A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the

Unquenched Desire of Man

Sina Movaghati
University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus

Ever since the British colonists blessed tiger hunting as the cardinal “royal” sport of the
Haut monde, a surge of interest took place among the leisure class to travel to the British
Raj in order to re-practice their ancestral fox hunting on foreign hunting grounds—this
time with a more fearsome quarry. Since tigers were considered exotic and fierce creatures,
overpowering these beasts secured a certain cachet for the victor, signifying his virility
and manliness. As a result, the encounter between man and the tiger—both in the met-
aphoric and non-metaphoric sense—provided a literary trope for the twentieth-century
writers who associated the animal with the erotic hunger of the male protagonists. By
studying the traditional beliefs surrounding these mystical creatures, the present article
reads some of the notable literary fictions of the twentieth century that use the tiger as a
central animal motif—The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Death in Venice (1912), and
The Remains of the Day (1989)—in light of each other.

Keywords: Henry James / The Beast in the Jungle / Frank R. Stockton / The
Remains of the Day / Death in Venice

T
igers received quite an interesting amount of attention from writers through
time. The image of a crouching tiger residing in the lush, exotic jungles of
the East appears a number of times in literary fiction of the twentieth cen-
tury. In particular, Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle (1903), Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice (1912), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) are

Sina Movaghati (sina.movaghati@nottingham.edu.my) is an assistant professor of

English literature at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus. His recent arti-
cles have been published in academic journals including Quarterly Review of Film and
Video, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and New Review of Film and Television Studies.
Movaghati’s latest work will appear in the forthcoming collection Fictional Worlds and the
Political Imagination, edited by Garry L. Hagberg.

Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 46, No. 4 • Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University • DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.46.4.07
116 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

significant literary works that not only employ tigers as the central animal motif
but also thematically resemble one another to a great extent. On the thematic
level, all three works deal with lonesome figures who repudiate the call of love
and renounce carnal delights due to certain fears or rigorous self-restraint. In
James’s tale, the fear emanates from an assured feeling of inevitable doom that
eventually leads John Marcher to sexual abstinence and social inertia. Whereas
in Ishiguro’s novel, Stevens fears that any sort of emotional indulgence, such as
falling in love with a confrère, would make him a less “dignified” butler and, hence,
a less worthy servant to his master. Meanwhile, in Mann’s work, a widowed writer
considers social abstinence and severe self-discipline as the critical components
of his life-long artistic achievements that should not be compromised under
any circumstances. On the micro-level, certain astounding affinities can also be
found among these works. In each of these tales, conflicting encounters—mostly
metaphoric—occur between a male character and a tiger, resulting in either the
human’s suppression or the tiger’s demise.
Even though these encounters with tigers do not occupy a large portion of the
narratives, they have significant functions in dissecting the thematic meanings of
the stories. This is due to the fact that for Marcher, the inescapable doom mani-
fests itself in a mental image of a “crouching beast” lurking in a jungle, waiting for
the right moment to pounce upon the protagonist and seal his doom. Similarly,
Gustav von Aschenbach of Death in Venice sees the glinting eyes of a “crouching
tiger” in the midst of his rêveries every time his homoerotic impulse gets inten-
sified. Furthermore, for Ishiguro’s Stevens the butler, the concept of dignity is
embodied in an anecdote passed on to him by his father (also a butler before him),
regarding the removal of a tiger from a master’s dining room.
In James’s and Mann’s novellas, the metaphoric pounce of the beast ends
in the disorientation of selfhood as the creature succeeds in taking hold of the
protagonist’s psyche and steering him toward eventual doom. On the contrary,
in an embedded narrative about a tiger and a butler in Ishiguro’s novel, the tiger
gets killed by the butler in silence, and the animal does not get the chance to
create trouble for the butler’s master and his guests. By focusing on the encounters
between man and the tiger, I argue that even though these confrontations have
antithetical outcomes, they have similar effects on the stories’ themes and the
overall plot structures in a way that not only one can regard Ishiguro’s allegorical
tiger as a distant cousin of James’s and Mann’s metaphoric beasts, but also The
Remains of the Day, as a whole, can be viewed as a descendant of its fictional
progenitors, The Beast in the Jungle and Death in Venice. To this aim, it is necessary
to discuss how The Beast in the Jungle came into existence and what was the inspi-
rational source of the novella’s central and most haunting image.

ON THE GENEALOGY OF JAMES’S IMMORTAL TALE

Looking at James’s Notebooks, we can see that he was preoccupied with two
primary themes of The Beast at least several years before he wrote the novella. In
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  117

an entry that dates back to 9 January 1894, James mentions being struck by this
concetto about a person who, despite being physically alive and healthy, feels emo-
tionally withered and dead in oneself. A note he wrote a year later, on 5 February
1895, links his initial idea of “the living death” (83) with a theme of “too late.”
James writes:
What is there in the idea of Too late—of some friendship or passion or bond—some
affection long desired and waited for that is formed too late?—I mean too late in life
altogether. Isn’t there something in the idea that 2 persons may meet (as if they had
looked for each other for years) only in time to feel how much it might have meant
for them if they had only met earlier? (. . .) They but meet to part or to suffer—they
meet when one is dying—‘or something of that sort.’ They may have been dimly con-
scious, in the past, of the possibility between them—been groping for each other in
the darkness. It’s love, it’s friendship, it’s mutual comprehension—it’s whatever one
will. (. . .) I fancy, there would have been no marriage conceivable for either. Haven’t
they waited—waited too long—till something else has happened? The only other
‘something else’ than marriage must have been, doubtless, the wasting of life. And
the wasting of life is the implication of death. There may be the germ of a situation in
this; but it obviously required digging out. (112; emphasis added)

