In this essay, Will Abberley analyzes Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (1869). Abberley uncovers two different gendered emotional registers in these Victorian zoologists’ travel memoirs. The memoirs are demonstrative of a rational detachment associated with “men of science” on the one hand, and of the passionate instincts of the hunter on the other. As such, these memoirs exemplify the contradictions and tensions between Victorian attitudes regarding masculinity, nature, and emotion.
DOI: doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7984