Between Fact and Myth: The Kingdom of the Nonhuman in the Victorian Literary Imagination

This paper is an attempt to examine how animals and mythical creatures acquire an ideological importance in the Victorian imagination, a process which often involves the rise of conflicts in the taxonomic traditions in natural science. I explore the Victorian engagement with natural science through animal narratives that inform the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley-Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story (1866), and The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863). These texts engage with animal issues both in terms of cultural meanings and scientific implications, allowing the reader to see exactly how the human-animal boundary is constructed. Besides, they constitute a critical site for the representation of the conflict between truth/fact and myth/fantasy, science and romance. Moreover, I probe the role played by creatures such as apes and mermaids (perceived as either factual or imaginary) in the making of popular myth, as well as in the investigation of the central idea of systematic classification in the Victorian imagination. They present the taxonomic debate on classifying and categorizing species, which meanwhile illustrates the dichotomy of scientific realism and romantic imagination. When we consider the confusion between the idea of the ape and of the missing (or the myth-ing) link, we may better understand scientific discourse about the nature of species in the Victorian literary imagination.