We can see how James tries to weave different ideas into the fabric of a single plot.
The principal idea was about the involvement of a man and a woman in a platonic
love-relation who, despite strong emotional attachments, decide to maintain the
status quo until a fatal accident dooms them to separation. James notes that the
sexual gravitation would eventually overtake the platonic mindset. However,
the recognition that they were “soulmates”—which James believes should belatedly
happen to the male figure—arrives so late that the reunion is impossible due to
the female character’s death or the marital engagement of one of them to some
other person. Here, James views the idea of “the wasting of life” as equivalent to
the character’s spiritual death. As if by waiting too long to act, the male character
inadvertently leads himself toward emotional sterilization and, as a result, feels
an empty void within, which in James’s view parallels death. However, since the
other soul knows this man too well, a huge part of him exists within this female
companion: “He is alive in her and dead in himself—that is something like the little
formula I seemed to entrevoir” (113). Thus when the female companion physically
dies, that part of the man’s existence is erased too, leaving the male figure in a
state of total spiritual ruin.
In a note James wrote on 27 August 1901, it is apparent he has already figured
out a suitable plotline for his “very tiny fantaisie” that allowed him to integrate all
the aforementioned themes and ideas into a single plot structure. The plot of the
story is about a man who is haunted by a premonition all his life “that something
will happen to him: he doesn’t quite know what” (199). Interestingly, in this new
outline, James replaces the term “second-consciousness” with the word “real mate”
or the “soulmate.” The man confides his fear of the inevitable downfall to this
118 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

second-consciousness, emphasizing that the doom “will come before [his] death,”
and he would not die without it (199). James maintains:
Finally I think it must be he who sees—not the 2d consciousness. Mustn’t indeed the
‘2d consciousness’ be some woman, and it be she who helps him to see? She has always
loved him—yet, that, for the story, ‘pretty,’ and he, saving, protecting, exempting
his life (always, really, with and for the fear), has never known it. He likes her, talks
to her, confides in her, sees her often—la côtoie, as to her hidden passion, but never
guesses. She meanwhile, all the time, sees his life as it is. It is to her that he tells his
fear—yes, she is the ‘2d consciousness.’ At first she feels herself, for him, his feeling
of his fear, and is tender, reassuring, protective. Then she reads, as I say, his real
case, and is, though unexpressedly, lucid. The years go by and she sees the thing not
happen. At last one day they are somehow, some day, face to face over it, and then
she speaks. ‘It has, the great thing you’ve always lived in dread of, had the foreboding
of—it has happened to you.’ He wonders—when, how, what? ‘What is it?—why, it is
that nothing has happened!’ Then, later on, I think, to keep up the prettiness, it must
be that HE sees, that he understands. She has loved him always—and that might
have happened. But it’s too late—she’s dead. That, I think, at least, he comes to later
on, after an interval, after her death. She is dying, or ill, when she says it. He then
DOESN’T understand, doesn’t see—or so far, only, as to agree with her, ruefully,
that that very well may be it: that nothing has happened. He goes back; she is gone;
she is dead. What she has said to him has in a way, by its truth, created the need for
her, made him want her, positively want her, more. But she is gone, he has lost her,
and then he sees all she has meant. She has loved him. (It must come for the READER
thus, at this moment.) With his base safety and shrinkage he never knew. That was
what might have happened, and what has happened is that it didn’t. (199)

Even though the above passage neatly summarizes the novella’s plot, it leaves out
the centerpiece. One cannot find any reference in the Notebooks to the tale’s most
haunting metaphor, and James’s daily records do not allude to any source that
might have inspired him to choose the image of a “crouching beast” as the direful
figuration that seals the protagonist’s inescapable doom. But from where might
have James obtained the metaphor of the beast? James scholars have proposed
three different sources so far.

ON THE INCEPTION OF THE TIGER IN JAMES’S TALE

There have been disagreements among critics about the inspirational source
behind The Beast’s central image. James scholars have come up with different
explanations in this regard. For example, H. Lewis Ulman postulates that James
derived the key “motif ” of his novella from a “psychological” passage entitled
“The Tigers in India” that his older brother William James wrote, “which pre-
dates ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ by more than six years” (2). Unlike Ulman, Jessie
Ryon Lucke believes “that a certain passage from Hawthorne’s The Blithedale
Romance was, all unconsciously perhaps [. . . the] original inspiration” for James’s
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  119

