VI.

 

Julia Walker calls attention to the importance of posing in The Hairy Ape in a series of essays that combines psychoanalytic, economic, and theatrical analyses.42 She connects the character of Yank with Eugene's father, the actor James O'Neill, and fashions a complex argument claiming that the playwright's Oedipal and class anxieties are worked out through a "fantasy master narrative" of his father's ultimate demise, played out through Yank's "tragic life" (Walker, "De New," 24). While the biographical claims of Walker's argument are at times tenuous,43 she discusses quite convincingly the effect that changing turn-of-the-century acting styles had on James O'Neill's career and the manner in which these styles reappear in The Hairy Ape.

 

As the nineteenth-century Romantic technique of acting on "points" was replaced by the twentieth-century Delsarte method propounded in the United States by Steele MacKaye, James O'Neill's formerly successful bits of stage business, which included "assuming poses and postures to vividly illustrate images or metaphors in the dramatic text," had the potential to "degenerate into a form of hammy acting" (Walker, "De New" 21-22). Walker asks us to see Eugene O'Neill's frequent stage directions indicating that Yank assume the posture of Rodin's The Thinker as examples of "empty `points'" upon which Yank must stand, "emphasiz[ing] the rupture between gesture and meaning" that is evinced by Yank's failure to understand "a world structured upon ideas" ("De New" 26, 25). Because "Yank is stunted in his ability to think," writes Walker, his "pose is meant to ironically inscribe him as a purely material and sensuous being" ("Bodies" 75). Like Bogard, Walker takes O'Neill's repeated invocations of Rodin's The Thinker at face value, assigning to the statue a transhistorical significance that obstructs the critique of humanism implicit in its use. She, too, is subject to this forced perspective, in which the "mind" is a sign of the human and the "body" a degraded marker of animal sensibility.

 

"Modeled in soot if not in bronze," continues Walker, Yank's "inert physicality is juxtaposed against the formlessness of thought. This pose recurs . . . each time registering the futility of the pose to realize what it is meant to represent." Exactly what that is, Walker does not specify. Implicit, however, in the language of her claim that Yank will never "become the thinker that he attempts to `ape'" ("De New" 26), is the kind of humanist ethos that conflates mimetic power with the "fully human" while denying this action to others, who become less human the farther removed they are from the culturally-sanctioned mimetic style—in this case, realism. As we move from "human" to "nonhuman" the ideologically potent concept of mimesis devolves to the instinctual, reflexive, bodily practices of mimicry—a skill humans share with other species.

 

Furthermore, Walker assumes that Yank's Thinker pose is a conscious impersonation, and that his eventual inability to replicate the statue's "exact attitude" corresponds similarly to his inability to think. In obvious contrast to Mildred's purposeful social posing—which precipitates her Aunt's parting scream, "Poser! . . . I said Poser!" (134)—Yank's movement into the Rodin posture is not a part of the dramatic narrative. It is merely an indication that he is "tryin' to t'ink."44 At the level of the story, then, Yank's posture is icono-graphic. It only becomes symbolic to those outside the narrative whose received knowledge includes Rodin's statue and its accumulated meanings. Correspondingly, it is not Yank's failure to think that O'Neill represents, but rather his failure to pose—and to recognize posing in others. In Mildred's case, the pose is always a deceptive front—a mask that can "be put on and taken off" with "ease," as Roediger characterizes white performers' use of blackface. While Mildred might be called, more accurately, a poseur—someone who is always aware of her own performance—Yank's efforts to belong are doomed by their very innocence and sincerity. Not until his final lines does Yank embrace performance as a mode of being.

 

Therefore, while I disagree with critics who assert that Yank cannot and does not "think," and that this constitutes his tragedy, I find Walker's emphasis on the act of posing especially productive. Because she relies on examples of acting styles that support a biographical argument, however, she misses some of the other, more direct—and Darwinian—antecedents to Yank's unwitting pose, ones which intersect with Eugene O'Neill's pervasive references to evolutionary paradigms and popular performance practices. Similarly, when Bogard dismisses O'Neill's "quotation" of Rodin, he erases along with it a tradition of theatrical illusionism that thrived in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when actors attempted to replicate the poses of classical sculpture.45

 

The term "attitudes" was first used in the 1770s by Lady Emma Hamilton, whose beginnings as a domestic servant and scantily clad "goddess" illustrating various sexualized poses in London's notorious "Temple of Health" allowed her to advance in the world, eventually making her way into the realms of the aristocracy and marrying the elderly Lord Hamilton, who owned a large collection of classical sculpture. "As she rose in society, she became famous for her `attitudes'—pantomimic representations, in full costume and with props, of famous pictures and statues" (Altick 82, n344). Lady Hamilton's performance, seen by Goethe in 1787 while he was in Naples, was said to have inspired a scene in Elective Affinities (1809), which in turn helped popularize the practice in the nineteenth-century theater (McCullough 6-7).

