ABSTRACT
In this chapter Anna West inquires into ant culture, insect emotion, and the extension of Descartes’ proposition of animals as automata to human animals. After the widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution, the way Victorians organized and viewed the natural world shifted. Traits that were considered to be uniquely human—possession of culture and the ability to feel emotion, for example—were traced to their roots in the animal world in works like Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and George Romanes’ Animal Intelligence (1882) and Mental Evolution in Animals (1883). At the same time, assumptions about the animal world were being extended to the human, notably in Thomas Huxley’s 1874 lecture that reconsidered Cartesian dualism by applying the argument of animals as automata to humans. While Darwin’s awe at the mind of an ant may seem difficult to reconcile with Huxley’s view of humans as automatons, The Return of the Native offers the concept of “creature” as a way to approach the “whole conscious world collectively,” as Hardy phrased it in a 1909 letter. Hardy’s creatures—like Darwin’s, Romanes’, and Huxley’s—complicate categorical hierarchies and inverse Victorian attitudes toward not only the human but also the animal, pointing toward what Derrida terms the “unsubstitutable singularity” of the individual.
