Simian Narratives at the Intersection of Science and Literature

Medeiros, Paulo de

doi:10.2307/3195035

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The stories of large apes being hypersexualized and carrying off native women appeared in early travel literature and had even been repeated in Buffon's Histoire naturelle. 52 By the July Monarchy they found their way into popular fiction, and even a bizarre, farcical tale, 'Quidquid Volueris' (or 'Whatever Works'), written in 1837 by the precocious sixteen-year-old, Gustave Flaubert. Probably inspired by the display of the well-behaved, young Sumatran orangutan from May 1836 to January 1837 in the Jardin des plantes, 53 this disturbing nightmare starts with an arrogant, philistine anthropologist, Paul de Monville, who mates an attractive Brazilian slave woman with an orangutan to win a bet about the possibility of such an interspecies coupling.…”

Section: Sex and The Single Primatementioning

confidence: 99%

Beauty or Beast? Manet's Olympia in the Age of Comparative Anatomy

McCauley¹

2020

Art History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Among the most‐cited jibes directed at Manet’s Olympia in 1865 was a comment by the little𠄉known critic, Amédée Cantaloube, in a short‐lived periodical, Le Grand Journal, that dubbed the reclining nude ‘a kind of gorilla’. Through a close reading of the layered associations with this primate, only named in 1847, this essay locates the painting’s subject within contemporary excitement over the possible capture of a living specimen by adventurer Paul Du Chaillu, and scientific as well as popular debates over the links between humans and higher mammals. Using a piecemeal way of reading the body consistent with the methods of comparative anatomists, critics saw the disjointed body of Olympia as not only that of a prostitute but also sub’human. Cantaloube’s extreme language also reflected repressed fears of interspecies coupling and the linked possibility of miscegenation, particularly topical in light of the end of the Civil War in April 1865.

show abstract

Section: Sex and The Single Primatementioning

confidence: 99%