ABSTRACT
Modern Europeans had to renegotiate a relationship to animality in terms of exoticism, wildness, and clever performance. Zoos and circuses, however, having different institutional histories, offered these visitors different experiences of animality. Taming and training were the practices and allegories of these gestures of inclusion and exclusion, of the simultaneous narrowing and widening distance within the civilizing process. Animal savagery, victimhood, innocence, and vitality afforded the most daring fin de siecle theorists a space within which to think beyond traditional conceptions of humanism. A frequent visitor to the zoological garden, Frank Wedekind experienced the menagerie at feeding time and understood animals as powerful and dangerous creatures with rapacious appetites and survival instincts. Wedekind aims to demystify human morality by revealing its instinctual basis. Wedekind claims 'life itself is a damned clever beast, and it is not easy to subjugate it. Friedrich Nietzsche uses the image of the animal tamer to comment on morality.
