Conclusion

Summary

Imperial romance expresses human involvement with the natural world, and indeed the term human itself, as beset by paradoxes. To glance back over the adventures of this study, as much as Henty and Buchan in Rujub the Juggler and A Lodge in the Wilderness seek to regulate and domesticate animal others as an emblem of the assimilation of racial others, they also retain an ideological and aesthetic investment in otherness as a core ingredient of their narrative practices and as a sign of a culture and a masculinity infused with virility. The naturalist's craft for Fenn and Henty while involved in the Euro- and anthropocentric ordering of the world, constructs an ambivalent human subjectivity that fails to marshal its own savagery. Gorillas provide an illustration par excellence of the uncertainty of the species divide and of the instability of literary categories: the embodiment of an ontological doubt that muddies human priority. The discourse of the human body, particularly here the male body, both in degeneration and at its peak, further disturbs the absoluteness of the human/animal divide; while Ralph's meeker, disempowered sensibility illustrates the complexity of the psychic thrills that inhere in such texts' obsessive interest in violence towards animals.

These patterns reveal imperial romance's presentation of non-human animals as a multifaceted and conflicted textual experience that requires a reconsideration of a crudely reductive reading of the genre as simple escapism. Images of the natural man, the degenerate, the ape, the victim and the savage indicate the human as a designation porous at many points and destabilise a hegemonic logic that ostensibly abjects animality as the sign only of the disenfranchised other.