tale (529). Lucke also claims that Marcher is modeled after Hollingsworth, the
“egotistical” philanthropist of Hawthorne’s novel (531).1 Indeed, self-absorption
can be regarded as a personality trait central to the characterization of both
Hollingsworth and Marcher. However, the most reasonable and enticing expla-
nation was propounded by George Monteiro in 1983.
Monteiro believed that a widely-popular allegorical tale, “The Lady, or
the Tiger?” written by the nineteenth-century American humorist, Frank R.
Stockton, is behind the origination of the central image of James’s tale. Monteiro
suggests that the November 1882 issue of The Century Magazine became “uncom-
monly memorable” for James (96). Monteiro sets forth interesting evidence in this
regard; he asserts that the issue had sentimental value for James because his travel
piece entitled “Venice” was the lead article, and he was featured in a fairly long
“appreciative essay” by William Dean Howells entitled “Henry James, Jr.,” which,
according to Monteiro, generated a lot of buzz on both sides of the Atlantic (96).
Monteiro then shifts our gaze to Stockton’s short story, which appeared for the
first time in that same issue and was widely celebrated. Even though all three
explanations are speculative in nature, there is no doubt that James was familiar
with Stockton’s tale at the time of crafting his novella. A brief look at Stockton’s
story alongside James’s evinces similarities that are almost impossible to dismiss
as mere coincidences.
“The Lady, or the Tiger?” is an allegory of a love dilemma that, according
to Stockton, remains unresolvable. The story is about a “semi-barbaric” kingdom
from a “very olden time” that was ruled by a king of “exuberant fancy” (Stockton
3). Believing himself the agent of “poetic justice,” the king devised an “impartial
and incorruptible” adjudication mechanism that instantly decides his subjects’
innocence or guilt (4). When a subject was accused “of a crime of sufficient
importance to interest the king” (4), he was taken to the king’s amphitheater—an
arena built solely for such occasions—to blindly choose between life and death.
The story continues:
When all the people had assembled in the galleries, and the king, surrounded by
his court, sat high up on his throne of royal state on one side of the arena, he gave
a signal, a door beneath him opened, and the accused subject stepped out into the
amphitheater. Directly opposite him, on the other side of the inclosed space, were
two doors, exactly alike and side by side. It was the duty and the privilege of the
person on trial to walk directly to these doors and open one of them. He could open
either door he pleased; he was subject to no guidance or influence but that of the
aforementioned impartial and incorruptible chance. If he opened the one, there came
out of it a hungry tiger, the fiercest and most cruel that could be procured, which
immediately sprang upon him and tore him to pieces as a punishment for his guilt.
(. . .) But, if the accused person opened the other door, there came forth from it a
lady, the most suitable to his years and station that his majesty could select among
his fair subjects, and to this lady he was immediately married, as a reward of his
innocence. (4–5)
120 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

When the king discovers that his daughter is having a secret affair with a hand-
some commoner, he immediately commands his soldiers to detain the youth
and put him in prison. The king applies the same system of justice to the lover’s
case; however, he orders his men to survey the tiger cages of his kingdom “for
the most savage and relentless beasts,” and therefore, the “fiercest monster” got
selected for the arena (7). The king also orders the “competent judges” of his
land to choose the most beautiful maiden in the kingdom “in order that the
young man might have a fitting bride in case fate did not determine for him a
different destiny” (7).
The day of the trial arrives, and the princess, who already “possessed herself
of the secrets of the doors,” discreetly raises her hand and makes “a slight, quick
movement toward the right” to guide her lover toward the door he should open
(10). Even though the reader is waiting to find out what is behind the door on the
right side, the story never discloses the result. Instead, the tale has a self-reflexive
ending. The narrator now addresses the readers regarding a dilemma that occupied
his thoughts for long: The princess indeed cannot bear the sight of her lover being
ripped apart and devoured by a cruel beast, but can she tolerate seeing another
woman marry him?2 The narrator does not reveal the princess’s decision; however,
he warns the reader not to “lightly” consider the question that he puts forward:
“And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door,—the lady,
or the tiger?” (12)
Interestingly, even though Ulman, Lucke, and Monteiro consider three dif-
ferent inspirational sources for the origin of The Beast’s most haunting image, they
unanimously agree on two main principles. First, the fierce metaphoric creature
of James’s tale that lies in the midst of the jungle is a tiger—perhaps an Indian
tiger if we want to relate it to William James’s essay, as noted by Ulman. Second,
the fact that James replaced the word “tiger” with “beast” in his novella implies
that he deliberately wanted to avoid directly alluding to any of these above-
mentioned sources or the three altogether. Nevertheless, in one telling instance
in The Beast, James does use “tiger” instead of “beast”; here, we can observe strong
ties to Stockton’s tale, as James briefly touches upon the mutual exclusivity of the
lady and the tiger:
The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of
their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out
of the question. [Marcher’s] conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short,
wasn’t a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was
precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid
the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the
Jungle. It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to
be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite
lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied
by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring
his life. (The Beast 561–562)
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  121

John Marcher here assesses the possibility of marrying his confidante or the
“second-consciousness,” May Bartram. This passage can be regarded as a strong
allusion to Stockton’s tale, as the same mutual exclusivity between the lady and the
tiger can be observed. Marcher refuses to ask for May Bartram’s hand in marriage
on the grounds that he does not want to share his catastrophic fate with anyone.
Therefore, he has to leave the lady behind and face the dangerous tiger alone.
There is another striking resemblance between these two tales. In Stockton’s
story, if the prisoner is found guilty by the cosmos, the pouncing tiger will seal
his doom. Here, by killing the prisoner, not only does the beast put an end to the
unfortunate man’s life, but also, by devouring all his physical organs, the creature
symbolically annihilates the prisoner’s (sexual) potency. But if the fellow got lucky
and opened the other door, his innocence was rewarded with marriage to a rav-
ishing damsel who was waiting upon him to serve the purpose of procreation and
mating. In this regard, the fortunate man could gain or regain his virility through
unbridled sexual practice. Therefore, in both stories, tigers are represented as
the dominant forces that obstruct the protagonist’s manliness from coming to
fruition.3 However, the successful avoidance of the tiger’s ensnarement results in
experiencing sexual exaltation. As a result, depending on the man’s choice, his
sexual virility is either annihilated or satiated. The same dynamic can be observed
in James’s novella; the metaphorical pounce of the tiger leaves John Marcher in an
emotionally devastating state. He realizes that no greater catastrophe could have
befallen him than the death of his “soulmate.” However, since the damage has
been done already, the belated recognition of May’s passionate love leads Marcher
to a state of quasi-castration anxiety.
Interestingly, another striking detail can be seen in the above excerpt from
The Beast. By stating that “a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompa-
nied by a lady on a tiger-hunt,” James directly alludes to big-game hunting that
was in vogue among Britain’s leisure class in the second half of the nineteenth
century. One of the reasons for the sudden popularity of the tiger hunt was that
the traditional fox hunt was no longer considered adequately “masculine” due to
the increased presence of women on the hunting grounds. Therefore, Britain’s
plutocracy had to find new hunting grounds to flaunt its manliness.

