Alba Tomasula y Garcia
Gorillas in the Mind: The Construction of a Great Ape
While representations of animals have long expressed evolving conceptions of beasts and humans (especially as played out in the power relationships between them), it is depictions of apes in particular—likely because they are so biologically close to humans—that hold a special place in human-animal debates. Intense human interest in apes (and the effects of such interest on our ideas of both these beasts and ourselves) can be witnessed in events as diverse as the publication of On the Origin of Species, in 1859, to the 2014 lawsuit by Steven M. Wise on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee, against Tommy’s owner for holding the ape in violation of his rights as a “legal person.” In fact, these creatures have acted as lightning rods in arguments over every facet of human existence, from the “naturality” of social hierarchy to what our “proper” relation to nonhuman nature should be. Consider, for example, two prototypical apes that appeared almost simultaneously at a formative moment in the American public consciousness of the Great Ape. The first and most well known of these, King Kong, conquered the big screen over 70 years ago and remains a world-renowned cultural icon to this day. While King Kong is most obviously a fictional character and known now to be a poor model of how real gorillas behave, he is nevertheless the star of a film deemed culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant, although perhaps for all the wrong reasons. The original King Kong, after all, not only portrays gorillas as vicious, brutal creatures, but also stands as a prominent example of how representations of these apes—such as Kong—were used to encode black humans as viciously bestial by nature, and therefore as requiring control by civilized hands. Indeed, the very plot of King Kong was constructed upon the supposed threat of black masculinity to white womanhood. These are representations with a long and violent history, for which King Kong, as it were, is only the tip of the Empire State Building.
The portrayal of gorillas—and by extension Africans and indeed all dark-skinned humans—as lecherous monsters was well established in European and Euroamerican societies long before Kong made his appearance on the silver screen. While apes had been used in Europe as symbols of sin, lust, and evil since the medieval period, during colonization the demonization of apes— and the attribution of ape-like characteristics to Africans—became “particularly strong in the English imagination.” In numerous instances, these assumptions about the nature of apes and Africans were two sides of the same colonial sentiment.1 Edward Long’s 1774 History of Jamaica, for example, emphasized imagined similarities between enslaved Africans and apes to justify the bondage and brutality into which so many were forced.2 It is not without reason that philosopher Frantz Fanon has stated that when a colonist seeks to describe “the natives” fully, he “refers constantly to the bestiary”; human-animal comparisons, especially to apes, have long been utilized as particularly powerful rationales for the abuses of imperialism.3 Of all the apes, it was the gorilla, usually depicted as the most ferocious, cunning, and sexual animal of all, that was most often cited as evidence for the need of colonists: white men who, armed with modern technology, were able to subjugate, tame, and thus make useful the wild.
Perhaps because gorillas were so strongly linked in the minds of colonists to the humans they were subjugating, these apes became a favorite game animal for colonial servicemen seeking to add to their personal prestige, as well as to prove the superiority of European civilization by “purging a [colonized] country of its wildlife.”4 As professor of history Harriet Ritvo succinctly put it, “the association of the big game hunter with the march of empire was literal as well as metonymic”; the killing of a dangerous, exotic animal by a colonial hunter was perceived as connected to the complete domination of a native people..5 Indeed, the famous hunter Paul Belloni du Chaillu, who has gone down in history as the first white man to kill a gorilla, not only described Africans as “naturally” inferior humans but also portrayed gorillas as “’hellish dream creatures’” of which “‘no description can exceed…the ferocity of [their] attack.’”6 Most other accounts of gorillas from the middle to the late 1800s follow this pattern of description, with some, such as that of the German commercial traveler Herr Paschen of Schwerin, also taking pains to detail how gorillas were both “fearful monsters” and sexual predators.7 This perception of gorillas became so dominant that in the 1890s Richard Garner, one of the first white men to attempt to scientifically study wild gorillas, spent “112 days in a specially constructed cage to protect himself from the savage apes he hoped to encounter.” Contemporary primatologists will be unsurprised to learn that the “gorillas mainly avoided him.”8 Even so, by 1902 the portrayal of gorillas as both “the most dangerous of animals” as well as creatures consumed by “unbridled libidinous desire” was firmly established, with little to no counter narrative to challenge such a belief.9 It is in this context that the legend of King Kong was born.