 

In Living Pictures on the New York Stage (1983), Jack W. McCullough identifies Andrew Ducrow, an English equestrian who originally performed on horseback in the 1820s and later transferred his "animated statues" to the stage, as Hamilton's theatrical descendant, and names him the "forerunner of the poses plastiques so popular in circuses and variety theaters in the second half of the [nineteenth] century." In a show called "Grecian Statues," Ducrow "imitated a series of statue-like poses, in which he seemed to take on the appearance of marble, depicting Homeric heroes, athletes, and gladiators." The arrival of the tableau vivant (and its theatrical variants) to the New York stage was, McCullough claims, "in part, at least, a direct result of Ducrow's influence" (8).

 

The poses plastiques exhibited the same relation to sculpture that the tableaux vivants did to painting. By the mid-nineteenth-century they had been merged into a "technique of shifting poses," which allowed the traditional tableaux to "incorporate a method associated earlier with what were known as `attitudes'":

In such performances, the "poseur" would represent a well-known character or type, often drawn from classical art works, and would proceed through a series of poses, revealing a new emotion for the same character in each separate pose. [. . .] The point is that these changes from pose to pose were within a single character, not changes from one character to another. (McCullough 25)

O'Neill's "interest [. . .] in deconstructing modes of performance" (Walker, "De New" 26) was clearly just as active in relation to these practices as it had been to other forms of display, such as natural history museums and zoos, that couched their sensationalism in pretensions to scientific authority or classical education. By undermining these pictorial and sculptural traditions in The Hairy Ape, O'Neill signaled his resistance to a number of authoritative discourses that were operative in the social ambitions of audience members and actors who sought to close the distance between themselves and the classical ideals they purported to admire or embody. Part of the allure of the poses plastiques was surely the impressive demonstration of skill needed to achieve such a likeness, but the statues chosen for display reflected a myth of the human that would have foundered were the subject not so elevated—yet the performer just as masterful. One need only compare these kinds of characters and poses with those of blackface minstrelsy to understand the inherently political nature of imitative relationships and their transitive power, which dematerialize race, class, gender, and species just long enough to reconfigure them according to the logic of the prevailing ideology.

 

In light of these traditions, and The Thinker's ambivalent relation to classical sculpture, O'Neill's choice of the Rodin statue is even more pointed. Just as the circus and variety actors camouflaged themselves as Roman heroes and Greek goddesses, hoping to improve their respectability (and in the case of Lady Hamilton, succeeding), O'Neill represents Yank as someone whose undeservedly inferior position in society might be camouflaged (at least initially) by the presumed cultural authority of The Thinker. But the felicities of resemblance that were so efficacious on the nineteenth-century stage (particularly in the era before Darwin's Descent of Man) are here undercut by O'Neill's insistent modernism, which displaces classical ideals along with realistic acting styles. When we add to this the fact that, until his very last moments, at least—when cage is transformed to stage—the character of Yank is most definitely not an actor, the full implications of O'Neill's intervention begin to take shape.

 

By subjecting an invisible, absorptive process such as thought (the linchpin of Enlightenment humanism) to the expressive conventions of the performing as well as the plastic arts, O'Neill calls attention not only to the differences between these modes of representation, but also to the many ways in which an essentially unverifiable act can become politicized. The apparently crucial differences between being human and acting human come down, then, to questions of style, and any claims to the contrary are repeatedly exposed in The Hairy Ape as phantoms of epistemology rather than faithful indicators of ontology.46

 

That these imitative struggles occur in a drama O'Neill designed "to run the whole gamut from extreme naturalism to extreme expressionism" (Bryer 31) suggests yet another complicating factor in the semiotics of the modernist stage, calling into question the perceived correspondence between form and being that allows humanist critics to separate the "essence" of a pose from its theatrical "realization." If the actor playing Yank is to attempt the "exact attitude" of a sculpture in which a number of traditional and modern styles converge, where would that representation fall along the broad spectrum O'Neill invokes? Which discipline, theatrical or sculptural, modifies the other? Is there a recursive movement between these modes of representation? And if so, how do these aesthetic contingencies affect the pose's ideological significance?