TIGERS AND THE BIG-GAME HUNTING IN INDIA

After May Bartram’s death, Marcher travels to colonial India, where big
game tiger-hunting was labeled the “real sport” during the “last quarter of the
nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century” (Mckenzie 70).
Due to several reasons like industrial encroachment, the increasing empathetic
attitude toward wildlife, or even the presence of women, traditional fox-hunting
in Britain gradually lost its charm as a favored hunting sport since it was con-
sidered by many to have become dull, “artificial and emasculated” (Mckenzie
70). As a result, in the 1850s, Britain’s plutocracy sought more thrilling sport
modes in primeval and untouched environments overseas to distance itself from
122 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

domesticated and effeminate fox-hunting as well as to safeguard and celebrate

British sportsmanship that represented the virile nature of white masculinity. To
this end, colonial India and French Indochina, with their vast lush groves and
varied animal species, became the two most preferred hunting resorts by western
colonizers.
It is not entirely clear why the elite European hunters preferred tigers for their
big-game hunting above other woodland animals that existed in colonial India
and Indochina, such as leopards, elephants, lions, and rhinoceroses. However,
there are a few reasons why tigers were favored over the other available mega-
fauna species. Deemed as the masters of the jungle and royal beasts, “tigers had
been closely associated historically with Indian and other Southeast Asian rulers”
(Sramek 659). By conquering these animals, Britons were “symbolically” trying
to stage “the defeat of Tipu Sultan and other Indian rulers who dared to get in
the way of Britain’s imperial conquest of India” (Sramek 661). Therefore, for the
imperialists, the tiger hunt “represented the striving and victory of civilised
man over the darker primeval and untamed forces still at work in the world”
(MacKenzie 47). Sramek explains:
Tigers also represented for the British all that was wild and untamed in the Indian
natural world. Thus, the curious late Victorian and Edwardian spectacle of British
royals and other dignitaries being photographed standing aside dead tiger carcasses
depicted the staging of the successful conquest of Indian nature by “virile imperial-
ists.” (. . .) More generally, tiger hunting was an important symbol in the construction
of British imperial and masculine identities during the nineteenth century. Precisely
because tigers were dangerous and powerful beasts, tiger hunting represented a
struggle with fearsome nature that needed to be resolutely faced “like a Briton.” (659)

However, the colonialists’ fascination with tigers went way beyond the spe-
cies’ glamorous striped fur. As Malarney noted, “the tiger was the most prized
trophy among the large cats and was often described with anthropomorphic
superlatives” (661). Certain humanistic traits like deceitfulness, thoughtfulness,
and prudence were attributed to these animals by the imperialists. Due to their
agility, strength, and alertness, tigers were reckoned as the perfect fearsome
adversaries for the hunters, as the big cats were deemed “the most difficult animal
to hunt” (Malarney 662). Furthermore, the re-introduction of the chivalric ideals
in Britain during the nineteenth century by Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle
had an enormous effect on the revival of gentlemanly sentiments amongst the
plutocracy as it offered “a powerful rationale” to the colonialist elite “to protect
Indian men, women, and children from the savage creatures” that often attacked
villages and slaughtered the livestock (Sramek 667).
Still, tigers have been associated with masculine potency in the Far East and
Southeastern Asia in more than one way; the tiger penis soup is among the greatly
sought-after aphrodisiacs that is regarded by the locals to “promote longevity” of
intercourse and “restore sexual vigour” in men (Taberner 25). Furthermore, tiger
bone and other bodily organs are believed to be potent sexual stimulants. Khoshoo
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  123

mentions that affluent Chinese are willing to “pay 300 U.S. dollars” for a soup
made from tigers’ bodily organs (831).