Released in 1933 to popular acclaim, it is unsurprising that Kong, given the histories and assumptions that informed him, turned out the way he did. Merian C. Cooper—one of the producer-directors of King Kong—even stated that he had first picked up his fascination for gorillas as a young boy from a copy of Paul du Chaillu’s 1861 best-selling Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, a work that, like many other adventure narratives of the era, depicted gorillas as virtual devils.10 Given that du Chaillu also “took a dim view of the ‘dreadful and dreary lives’ of Africans and advised that ‘the cunning hand and brain of the white man’ could improve their situation,” one can see how colonial ideology was embedded in King Kong from its conception.11 And indeed, King Kong, for all its semi-fantastical elements, is also an almost verbatim repetition of the numerous colonial hunting narratives that came before: in the film, producer Carl Denham and his crew travel to Skull Island with a boat full of gas bombs and rifles. Upon arrival they find primitive drum-beating and grass-skirt-wearing black natives at the mercy of a large, vicious animal to whom they sacrifice young women. The very fact that it falls to Denham and his crew to subdue a rampaging Kong is very much a reinstatement of the “White Man’s Burden,” in which it is up to the colonizers to save the colonized from some problem, often a vicious indigenous animal, that they— being but “savages”—are unable to handle themselves. But it is Fay Wray’s role as the perpetually screaming demoiselle en détresse that calls attention to a particular long-standing use of gorillas: the employment of these beasts as living embodiments of fears about the “wild” sexuality of black men and their perceived threat to white women, and, by association, to “pure” European civilization as a whole. King Kong intends to suggest that such fears are well founded, as Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow, the single blonde in the film (and a white woman of child-bearing age), is first kidnapped by the black primitives who then offer her as a sacrifice to Kong, an even more wild, savage, and libidinous figure than themselves.
In his essay “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” Sterling Brown notes that a popular character type in what he calls “Ku Klux Klan fiction” is that of “The Brute Negro.” This trope is, as Brown describes it, “’a gorilla-like imbecile, who ‘springs like a tiger,’ has the ‘black claws of a beast,’” and who features in stories that have a very rigid and precise plot structure: a black man rapes a white woman, thus sparking “’a glorious ride of the Knights on a Holy Crusade to avenge Southern civilization,”’ which ends with the just lynching of the black “brute.”12 Stories of this sort became particularly popular after Emancipation, when a horror of interracial coupling was often expressed through images of white women with gorillas, a horror that perhaps takes its most famous form in King Kong. Indeed, while this movie does present a “somewhat sympathetic view of the fate of the ‘primitive’ in modern industrialized society—a morality tale about the savage in the city, in which Kong meets his end at the hands of the military-industrial entertainment complex—what is more emphasized is the [unspoken sexual] threat represented by the beast’s attraction to the ‘golden woman.’”13 When Ann is sacrificed to Kong, instead of immediately eating her—as he presumably does his black victims— he plays with her as if she’s a doll, fascinated by her white beauty, even stripping off her clothes while she screams in terror. Kong’s desire for Ann isn’t diminished even after he has been subdued and brought to New York in chains. Reduced from island deity to live spectacle before a gawking audience of bejeweled and tuxedoed theatergoers, Kong is forced to pose beside Ann and her fiancé, the white sailor who rescued her from Kong’s clutches. Frustrated into a rage by being shackled so near to the golden beauty he craves, Kong soon goes on a rampage, breaking his chains and taking Ann with him. In the end, we are told that being enraptured by the beauty of this white woman and laying claim to her is what ultimately slays Kong, Carl Denham remarking, “It was Beauty killed the Beast.” If Kong hadn’t been so aroused by the white woman’s beauty, or if he had at least been able to control himself, the movie tells us, Kong would have never been gunned down. In this, King Kong is a tale as old as institutionalized racism, and stands as a document of colonialism, where “woman [specifically white woman] is not just beauty…she is ‘endangered beauty,’” who we see scared out of her wits and in need of rescue by white men due to her direct exposure to a “black ape representing [the] remorseless phallic potency [of black men].”14 For all the sympathy that he might garner on the surface, King Kong embodies—as did all the gorillas killed by white hunters before him—“an imperialist parable about the risks posed by contact between the primitive and the civilized [and] a cautionary tale about rampant [black] male sexuality and the dangers of interracial intercourse.”15