 

Bogard's conviction that the first four scenes of The Hairy Ape are primarily naturalistic and the final four primarily expressionistic is qualified by one exception:

Perhaps the only genuinely non-naturalistic element in the early scenes is the pose which Yank assumes when he is attempting to puzzle out the questions that have been raised. Then he sits in the attitude of Rodin's "The Thinker" (246).

The implicit suggestion that the Rodin pose is expressionist rather than "naturalistic" is curious in terms of what it suggests about character and intent, especially when one takes into account the later scene in which the gorilla appears as The Thinker. Whatever conclusions we might reach, however, are symptomatic of a reading that, even (and especially) in its acknowledgement of Darwinian influences, is primarily literary, and therefore makes little distinction between stage directions and dialogue. But as we've seen, O'Neill's Thinker (for clearly it is neither Rodin's nor Yank's) operates as a purely theatrical conceit, exceeding through performance the limits of text just as it exceeds the fixed materiality of its sculptural referent.

 

Nevertheless, Bogard's question about the pose's symbolic status reopens the problem of theatrical style not just in terms of acting or design, but in terms of the historical relation between aesthetics and ideology. Understanding Yank's (or the gorilla's) pose in relation to a specific theatrical movement such as naturalism, for example, takes on great import for the meaning of the play as a whole. In "Darwin's Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature's Stage" (1991), Joseph R. Roach revisits "Realism and Naturalism [. . .] not from the perspective of what they have become,

but from the perspective of what they were attempting to subvert. They stood opposed to the received conventions of theatrical representation founded on creationist, essentialist, and idealist versions of eternal Nature. (44)

In what he describes as a "delicate recuperative project," Roach argues that the naturalism of Zola and Antoine be aligned with Brechtian "strategies of performance that historicize, criticize, and contest dominant and oppressive ideologies" (43). "For the naturalists," writes Roach, "the individual body becomes a site on which the representation of character will be rewritten by the defamiliarization of the ideal type. To this Darwinism contributed a newly authorized version of the body shorn of its theocentric symmetry, originality, and perfection" (52).

 

In The Hairy Ape, this "ideal type" is represented by the persistent humanism of Rodin's Thinker, which, despite its controversial character in turn-of-the-century Paris, ultimately came to represent a universally agreed-upon "symmetry, originality, and perfection." The Brechtian defamiliarization Roach reads back onto the naturalists is most apparent here in the context of the repetition and revision of Yank's "attitudes," which separate him from the choral group while simultaneously exposing the pretense of unity among actor, character, and image.

 

The full array of implications this gestus may have engendered onstage was recreated offstage by a striking image of the actor who played Yank (Louis Wolheim) in the Thinker pose (see Fig. 13). The special photographic process used by James Abbe seems to render its subject in the reflective hues of steel while the caption reads: "The Beast: An extraordinary cameo-like study of Louis Wolheim in his splendid characterization of `The Hairy Ape.'" This representation places actor, animal, machine, and sculpture under the umbrella of O'Neill's title, while omitting any mention of the character Yank or the intermedial figure of Rodin's Thinker. Finally, by making the Thinker pose the play's central gestus, O'Neill is able to demonstrate the social processes of individuation associated with humanist ideals of rationality, or, in Nietzschean terms, the Apollonian. This gest is repeatedly juxtaposed with a competing image, which I call "The Drinker," in which the stokers' communal reveries, as irrational as they are pleasurable, evoke Dionysian rituals. Through these opposing actions, O'Neill reveals the social conditions under which Yank and his fellow stokers labor, and the ideologies through which they are reproduced.