GO EAST: ASCHENBACH AND HIS TIGER

The fact that the tiger was associated with virility and eroticism made it a perfect
fit to be utilized as a symbol in the narratives that dealt with repressed sexual
desires. Nine years after the publication of James’s timeless novella, another sig-
nificant literary work emerges from the east side of the Atlantic that touches upon
the same theme of “death-in-life,” which was propounded by James years earlier
(Brink 174). Thomas Mann’s magnum opus, Death in Venice, deals with the story
of an esteemed Silesian-born author, Gustav von Aschenbach.
Like his fictional counterpart Marcher, Aschenbach is also a solitary figure
in his fifties whose lack of physically “robust constitution” compelled him to
avoid “constant exertion” and, in consequence, he gradually adopted a hermit-like
lifestyle, taking shelter in the sanctuary of the intellectual recluse (Mann 146).
When Aschenbach reached adolescence, “medical considerations” kept him from
customary involvement with the public as he received homeschool education
away from other young people. James’s concluding remarks about Marcher could
equally be said of Aschenbach’s life: “He had been the man of his time, the man,
to whom nothing on earth was to have happened” (The Beast 596). Nonetheless,
Aschenbach was not always emotionally sterile like Marcher; in fact, he married
at a young age, but his happiness “ended after a few short years” with his wife’s
death (Mann 151). Now, as an aging man, the cautious author has succeeded in
inculcating himself with the art of playing it safe; he keeps himself “entirely con-
tent to have viewed that much of the earth’s surface which anyone can experience
without departing the immediate circle around his homeland” (142). However,
Aschenbach’s case is not about the number of stamps in his passport; rather, it is
about the absence of desire to leave his comfort zone and discover new territories:
“He had never even been tempted to leave Europe” (142). All the spontaneous
feelings or overwhelming emotions that come over Aschenbach are “quickly
moderated and corrected by reason and by self-discipline that he had practiced
from youth on” (143). Now that the prime of youth is gone, self-restraint gets
practiced to such an excess that the author tries to “purge his vocabulary of words
with vulgar associations” (151). As a result, his books have been considered to be
among the safest literary works that “the ministry of education adopted selected
passages from his work(s) as mandatory school reading” (151).
During one evening stroll in Munich, Aschenbach notices a foreigner
standing in the portico of a funeral chapel with Byzantine architecture. The
alien physiognomy of the man arouses curiosity in Aschenbach. It makes the
Bavarian author overstep “the bounds of polite restraint” and stare at the man in
an inquisitive manner. The man notices Aschenbach’s gaze. Afraid of confron-
tation, Aschenbach shies away from the man’s “militant” eyes. However, this
sudden out-of-bounds exchange of glances was enough to initiate the mad motor
124 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

of homoeroticism within the Bavarian author. After the encounter, a thought ver-
itably attacks the author in the form of a “visual longing.” A longing flares inside
Aschenbach, “a near hallucination,” an urgent desire to “get away”:
[Aschenbach] . . . saw a landscape, a tropical swamp under a sky thick with vapor,
damp, lush and monstrous, a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, bogs and
sediment-carrying channels . . . saw hairy trunks of palm trees pushing up near and
far from fecund tangles of fern and beds of oily, swollen, outlandishly blooming flora
. . . saw bizarrely deformed trees with roots growing down through the air into the
earth, into the green shadows reflected in sluggish floodwaters where, between float-
ing, milky-white flowers the size of plates, birds of some alien species stood in the
shadows with hunched shoulders and clumsily shaped beaks and stared immovably
off to one side . . . saw through the knotted shoot of a bamboo thicket the glint from
the eyes of a crouching tiger . . . and felt his heart pound with horror and inexplicable
longing. Then the tiger vision dissolved, and, shaking his head, Aschenbach resumed
his deliberate walking along the stonemasons’ fences. (142)

Unlike Marcher, Aschenbach looks directly into the eyes of the tiger amid
his rêverie; however, both tigers in The Beast and Death in Venice adopt crouching
postures, which means they are ready to pounce. Furthermore, the primitive
damp jungle that serves as the imaginary location for Achenbach’s perfect get-
away is a direct allusion to India’s “lush” jungles, where the tiger-hunting was in
vogue. As Parkes notes, the image of the tiger in Death in Venice represents “lust”
and “the concupiscent passions” (79). Therefore, it would be credible to assume
that what Aschenbach envisions directly correlates to the nineteenth and early
twentieth-century Europeans’ conception of big-game hunting in the Indian sub-
continent and the fact that the Bavarian author imagines himself in such “tropical
wilderness” can be regarded as a subconscious attempt to regain the lost sexual
vigor or to retrieve the forgotten feeling of emotional intensity. Aschenbach does
see his lust mirrored in the “glint” of the tiger’s eyes. However, since the aging
author moderates vehement emotions through a system of corrective reasoning
and self-discipline, he automatically shuns the overwhelming desire and averts
his eyes. As a result, the vision dissolves shortly after the encounter.
Considering his fragile health, Aschenbach then chooses Venice as a
logically safe and exotically-modest destination. It is in Venice that the aging
author madly falls in love with an androgynous “demigod-like” Polish boy,
Tadzio, who happens to sojourn in the same hotel with his mother and sisters.
As Traschen notes, “Mann’s use of Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollonian-
Dionysian polarity” manifests itself in Venice (176). The plague-ridden city
becomes a dialectical battleground between logic vs. emotion, sanity vs. mad-
ness, order vs. chaos, and reason vs. instinct. Near the novella’s end, the
deranged Aschenbach dreams of giving “himself over to the Other God,”
Dionysus, the Grecian mythic god of fertility and ritual madness (Mann 211).
Seeing himself among the grotesque-looking men and women, Aschenbach
joins the crowd in the chaotic “dancing circle of the god” and participates in
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  125

the ritual game of animal slaughter. “Devouring” the organs of the animals,
Aschenbach then engages in “free and open copulation in honor of the god (. . .)
on the mossy ground” (211).
According to Parkes, the tiger in Death in Venice represents “the latent
Dionysian side of Aschenbach’s character” (79). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
also singles out the tiger as one of the animals that pulls Dionysus’s chariot: “The
chariot of Dionysus overflows with flowers and wreaths; beneath its yoke tread the
panther and the tiger” (22). In Greek mythology, the tiger is brought to Greece
by Dionysus upon his return from the East. Enraged at Zeus’s infidelities, Hera
held a strong grudge against Dionysus when he was born; he is the offspring of
Zeus and Semele, the youngest daughter of Cadmus, the king of Thebes. “When
Dionysus had grown up, Hera threw him . . . into a state of madness, in which he
wandered about through many countries of the earth” (Smith 1047). Smith writes:
According to the common tradition, Dionysus first wandered through Egypt, where
he was hospitably received by king Proteus. . . . He now traversed all Asia. . . . When
he arrived at the Euphrates, he built a bridge to cross the river, but a tiger sent to
him by Zeus carried him across the river Tigris. . . . The most famous part of his
wanderings in Asia is his expedition to India, which is said to have lasted three, or,
according to some, even 52 years. (1047)