King Kong became a sensation almost immediately, even though, and likely because, the film embodied a plethora of colonialist and racist assumptions. The movie was never about gorillas, but rather, as with most media before it, used gorillas as a screen “upon which to project fears of sexuality and uncontrolled drives, theories of criminality, and narratives of human and primate difference.”16 Yet while this use of the gorilla in the 1930s was very much in keeping with all of those that came before it, in the same decade the image would undergo a radical shift, due in no small part to a living beast that the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago brought onto the national stage and into the national consciousness in the form of a real gorilla named Bushman.
Bushman was purchased by Lincoln Park Zoo in 1930, when he was two years old and weighed 38 pounds. Although we cannot be sure how exactly he was acquired by the zoo, chances are that his story ran along the same lines as that of the vast majority of infant gorillas procured during hunting trips at that time. It was the case in the 1930s, as is almost always the case now, that, in order to capture a wild infant gorilla, the infant’s mother was killed. In all likelihood, Bushman’s entire family was slaughtered, the wholesale massacre of gorilla groups being common in the gathering of their infants for sale. Schaller gives one example of how complete this destruction could be: “‘In about 1948,’” he reports, “’officials organized the killing of some sixty mountain gorillas near Angumu to obtain eleven infants, only one of which survived.’”17 Yet while Bushman was violently taken from his original home and made a spectacle, like his fictional counterpart Kong, he didn’t inspire terror. Rather, he captivated the hearts of Chicagoans and visitors from around the world. He grew to be 6 ½ feet tall and to weigh 530 pounds, and for twenty-one years he delighted crowds with his size, strength, and “practical jokes.” His death on New Year’s Day in 1951 made headlines, and people filed by his empty cage over the next several weeks in mourning. Although they were virtual contemporaries, Bushman thus inspired a very different set of reactions than did King Kong. The reason for this lies in the fact that not only was Bushman safely behind bars, but he was also the first real, living gorilla that many had ever seen, one who even in his cramped cage offered a glimpse on how the actual beasts behaved.
Bushman, the first gorilla kept in a zoo west of the Potomac River, attracted large crowds through his novelty alone. He also grew into an incredibly powerful animal, and could not only pop footballs as if they were balloons, but could also stretch an automobile tire—as one visitor put it—“like a rubber band.” Bushman’s personality also attracted spectators, and he came to be well known for “pranks” such as “playfully” throwing food and dung at gawkers. As reported by Life, which highlighted Bushman’s actions throughout the years, this became such a frequent occurrence that a plate-glass wall had to be installed to keep his missiles from hitting spectators.18 Although it is now known that gorillas consider staring a sign of aggression and in response will throw objects such as leaves and dung as part of threat displays, the 1930s zoo-going public was ignorant of this fact and found Bushman’s antics exactly the kind of entertainment they wanted. In fact, Bushman came to be so loved that during his lifetime he not only received an estimated 120,000 visitors in a single day, but was also voted by the nation’s zoo directors as “the most outstanding animal in any zoo in the world.”19 He was also so anthropomorphized that he was described as an “all-American success story,” who, as one newspaper put it, came to Chicago “as a penniless immigrant orphan” that eventually “gave the city class.”20 Gorilla though he was, Bushman gained the admiration of millions and was even seen as embodying some of the best traits of humanity.