 

This "defamiliarization of the ideal type" achieved by the Thinker gestus is reinforced by the "rewriting" effect of the coal dust, which, as we have seen, functions simultaneously as theatrical mask, animal hide, and racial coloring. The surfaces of Yank's degraded social status are later supplemented by black and blue bruises and red blood stains, eruptions that heighten the contrast between Yank's suffering animal body and the harmony and containment promised by the Rodin figure.47 The ultimate defamiliarization of the humanist ideal in favor of the Darwinian primate body occurs when the gorilla takes on the Rodin pose, adding heft to Carol Bird's observation in 1922 that the "monkey man" was "crowd[ing] the orthodox stage hero from the boards" (102).

 

Figure 13: This silvered photograph, which seems to render its subject metallic, was originally part of a centerfold entitled "Beauty and the Beast." It was countered by a portrait representing the actress Lenore Ulric, who starred in David Belasco's Kiki. Photo: © Estate of James Abbe / Kathryn Abbe. From Theatre Magazine 36.3 (September 1922): 152-153.

 

Because O'Neill does not ascribe the kind of naïve optimism to Rodin's statue that his modern critics do,48 Yank's gradual abandonment of the pose (within the text, if not on stage) might seem to coincide with his growing apprehension of humanism just as easily as his ineffectual reproduction of it. Likewise, the gorilla's stance might be as instinctual as Darwin's "caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed" (qtd. in Norris 53) or as strategic as Mildred's social posing. Whatever the case, any representational power the original statue may have had will be attenuated by its various theatrical reiterations. The Thinker's authoritative stance is now subjected to the transformational grammar of performance, where the power of articulation redounds to the actor who "takes on" the pose, rather than to the pose itself. O'Neill cunningly emphasizes the audience's agency in this expression through the pose's narrative absence, thereby leaving any interpretive practice—and its attendant political implications—up to the spectators themselves.

 

The act of "quotation" Bogard misunderstood as a facile reproduction of a self-evident concept is now exposed in all its complexity as the very seat of ideological power in The Hairy Ape. In O'Neill's modernist dramaturgy, history is submitted to the exigencies of the stage, where authorship in all its forms becomes contingent. The seemingly immovable fixtures of western civilization, such as the Rodin statue, are here resolved of their quiddity, reappearing as intermediate presences briefly inhabiting the stage, effigies of the human in a world where the laws of performance parallel the movement of evolution, and all is in a constant state of transformation.

 

VII.

 

O'Neill sets scene 8, The Hairy Ape's final episode, in the "monkey house at the Zoo," where the play's animating metaphors are literalized, and the power differentials established in the earlier scene of (mis)recognition between Yank and Mildred are reconfigured in an encounter between Yank and a gorilla. Architecturally, the zoo recalls both the stokehole and the prison, but the inhabitants of this version of hell are actual caged primates whose availability to the human gaze constitutes their labor, and it is Yank, rather than Mildred, who now wields the interpellative power of the spectator.

 

Accordingly, the gorilla is positioned similarly to Yank in earlier scenes; he, too, emerges as protagonist from an adumbrated chorus of primates, just as The Thinker did from the doomed souls of The Gates of Hell (recall Fig. 9):

One spot of clear gray light falls on the front of one cage so that the interior can be seen. The other cages are vague, shrouded in shadow from which chatterings pitched in a conversational tone can be heard. On the one cage a sign from which the word "gorilla" stands out. The gigantic animal himself is seen squatting on his haunches on a bench in much the same attitude as Rodin's "Thinker." (160)

Already, in the scene's initial stage directions, O'Neill has enacted a radical type of surrogation, replacing the human being at the center of the drama with an animal who seems to confirm early views of The Thinker as "a brute, a sort of gorilla." If, as Roach advises, "candidates for surrogation must be tested at the margins of a culture to bolster the fiction that it has a core" (Cities 6), the zoo will function as a testing ground where the possibility of continuity between primates, rather than their categorical separation, threatens to expose the fictive core of humanist ideology. Malamud rightly concludes that "the dramatic tension [in scene 8] derives from the question of whether or not the animal is, as Mildred suggested, Yank's peer, and if so, what exactly this means" (140).

