“It’s length was thirty-three feet four inches”, Edwin, The Edinburgh Evening Courant, and Mavor’s New Dictionary of Natural History, in turn, report.
Fattened and lethargic from the meal, the anaconda rests, and the Ceylonese snatch the opportunity to bash the anaconda and feast upon it. The following day, Edwin observes the anaconda stalk and prey upon a tiger, graphically suffocating it and snapping its bones. They prove to be poor shots and save the task for another day, but not before Edwin embarks on a nearly 250-word long description of the anaconda’s beauty-"It’s back was beautiful than can well be imagined”-which is realised by its polychromatic scales that swirl with green, yellow streaks, black spots, and “dusky olive”, black, and “great round long blotches of a perfect blood colour” (p. A group of twelve (the Christian numerical allegory should not be lost on readers) assemble to “destroy it” (p. Edwin balks, and thus witnesses the serpent snatch a small animal and retreat with it up the palm. The attendant demands that the house be shut up and all entries barred. The branch is no branch at all it is a massive anaconda. A Ceylonese attendant asks Edwin what has so captured his attention, and in pointing out the strange sight, “a paleness overspread his whole face, and he seemed almost sinking to the earth with terror” (p. Stationed as a colonial convoy in Ceylon (what is now Sri Lanka), the narrator-assumedly Edwin-is captivated by an animate branch that “bend and twist” against the forces of nature and weather, up a massive palm tree. News of this particular anaconda vignette, as I show here, was not only long-lived, but was disseminated and published widely throughout Great Britain, so much so that it became a narrative tour de force, insinuating itself in the Gothic literary landscape on which I focus. Edwin, was inserted in the Edinburgh Evening Courant of 15 August 1768” (p.
Perhaps reflected by his incredulity, Mavor cannot corroborate the anecdotal evidence, which was “said to be written by an English gentleman resident in the East Indies, and signed R. Also known as the “anacandaia” and the “bubalinus serpens”, Mavor’s explication curiously reiterates a second-hand anecdote to situate ethological knowledge about this particular East Indian serpent. In A Dictionary of Natural History (1785), Scottish priest and bibliophile William Fordyce Mavor defines the anaconda as a “Ceylonese serpent of enormous magnitude, extremely mischievous among cattle” ( Mavor 1785, p. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.
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Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire.
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