Despite all this admiration, it must be noted that Bushman performed all of his feats in a tiny, human-controlled environment, one that emphasized how powerless this powerful animal actually was under human control. In this, Bushman was made to service a particular desire that has long defined menageries. Anthropologist John Sorenson perhaps defined this desire best when he wrote that throughout history “zoos have been…expressions of power over nature”; the stronger and more ferocious a particular captive animal is, the more conspicuous is the human control over the beast, and thus over nature as a whole.21 The fact is that zoos wouldn’t even begin to consider conservation as a goal until the 1960s. Before this, they had existed primarily as either affirmations of man’s “ imperial mastery over Nature” or as forms of entertainment.22 Even so, it was partially due to the zoo setting that Bushman received as much love as he did. It is, after all, hard to imagine any caged animal as a threat. Moreover, as one of only eleven gorillas then in US zoos, and as the one who was most well known due to his “sense of fun,” Bushman’s presence at Lincoln Park Zoo allowed visitors a rare chance to see a real gorilla with many moods and a unique, charismatic personality, making gorillas in general seem less like ferocious monsters and more akin to people.23 Seeing Bushman up close humanized him to some degree, allowing people to feel compassion for the ape, rather than just fear. In this way, Bushman, along with other gorillas in zoos, played a very important role in changing the Western perception of gorillas from that of bloodthirsty beasts to “primarily peaceful animals [that nevertheless possess] great size and strength.”24
Even though it’s increasingly rare to find gorillas in the wild (as of 2014 there were only 880 mountain gorillas left in their native territory in Uganda), they’ve begun to appear in growing numbers in the West due to captive breeding programs.25 In this, there is a direct link between the affection visitors at Lincoln Park Zoo had for Bushman and the desire of zoos around the world to imitate his success in attracting crowds. Initially, this contributed to the decimation of gorillas in the wild by increasing the demand for gorilla infants. Indeed, a Life article reporting on a sick and ailing Bushman in 1950 blithely assured its readers that “U.S. zoos do not have to worry about replacing their aging apes because a constant supply of baby gorillas…keep[s] coming in.”26 No mention was made of the wholesale slaughter of adult gorillas used to obtain this “constant supply.” But it was also the love and admiration Bushman inspired during his lifetime that convinced Lincoln Park Zoo to invest the millions of dollars required to sustain captive breeding programs for his species. As it happened, Bushman’s cultural legacy at Lincoln Park Zoo was to play a major role in transforming the old zoo structure. Once people began to see Bushman as an animal with emotions and understanding, often comparable to their own, they began to call for more humane treatment of animals, at least within the zoo setting. As it were, it was only when animals and the “wilderness” they represent became “controlled, subdued, and safe,” that they were perceived as being “at last worthy of our benign attention.”27 And so Lincoln Park Zoo, which once only exhibited wild-born gorillas, is now internationally famous for its gorilla captive breeding program, which stands as one of the world’s most successful.28 Currently, between 14 and 20 gorillas are born in US zoos every year, and Lincoln Park Zoo, whose gorillas are “well-represented genetically in North American zoos,” is largely responsible for overseeing the mental, physical, and genetic health of these beasts.29 It is, that is to say, partially due to the affection Bushman inspired that Lincoln Park Zoo, and other zoos like it, currently stand as some of the last and most fervent hopes that gorillas have of surviving into the future, if not necessarily in the wild.