Interestingly, After May Bartram’s death, Marcher also travels to the East.
In a similar Dionysian fashion, the protagonist of James’s novella visits “Egypt”
and “India” and roves about the “depths of Asia” (The Beast 591). This hints at
some interesting possible interpretations. On the one hand, Marcher’s passage to
the Orient can be viewed as the individual’s attempt to (re)possess the once lost
and now aroused sexuality; on the other, it may suggest the idea of “wandering
madness” associated with the mythic god. Or it can imply both of these interpre-
tations at the same time.
We should also bear in mind that in Death in Venice, Sirocco, the
Mediterranean wind—which the Venetians blame for bringing Asiatic cholera
to the Mediterranean shores—is also associated with the arousal of carnal feelings
in Aschenbach and the increase of “vice” in “obtrusive and excessive forms (. . .) in
the Italian South and the Orient” (208). Mann refers to Sirocco several times as
the key instrument of carrying plague from the East to the Mediterranean coasts.
This wind also appears in the novella when the maddened Aschenbach is having
his “last meal” before his death:
A tepid storm wind had come up. The rain was infrequent and light, but the air
hung humid, thick with odors of decay. Fluttering, clapping and whistling could
be heard all around, and to the feverish Aschenbach under his makeup it seemed
that an evil race of harpies was at work in the sky, fiendish sea birds who would ruin
the condemned man’s last meal, leaving it half-chewed and soiled with dung. The
humidity had robbed him of all appetite, and he couldn’t help but imagine that his
food had been contaminated with infectious material. (213)
126 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

Therefore, not only does Sirocco figuratively cause Aschenbach’s death, but it also
arouses the lust and feverish madness of the character.
Similarly, Marcher’s psychic climate ends somewhere between derange-
ment and the carnal craving for the beloved buried under the ground. It is
worth mentioning that the Italian word for the Mediterranian wind, sirocco, is
etymologically derived from the Arabic root shoruq or sharqi (‫)الشرقية‬, denoting
the wind that rises from the East (etymonline.com). Interestingly, in Death in
Venice, the fever-inducing plague initiates from the primal jungles of the far
East, the tigers’ natural habitat. Then, it arrives in the Mediterranean cities
by sea:
For many years, Asiatic cholera had been both on the increase and on the
move. Originating in the humid swamps of the Ganges delta, carried by the
mephitic breath of that haughty and untameable primeval island jungle shunned
by man, where the tiger crouches in his bamboo thicket, the epidemic had raged
long and with unusual intensity throughout Hindustan, spreading east into China
and west into Afghanistan and Persia. There, following the main caravan routes, it
had brought its horrors as far as Astrakhan, even as far as Moscow. But while all
of Europe watched with fearful eyes lest this specter continue its invasion by land,
Syrian traders were already carrying it by sea. It appeared almost simultaneously
in several Mediterranean ports, raising its head in Toulon and Málaga, showing
its face in Palermo and Naples and digging in its heels throughout Calibri and
Apulia. (206)

Therefore, the East is associated with Dionysian mysteries; and the exigency of
the travel to the East indicates the individual’s quest to overcome the psychic
sexual struggle.
However, James and Mann are not the only modernists who exploited such
a notion. Other writers also used the idea of “traveling to Asia” as a trope that
signifies the protagonist’s attempt to overcome sexual let-down or repair the
psychological damage regarding his sexual potency. A similar urge to travel
happens to Newland Archer, the romantic and melancholic protagonist of Edith
Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920). After Newland’s coital rendezvous with
Ellen Olenska, his forbidden dulcinée, was adroitly thwarted by his wife, May
Welland, Wharton’s hero suddenly decides to travel to the East:
“I want to make a break. (. . .) To go away, at any rate—at once. On a long trip, ever
so far off—away from everything.” (. . .)
“Where, for instance?” she asked. (. . .)
“Oh, I don’t know. India—or Japan.” (240)

Another notable example would be William Somerset Maugham’s cele-

brated novel, The Razor’s Edge (1944). After Larry Darell’s longtime fiancée Isabel
Bradley breaks off her engagement with the hand-to-mouth bohemian and mar-
ries Larry’s tycoon friend, Gray Maturin, Maugham’s Chicagoan hero wanders
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  127

eastward until he ends up in India and stays there for “five years” (Maugham 145).
Interestingly, upon his return to Paris, Larry once again feels the urge to ask for
another woman’s hand in marriage; this time, he asks Sophie McDonald, his
childhood sweetheart. Also, in The Razor’s Edge, Maugham several times alludes
to the Indian tiger and big game hunting in India. Interestingly, even though the
protagonist often used to “hear the roar of a tiger,” he never shot a tiger nor gets
attacked by one, indicating Darell’s accomplishment in attaining psychic and
spiritual balance and peace (265).

