"Contested Exhibitions: The Debate Over Proper Animal Sights in Post-Revolutionary America," Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9.2 (2005), 219-235. (original) (raw)
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Masters Thesis, 2018
Throughout the nineteenth century, a diverse array of wildlife arrived in London, the center of both a nation and a global empire. Once in Britain, live animals were exhibited for adoring, middle- and upper-class audiences in two of the city’s most popular entertainment venues, the Exeter Change Menagerie and the London Zoological Gardens. Here, visitors interacted with animals by viewing, feeding, touching, and riding upon them, all ways formulated to consume an animal that, unlike pets, could not actually be purchased by the average Briton. In lieu of this constraint, these modes of interaction provided a way for visitors to feel a sense of transitory ownership over these creatures, thereby turning interactions with animals into a sort of immaterial capital to British consumers. Many animals were already dead before they arrived in Britain—including dinosaurs harbored in the earth for eons—or died in London after a life in captivity. Just as living creatures were exhibited, so too were deceased animals displayed in scientific museums, exhibition venues, and entertainment halls. Britons flocked to see and touch these enormous taxidermies and skeletons, astounded that such colossal creatures had been captured and supplanted from their natural environment for perpetual display in the metropolis. Bridging the gap between life and death and exemplifying the contentions of each prior chapter, this thesis concludes by examining the celebrity elephant Chunee’s lifecycle through London, from his time acting on the stage to his skeleton’s display long after his death.
ing quantitative data. Additionally, qualitative evidence is also asked to support unjustifiably broad conclusions. For example, for the author to assume that the lack of serious differences in the language used to describe male and female offences in recognizances proves that a large proportion of petty violence was "ungendered" (66-68) underestimates the impact of formulaic legalistic wording and too readily takes official texts as proof of broader social views. Moreover, the credibility of her challenge to assumptions about gender and "violence" would have been strengthened by more attention to how her analysis of "ungendered" petty violence can be squared with solid evidence of significant gendered differences in more serious violence. The author ultimately seeks to prove that "neither the perpetration nor the prosecution of petty violence was entirely subject to gender limitations" (128). This could be seen as a modest goal, since no historian of any time period has, to my knowledge, ever claimed the complete subjection of violence to gender codes.
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On October 23, 1903, William Temple Hornaday, the director of the New York Zoological Park, wrote to a Mr C. L. Williams, then responsible for ‘Hagenbeck’s Animal Show,’ which was touring the United States. At the time, the show was to be seen at the Grand Opera House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but it was missing one of its star performers, the famous lion-tiger hybrid ‘Prince’ who had been part of the show for over a decade, making his debut in the United States as part of Hagenbeck’s exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Prince was in New York instead of with the show because he was ill and it was hoped that the relative quiet and expert care available at the zoological park would help him recover. Alas, according to the letter, Prince ‘would require fully another month of convalescence’ before he would possibly be ready to ‘resume his work.’ ‘He yet feels so much under the weather,’ Hornaday writes, ‘that he lies in his den all day and never comes ou...