Together, Bushman and King Kong mark the transformation of gorillas in the Western popular imagination “from nightmarish monster to innocent victim and psychopomp.”30 As such, they reveal just how much the West has turned from an ideology of imperialism towards one of conservation and protection, even if its methods have, at heart, barely changed. King Kong, as the pinnacle of savagery and as a somewhat tragic, but ultimately monstrous creature whose destruction was necessary, is one of the last—and likely the most famous—of the gorilla images explicitly informed by colonialism and its assumptions. Bushman, in contrast, became a much-loved figure that helped form the perception of gorillas as gentle and vulnerable giants, an image later popularized even by King Kong’s director Merian C. Cooper. His 1949 film Mighty Joe Young is practically a complete reversal of the savage gorilla trope, for the giant ape of this movie is both clearly a victim of man’s greed as well as a hero, who not only saves a group of orphans from a burning building, but is allowed a happy ending in the form of a peaceful return to his native land. This gentle giant version of gorillas, first made popular by zoo gorillas such as Bushman, paved the way for research by figures such as Dian Fossey, and have now led to an enormous and sustained push to save gorillas from extinction, if not necessarily to halt the destruction of their habitats. From savage to noble, gorillas have long been used as a “means of creating [our] own identity and uniqueness,” even while their representations and histories reveal just how much Western society is torn “between the persistent drive to exploit and a new desire to preserve and respect.”31
NOTES
1 Sorenson, Ape, 58-59.
2 Ibid., 58.
3 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 7.
4 Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, 113.
5 Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 254.
6 du Chaillu qtd. in Sorenson, Ape, 63
7 Gott, 16.
8 Sorenson, Ape, 66.
9 Gott, 15.
10 Ibid., 50.
11 Sorenson, Ape, 66.
12 Quoted in Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, 35.
13 Wexman, “Horrors of the Body,” 289.
14 Weir, 64.
15 Ibid., 70.
16 Gott, 8.
17 Quoted in Dixson, 166.
18 “Bushman the Gorilla Has Birthday”
19 Schreuder, “Bushman Comes to Chicago.”
20 Tuomey, “Bushman: The Superstar No One Has Ever Been Able to Ape.”
21 Sorenson, Ape, 77.
22 Hancocks, A Different Nature, 252.
23 “Bushman the Gorilla Has Birthday”; “Bushman is Sick”
24 Gott, 11.
25 Rosen.
26 “Bushman is Sick.”
27 Hancocks, A Different Nature, 247.
28 Mullen, “Lincoln Park Zoo ape family gets visit from stork.”
29 Ibid.
30 Sorenson, Ape, 69.
31 Gott 7; Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, 281.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baratay, Eric, and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West. London: Reaktion Books. 2002.
Dixson, A.F. The Natural History of the Gorilla. New York: Columbia UP, 1981.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Gott, Ted, and Kathryn Weir. Gorilla. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2013.
Hancocks, David. A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2001.
Life. “Bushman the Gorilla Has Birthday in Chicago Zoo.” June 9, 1941. 97-98. http://books.google.com/ooks?id=jUwEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Life. “Bushman is Sick: At 22, Chicago’s grand old gorilla keels over and whole city worries.” June 26, 1950. 97-100. http://books.google.com/ooks?id=50oEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.
Mullen, William. “Lincoln Park Zoo ape family gets visit from stork; Unnamed female is first delivery in 6 years.” Chicago Tribune News. 2011. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-22/news/chi-lincoln-park-zoo-ape-family-gets-visit-from- stork-20111122_1_zoo-gorilla-population-ape-house-baby- gorilla.
Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.
Rosen, Jon. “As Mountain Gorillas Bounce Back, Rwanda Names Gorilla Newborns.” National Geographic News, Animals. July 2, 2014 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140702-gorillas-rwanda-babies-naming-ceremony-veterinarian/.
Schreuder, Cindy. “Bushman comes to Chicago; He was Lincoln Park Zoo’s most popular resident, but not always its best tempered.” Chicago Tribune Politics. December 19, 2007. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-bushman-story,0,1541189.story.
Sorenson, John. Ape. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.
Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. New York: Mirror Books, 1996.
Tuomey, Timothy J., and Magdalene Wise Tuomey. “Bushman: The Superstar No One Has Ever Been Able to Ape.” Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1980.
Weir, Kathryn Elizabeth, and Ted Gott. Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong. Queensland Art Gallery, 2005.
Wexman, Virginia Wright. “Horrors of the Body: Hollywood’s Discourse on Beauty and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1988.