A BEAST THAT GOT SLAIN: THE BUTLER AND THE TIGER ANECDOTE
Another highly praised piece of twentieth-century literary fiction that uses the
tiger as the central animal motif is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989).
Stevens, the butler of The Remains, can be considered a resurrection of a Jamesian
personage in contemporary Anglophone literature, in a sense that the English
manservant also deems human passions as expendables that impede the individ-
ual’s path toward achieving “greatness.” Therefore, like his fictional forefathers,
Marcher and Aschenbach, Stevens tries to subdue his sexual drive by practicing
stringent self-discipline. Like Marcher, Stevens also becomes penitent in the end
as he gazes into the emotional void within; however, this recognition arrives too
late—at a point where the spiritual damage is so vast that it cannot be compen-
sated. The gripping moment in The Remains’s denouement, when Stevens finally
breaks into tears on the pier in Weymouth, is reminiscent of The Beast’s grand
finale when Marcher ultimately loses self-control and bursts into tears, flinging
himself, face down, on his beloved’s tomb.
Like Aschenbach, the reason that Stevens inadvertently marches toward
his emotional castration is rooted in his belief in rigorous self-discipline
and his unquestionable commitment to the idea of a dignified butler. Through
his fragmentary explanations, the reader gradually fathoms that for Stevens
the term “dignity” indicates an unconditional loyalty to a morally worthy
employer and the emotional reservedness in times of crisis. These are the two
highest possible virtues that, according to Stevens, dignify a butler in his
profession. It is due to the same belief in “dignity” and “professionalism” that
the butler shuts himself off from the world of romance and vehement passions
and, consequently, rejects the call of love from Miss Kenton, the housekeeper
of Darlington Hall.
For Stevens, “dignity” is best manifested in an anecdote that his father
“was fond of repeating over the years” (Remains 33). Stevens recounts the tale to
demonstrate how a professional manservant can handle a complicated circum-
stance within a crisis-ridden household without allowing the unpleasantness to
affect the quality of his routine service to his employer. Stevens’s emphasis on
the anecdote is due to his belief that “somewhere in this story lay the kernel of
what true ‘dignity’ is” (39). However, from another perspective, this tale becomes
128 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

all-important because not only does the butler of the story travel to India at the
time of the British Raj, but he also encounters a tiger in the dining room of his
master’s manor:
One afternoon, evidently, this butler had entered the dining room to make sure
all was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining
table. The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the doors
behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer was
taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s attention
with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s ear: “I’m very sorry, sir, but there
appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you will permit the twelve-bores
to be used?”
And according to legend, a few minutes later, the employer and his guests
heard three gun shots. When the butler reappeared in the drawing room some time
afterwards to refresh the teapots, the employer had inquired if all was well.
“Perfectly fine, thank you, sir,” had come the reply. “Dinner will be served at
the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the
recent occurrence by that time.” (34)

Unlike the tiger in James’s and Mann’s tales, the tiger of The Remains is not
alert and physically robust and is not in a crouching posture; on the contrary, the
animal seems to be quite dormant and “languid,” indicating its lack of virility.
However, the butler does not show any mercy in sparing the life of a docile animal.
Also, the overall dynamic of this episode evinces how the creature’s annihilation
is done in cold blood and a decisive manner, signifying how the idea of total
subserviency ends in purging human emotions and passions. In fact, the tiger
in Ishiguro’s novel is a symbol of the butler’s passions, emotions, and eroticism
that are deliberately suppressed for the sake of demonstrating sheer subserviency
or what Stevens calls “professionalism.” And while many emotions are going on
“beneath” the surface, no “discernible” trace of emotional vehemence should be
observable on the exterior.
Ishiguro posits that a butler’s role is to serve “inconspicuously”; therefore,
a butler creates an “illusion of absence” while “being physically on hand to do
things” (qtd. in Vorda et al. 153). He maintains:
It seemed . . . appropriate to have somebody who wants to be this perfect butler
because that seems to be a powerful metaphor for someone who is trying to actually
erase the emotional part of him that may be dangerous and that could really hurt
him in his professional area. Yet he doesn’t succeed because these kind of human
needs, the longings for warmth and love and friendship, are things that just don’t
go away. (Qtd. in Vorda et al. 153)

Therefore, the phrase “no discernible traces” in the above excerpt hints at the
complete eradication of selfhood and human feelings to safeguard an ideology.
Indeed, the reason for Stevens’s psychic and emotional breakdown at the end
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  129

of the novel is that the more he looks into his soul in search of love, the less
he finds himself capable of showing such human emotions as he gazes into an
endless void within.
To Stevens, his father always showed the same level of professionalism as
the butler of the story; however, in the end, it is Stevens himself who surpasses
his father in inhabiting this idealized professional persona. Stevens’s agency as a
human being is alloyed with his professional persona, and his personal identity
is so integrated into the identity of Darlington Hall that he ends up being a man
with no independent identity. As Jack Slay notes: “Stevens’s lack of identity is . . .
emphasized by the fact that he is known only as ‘Stevens’; with no apparent first
name, he becomes ‘unselfed,’ possessing no self outside of his manservant role”
(180). Stevens practices inhabiting this professional persona to such an extreme
degree that eventually, in a parallel side-story in the novel, he metamorphoses
into the butler of the anecdote. At the conference of March 1923, the health of
Stevens’s father declines. However, professionalism dictates that Stevens remain
in the smoking room, laughing and entertaining his master’s guests instead of
being beside his father’s deathbed. As a result, Stevens’s father ironically becomes
the victim of the same mindset he inculcated in his son over the years. The father,
who ingrained the idea of dignity in Stevens, becomes the tiger that perishes in
silence, and no discernable traces of him are left while Stevens is serving Lord
Darlington and his guests.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: A TIGER THAT POUNCED AND A TIGER

