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The Jungle Books: Rudyard Kipling's Lamarckian Fantasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Allen MacDuffie
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Abstract

Scholars have long described Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books as a Darwinian narrative. Overlooked, however, is the way in which the text explicitly discusses Lamarckian evolutionary ideas, especially the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This essay contextualizes Mowgli's narrative within a fierce late-nineteenth-century debate about whether the Darwinian theory of natural selection or Lamarckian use inheritance was the main driver of evolutionary change. Kipling describes his protagonist's maturation to “Master of the Jungle” in thoroughly Lamarckian terms, as an evolutionary process propelled by experience, effort, and conscious adaptation. But some of the conceptual incoherence that troubled the Lamarckian evolutionary scheme when it was applied to human racial difference also troubles Kipling's account of Mowgli's genetic past and the evolutionary issue of his experiences.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 18 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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