Human Thighs and Susceptible Apes: Self-Implicating Category Confusion in Victorian Discourse on West Africa

Abstract

Examines examples of self-implicating category confusion engendered by the anomalous but linked figures of the gorilla and the cannibal which appear in a number of important Victorian exploration narratives of West Africa. Explores how certain moments in these narratives reveal an implicit, if unacknowledged, anxiety about the explorer’s dual place, both within the taxonomic schema and also outside and above it. Traces a change over time from the sensational representations of apes and cannibals from travelogues in the 1850s to the self-confident zoological and ethnographic project of Mary Kingsley in the 1890s, who managed to place herself outside the masculinist adventure tradition to secure a place within the more sophisticated game of worldwide empire as an ideologist of its emerging governing philosophy of indirect rule.