Abstract
This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.
Highlights
Sensuousness in Lewis and Coleridge.In A Dictionary of Natural History (1785), Scottish priest and bibliophile William FordyceMavor defines the anaconda as a “Ceylonese serpent of enormous magnitude, extremely mischievous among cattle” (Mavor 1785, p. 27)
Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms
I recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects
Summary
“The Anaconda was still employed in twisting itself in a thousand coils among the palm-branches with such restless activity, with rapidity so inconceivable, that it was frequently impossible for the sight to follow her movements At one moment, she fastened herself by the end of her tail to the very summit of the loftiest tree, and stretched out at her whole length, swung backwards like the pendulum of a clock, so that her head almost seemed to graze the earth beneath her: in another moment, before the eye was aware of her intention, she totally disappeared among the leafy canopies.” If queering the eighteenth century intends to explode finite boundaries of gendered and sexual containment, interspecies eroticisms dissolve the loose reins of human supremacy that too often plague queer and environmental studies
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