ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to expand the ecocritical study of Victorian visual and material culture by considering the live, intact, material bodies of whales as visual culture. Regarding the whale as imbricated in visual culture also speaks to the fundamental anxiety of the island nation: Britannia rules the waves, but whales rule the depths. The visual culture of any captive whale so long as the whale hunt continued was a visual culture of death, and the first Westminster whale’s death was in many ways even more of a spectacle than its arrival. The Westminster whales bring the ethical concerns to bear upon studies of Victorian visual culture and vice versa. These creatures constituted an early anxious alliance between those who would profit purely monetarily from exhibiting live cetaceans, and those whose research would profit and who would educate the public by way of live whale.