THAT GOT KILLED
Since the tiger became the central animal motif of Henry James’s timeless tale,
The Beast in the Jungle, the leitmotif of the tiger has appeared in twentieth-
century literary works that deal with individuals who suffer from suppressed
emotions and repressed sexual drives. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day are fitting examples that employ the
tiger as a central animal motif in a similar Jamesian fashion; furthermore, these
two works also highly correspond to the Jamesian thematic concerns—the
themes of “too late” and “living death.” Even though the tigers in all these
narratives are associated with lust and emotional aspects of the protagonists’
psyches, the encounters between the characters and the beasts do not result in
the same outcomes; in one, the tiger metaphorically pounces on the protagonist,
and in another, the tiger gets slain by the man. However, despite antithetical
outcomes, a certain fact cannot be disputed: there is a link between the tiger
and the unquenched desire of man. Still, one cannot confidently say that the
asceticism observed in Marcher and Stevens implies the same homosexual
overtones observed in Death in Venice. Perhaps the relationship between ascetic
behavior and latent or suppressed homosexual eros is something worthy of
further exploration.
130 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 46, Number 4

Notes
1. To provide evidence for her claim, Lucke directs attention to a particular passage from
Hawthorne’s novel:
Hollingsworth hardly said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously
addressed. Then, indeed, he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his med-
itations like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and betake himself
back into the solitude of his heart and mind. [. . .] His heart, I imagine, was never really
interested in our socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most
people thought it, impracticable plan, for the reformation of criminals through an appeal
to their higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to
tolerate him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject
by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the condition of his
higher instincts afterwards. (Hawthorne 25)
2. This excerpt from Stockton’s tale shows the princess’s ambivalent feelings toward her lover’s
situation:
But how much oftener had she seen him at the other door! How in her grievous reveries
had she gnashed her teeth, and torn her hair, when she saw his start of rapturous delight
as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in agony when she had seen
him rush to meet that woman, with her flushing cheek and sparkling eye of triumph; when
she had seen him lead her forth, his whole frame kindled with the joy of recovered life;
when she had heard the glad shouts from the multitude, and the wild ringing of the happy
bells; when she had seen the priest, with his joyous followers, advance to the couple, and
make them man and wife before her very eyes; and when she had seen them walk away
together upon their path of flowers, followed by the tremendous shouts of the hilarious
multitude, in which her one despairing shriek was lost and drowned! Would it not be
better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric
futurity? And yet, that awful tiger, those shrieks, that blood! (12)
3. Unlike the physical attack of the tiger in Stockton’s tale, the tiger’s sexual obstruction is meta-
phorical in James’s tale.

Works Cited
Brink, André. “The Tiger’s Revenge: Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.” The Novel: Language and
Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. New York UP, 1998, pp. 173–178.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Dodo Press, 2005.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
James, Henry. “The Beast in the Jungle.” The Short Stories of Henry James. Edited by Clifton Fadiman.
Random House, 1945, pp. 548–602.
———. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford
UP, 1987.
Khoshoo, T. N. “‘Conservation of India’s Endangered Mega Animals: Tiger and Lion.” Current Science,
vol. 73, no. 10, 1997, pp. 830–842.
Lucke, Jessie Ryon. “The Inception of ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” The New England Quarterly, vol. 26,
no. 4, 1953, pp. 529–532. https://doi.org/10.2307/362708.
MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester
UP, 1988.
Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man  131

Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. “Defining the True Hunter: Big Game Hunting, Moral Distinction, and
Virtuosity in French Colonial Indochina.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 62,
no. 3, 2020, pp. 651–680. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417520000201.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice and Other Stories. Translated by Jefferson P. Chase. Signet Classics, 2006.
Maugham, William Somerset. The Razor’s Edge. The Windmill P, 1944.
Mckenzie, Callum. “The British Big-Game Hunting Tradition, Masculinity and Fraternalism with
Particular Reference to the ‘the Shikar Club.’” The Sports Historian, vol. 20, no. 1, 2000, pp. 70–96.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17460260009445830.
Monteiro, George. “Henry James, Great White Hunter.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 1983,
pp. 96–108.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford UP, 2000.
Parkes, Ford P. “The Image of the Tiger in Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig.” Studies in 20th Century
Literature, vol. 3, no. 1, 1978, pp. 73–83.
Slay, Jack. “Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.” The Explicator, vol 55, no. 3, 1997, pp. 180–182.
Smith, William. “Dionysus.” Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. 1. Little
Brown, 1867.
“Sirocco (n.).” Etymology, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sirocco#etymonline_v_23574.
Sramek, Joseph. “‘Face Him like a Briton’: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity
in Colonial India, 1800–1875.” Victorian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 659–680.
Stockton, Frank R. “The Lady or the Tiger?” The Novels and Stories of Frank R. Stockton Stories I.
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900.
Taberner, Peter V. Aphrodisiacs: The Science and the Myth. Springer, 1985.
Traschen, Isadore. “The Uses of Myth in ‘Death in Venice.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 1965,
pp. 165–179.
Ulman, H. Lewis. “A Possible Lair: ‘The Tigers in India’ and ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’” The Henry
James Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 1991, pp. 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2010.0439.
Vorda, Allan et al. “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro.” Mississippi Review, vol 20, no. 1/2, 1991,
pp. 131–154.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. Oxford UP, 2006.
Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the
copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email
articles for individual use.