 

This taxonomical confusion, which sharpens O'Neill's unfolding critique, is upheld not only by the dramatic text but also by the play's visual rhetoric, in which human and nonhuman are united in the stage image of the Rodin pose as well as the actualization of the cage/stage trope. Both scene 6 at the prison (recall Fig. 12) and scene 8 at the zoo (see Fig. 21) begin with essentially the same stage picture; the repetition of these two caged figures (man and ape) is interpreted by humanist critics, not surprisingly, as a kind of theatrical bluff, further evidence that Yank's ability to think is no more forthcoming than a gorilla's: "And if his audience holds out hope that Yank will in fact become the thinker that he attempts `to ape,'" Walker explains, "O'Neill not only dashes their hopes but mocks them when, in the final scene, not Yank but the gorilla assumes `The Thinker's pose" ("De New" 26). By confusing the idea of a thinking gorilla with O'Neill's stage image of the gorilla as Thinker, Walker demonstrates humanism's powerful ability to camouflage image as essence, performance as ontology, and, finally, human as ape (and vice versa).

 

Finally, Walker's conviction that Yank is "unable to think" finds corroboration in a reading of the gorilla as dumb brute, a conclusion that is not only contradicted by current scientific knowledge,49 but, more importantly, finds little support within the world of the play itself. O'Neill's many stage directions clearly include the animals as agents of (theatrical) discourse, beginning with his insistence that the primates' "chatterings" be "pitched in a conversational tone" (160) at least until Yank's entrance disturbs them. Compare this with the uniform rigidity of previous choruses, whose "metallic quality" (124) and "mechanical unawareness" (147) now contrast markedly with the apparent civility and camaraderie of the monkey house.

 

The gorilla himself seems to communicate effectively using various gestures and sounds: he "growls impatiently" and "proudly," he "roars angrily" and with "an emphatic affirmative" (162). In addition to expressing his own emotions, the gorilla appears to understand Yank's, which range from friendliness, sympathy, and admiration at their initial meeting, to bitterness, confusion, pain, and "furious exaltation" (162) as Yank thinks through his predicament. The gorilla reacts to Yank's words "as if he understood" and Yank seems to confirm this when he replies: "Yuh got what I was sayin' even if yuh muffed de woids" (161). This, too, was the impression Bird received from the original production. She reports that Yank "gets on speaking terms with a huge gorilla. When he asks the gorilla a question," she tells us, mixing up her terminology to distinguish between the two primates at the same time she connects them, "the big animal rumbles a reply, so, evidently, the beast and the human ape speak the same language" (102). By the end of the drama, the intricacies of this view will play themselves out to an ambiguous conclusion.

 

Stark Young's review of the performance for the New Republic expands Bird's impression of the gorilla as speaker and thinker to a commentary on the uncredited actor playing him, claiming that his or her performance in the final scene was not only "better than Mr. Wolheim," but "extraordinary, out of class with any animal motive I have ever known on the stage" (43). What these extraordinary animal motives may have been, in fact, is the question that underlies O'Neill's theatrical mise en abîme, in which a presumably human actor (of unknown gender, race, ethnicity, class, or acting pedigree) costumed as a gorilla reenacts a gestic pose based on the posture of a statue whose history of reception reveals its own spectrum of categorical complexities and contradictions. All this representational confusion must then be sorted out by an audience of theatrical spectators who were, in 1922, primarily white, middle- or upper-class citizens familiar with Rodin's Thinker as well as the Bronx Zoo. What they surely weren't familiar with was O'Neill's cutting-edge theatricalism, which incorporated styles and structures from various European and American theatrical traditions; this generic and stylistic collage effectively destabilized an already fragile mimetic process, where any "truth" the modern stage might still be able to tell remained, like the primate actor, mysterious, magisterial, and masked.50

 

VIII.

 

Just as audiences and critics attributed various entrenched qualities to the Rodin statue, so too would they draw conclusions about the "nature" of the gorilla, then (in 1922, though less so today) thought to be one of the most cruel and ferocious animals on earth—a mysterious being whose reputation had been fueled by nineteenth-century travelers' tales in which the largest and least understood great ape became a preserve for western stereotypes of Africa and Africans: dark, savage, powerful, and in need of domestication. The "gorilla's black skin suggested that it was related to the African," explains Bettyann Kevles in Thinking Gorillas (1980), and as such "gorillas inherited all the scorn, the fantasy, and the fear that white people heaped upon Africans" (7-8). The first gorilla specimen brought back to Europe from Africa in the 1850s by the French-American adventurer Paul du Chaillu (1835-1903) was gutted, stuffed, and posed in an aggressive, teeth-baring position, suggesting that it was about to attack and confirming what many presumed was a naturally violent predisposition.

