The Sonic Animal in Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells and Nineteenth Century Fiction

Abstract

This thesis argues for the centrality of sound to our appreciation and understanding of the literary animal by introducing and investigating the literary phenomenon of the ‘sonic animal’. We can trace the history of sound as a strategy for representing the animal back to the Iliad in which Homer offers us a highly evocative description of Patroclus’s horse, Pedasus “whin(ing) in the throes of Death” after having been speared by the Trojan Sarpedon. But it is in the nineteenth century, a time of great upheaval in our attitudes and views toward the nonhuman other that the sonic animal once again makes its powerful voice heard. Indeed, the powerful voice of the sonic animal is spectacularly displayed in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Whereas for Poe, the sonic animal, a murderous orangutan whose gruff and shrill voice sounds remarkably like that of a human’s, marks the liminal threshold between animal sound and human language that is central to the internal structure of anthropocentrism, Wells’s crying, vivisected puma challenges science’s construction of the animal as an entity that can be treated with violent impunity, offering us a damning critique of the vivisectionist’s disavowal of animal emotion, pain and suffering. In light of this, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach drawing on animal literary studies, the history of science and Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) published posthumously in 2012, and one framed by the concept of the animal’s “point of view”. In their depictions of the sonic animal, Poe and Wells take up the animal’s “point of view” as a way of undermining and destabilizing two central assumptions of anthropocentric thought: namely, that the animal is incapable of language and has no emotional life. Engaging this concept of the animal’s point of view, Poe and Wells explore literature’s role in contesting anthropocentrism, effectively engaging us in an aesthetically provocative experiment in animal subjectivity. Literature, we see, can help us rethink how we value and treat the animal.