Moral: Man has gained dominion over nature not through physical prowess but through his wits and his ability to create laws and live in civilized society.
It’s easy enough to see that Kipling believes man has gained dominion over nature. Mowgli is the primary example of this; after all, he “discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf, the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes”. Also, in the scene at the end of Mowgli’s Brothers Mowgli uses the red flower to inspire such fear in the wolves that he can refer to them as dogs with impunity. “Tiger! Tiger!” is set up as the final showdown between man and nature— Shere Khan is Mowgli’s foremost enemy in the jungle, and more than the wolves he represents the nature of the animal—as Father Wolf says, “By the Law of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning”, but of course that doesn’t stop Shere Khan. Since Shere Khan represents the antithesis of order, Mowgli’s triumph in the killing of Shere Khan is a triumph over nature as a whole.
Mowgli is not physically strong. While experience alone should tell us this— humans just aren’t as big as bears and tigers and wolves and they neither have powerful jaws nor terrible claws— at the end of Kaa’s Hunting we are given solid evidence that Mowgli is spending time with animals physically out of his league. Bagheera gives Mowgli half a dozen “love-taps from a panther’s point of view (they would hardly have waked one of his own cubs), but for a seven-year-old boy they amounted to as severe a beating as you could have wished to avoid.” When Baloo beats him at the beginning of the story, according to Bagheera, “his face is all bruised”. And when the villagers see Mowgli at the beginning of Tiger! Tiger! he is covered in scars from playing with his wolf brothers. In the jungle Mowgli is small and weak, so his triumph over nature must occur through other means.
When Mowgli is being kicked out of the Seonee wolfpack, he keeps them from killing him by taking fire from the village. The fire is Mowgli’s human inheritance— he represents man in that he can use tools which other animals cannot, and uses these abilities to keep them from killing him. But even before receiving this formal inheritance, this proof that he is something other than wild, in his lessons with Baloo he proves himself to be not only more mentally agile than the other wolves but more able to live in and profit by the Jungle Law. When kidnapped by the lawless Bander-Log, Mowgli uses the Jungle Law to his profit and convinces a bird to tell Baloo and Bagheera where he is, and later on uses the same Jungle Law to keep snakes from killing him. Mowgli has nothing to fear in the jungle because despite living in the depths of the jungle he is on some level innately civilized. He is capable of learning, understanding, and utilizing more of the Jungle Law than any other animal in the jungle. He can even pronounce a word which Baloo, his teacher, cannot— that of the snakes. And in “Tiger Tiger”, Mowgli’s ultimate triumph over nature, Mowgli brings together both his intelligence and innate civilization— he plots a way to trample Shere Khan to death, and to exercise this plan he practices animal husbandry, a hallmark of civilization, organizing the dumb animals into a force which kills Shere Khan. Through this clash, Kipling shows that man’s superiority lies both in his superior intellect and his innate sense of law through which he organizes and controls the world around him.
The idea that Mowgli is “innately civilized” intrigues me. And the idea that such an intrinsic trait would also extend to Mowgli’s employment of the Law seems to me to suggest an inextricable link b/w civilization and order. While this might seem like an obvious link, it begs the question of whose order (whose “law”) produces such “civilization.” Your post does a nice job of revealing Mowgli’s ascension to the top of the animal kingdom; but I am left to wonder if this, in your mind, is attached to an imperialist ideology or not? I wonder only b/c you didn’t directly name British Imperialism as a “culprit” of sorts for Mowgli’s behavoir. And, frankly, this intrigued me further. Is there necessarily a contested relation b/w imperialism and natural order? Or, can imperialism be refigured as natural order? Would Mowgli then be natural or no? Such questions aside, the demonstration of your proposed moral was effective, and made good use of the Mowgli stories.
ReplyDeleteOne logistical note: watch your organization. I thought the post could have been even more effective at explaining your moral if some of the paragraphs had been reordered.