 

Du Chaillu was a prolific, embellishing writer as well as an enthusiastic hunter and taxidermist, and his melodramatic descriptions of encounters with gorillas were largely responsible for the ape's notorious reputation abroad. "Friend Paul," as Du Chaillu liked to call himself in the presence of children and "savage men," actively cultivated his celebrity in London and New York and held public lectures in which he presented "Fighting Joe," the first gorilla he had killed. In addition to these exhibitions, which had more in common with circus sideshows than they did with scientific inquiry, Du Chaillu recounted his exploits in a series of illustrated books aimed at children who "believed in the horrid gorilla and in the encounters [Friend Paul] had with that huge monster" (Stories iii-iv).

 

These "encounters" emphasized the ape's incontrovertible monstrosity while at the same time acknowledging an unnerving sense of kinship. In Stories of the Gorilla Country, Narrated for Young People (1867), Du Chaillu's description of his confrontation with a silverback, once remarkable for its novelty, today seems like a B-movie cliché:

The gorilla looked at us for a minute or so out of his evil gray eyes, then beat his breast with his gigantic arms—and what arms he had!—then he gave another howl of defiance, and advanced upon us. How horrible he looked! [. . .] The face of this gorilla was intensely black. The vast chest, which proved his great power, was bare, and covered with a parchment- like skin. His body was covered with gray hair. While the animal approached us in its fierce way, walking on its hind legs and facing us as few animals dare face man, it really seemed to me to be a horrid likeness of man. (275-76)

This lurid view of the gorilla persisted for nearly a century, and spawned an ever-expanding series of popular "primate dramas" in which the man-manqué would star.

 

Figure 14: "The Gorilla," the frontispiece from Paul du Chaillu's Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London: John Murray, 1861).

 

Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), an earlier, more "scientific" volume for adults, complete with Latin nomenclature, a pull-out map of central Africa across which Du Chaillu has added the words "gorilla country," and an oversized frontispiece titled "The Gorilla" (see Fig. 14), nevertheless offers a similarly vivid description of the hunt under the curious heading "Actions of the Gorilla." Du Chaillu concludes that the animal "was like a very devil," but after the battle he admits to feeling as if he "had killed some monstrous creation, which yet had something of humanity in it" (434-35).51 That "something" appears to have been acknowledged by the conventions of Victorian era portraiture, where primate modesty (in the guise of foliage) shields the gorilla's "manhood" from our view.

 

This presentiment was taken seriously by another nineteenth-century American adventurer, Richard L. Garner (1848-1920), who believed, contrary to Du Chaillu, that gorillas were intelligent beings who possessed the capacity and desire to communicate. He traveled to central Africa in 1890, but instead of hunting the apes, he built a protective cage for himself (which he named "Fort Gorilla") and remained inside for months, waiting for a glimpse of the creatures. His field research, along with behavioral experiments using captive apes, resulted in three primatological studies, the last of which, Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language, was published in 1900. In the "Preface" to this volume, Garner reassures his readers that

The author has carefully refrained from abstruse theories or rash deductions, but has sought to place the animals here treated of in the light to which their own conduct entitles them. [. . .] Believing in a common source of life, a common law of living, and a common destiny for all creatures, he feels that to dignify the apes is not to degrade man but rather to exalt him. (iv)

By imbuing his quest for knowledge with an ethical dimension that not only demanded just treatment of apes but required man to reexamine his own relation to nature, Garner decried the narrative excess that had made Du Chaillu famous: "Seeing the same old stories repeated year after year, and knowing that there is no truth in them," he writes, referring explicitly to his predecessor, "I feel it incumbent as a duty to challenge them" (273). It is not a coincidence that these conflicting representations bookend the decades in which Darwin's work was first published and the discourse of species became even more entangled in already passionate debates about the scientific bases of race and ethnicity, complicating the ongoing imperialist projects of European nations. Du Chaillu's first foray into Africa occurred in 1856, three years before The Origin of Species appeared, while Garner's research, first published in 1892, four years after Darwin's death, augered a new century in which differences of all kinds, including species, would be re-examined in light of theories of natural selection. An early devotee of such theories, Garner praised Darwin in his first book, The Speech of Monkeys, claiming that he had "given to the world the most profound and conscientious work, and from the chaos and confusion of human ignorance and bigotry has erected the most sublime monuments of thought and truth" (127).

 

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