern and primitive connotations. Both the zoo and literary naturalism show how positioning, understanding, and narrating the animal were perceived as culturally urgent tasks, part of arriving at a post-Darwinian understanding of the human.