The Longman Anthology includes this quote by John Morley, \u201cit was the age of science, new knowledge, searching criticism, followed by multiple doubts and shaken beliefs.\u201d The discoveries of Darwin and the accompanying implications of the contemporary early archaeology have thrown off thousands of years of faith in creationism and made them ridiculous.
May Kendall\u2019s poem \u201cThe Lay of the Trilobite\u201d playfully addresses humanity\u2019s new-found upheaval over scientific revelations through the eyes of an ancient arthropod. \u201c\u2019How all your faiths are ghosts and dreams,\/ How in the silent sea\/ Your ancestors were Monotremes –\/ Whatever these may be;\/ How you evolved your shining lights\/ Of wisdom and perfection\/ From Jelly-Fish and Trilobites\/ By Natural Selection\u201d (l 25-32). The dismissal of the previously held beliefs as \u201cghosts and dreams\u201d is excruciating to people who held creationism as not only true but holy up until now, and the apparently ridiculous new truth of natural selection is an especially hard pill to swallow with the ridiculous and degrading assertions that humans descended indirectly from plain animals: a monotreme (an animal that the speaker is unfamiliar with), jelly fish, and the comical and extinct trilobite.
In line 16 the speaker declares \u201cAnd I should be a Man!\u201d A triumphant statement in which the word man is capitalized and elevated, distinguishing its category above common nature. Up until Darwin\u2019s proposals in On the Origin of Species, people were able to assume that their human form was indeed holy, made in God\u2019s image. With the revelation the people may have simply evolved from beasts, educated society was thrown into tension. A theme strongly depicted in horror literature of the time is rooted in this new reality that humanity was not inherently separate from lower nature, including the absolute fear of regression. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the titular Doctor attempts to construct new humans surgically from animals and watches them rapidly regress to their animalistic urges. Dracula, in contrast, fully embraces the holiness and nobility of man in an epic battle for the immortality of the human soul, in which the educated protagonists demonstrate their uniquely human nerve and unselfishness in the face of Dracula\u2019s supernatural evil. May Kendall promptly pokes fun at both responses, pointing out the frenzied but circular nature of philosophy, saying \u201c\u2019You\u2019ve Kant to make your brains go round,\/ Hegel you have to clear them\u201d (ll 33-34). Yet the Trilobite\u2019s statement that \u201cI never took to rhyme,\u201d (l 54) Kendall draws attention to the absurdity of her own personification of the trilobite to prove a point, assuring readers that her own poem too is absurdist and should be given no more weight than any side of the argument.
In response to the Trilobite\u2019s line \u201cI didn\u2019t care\u2014I didn\u2019t know\/ That I was a Crustacean.\u2019\u201d Kendall includes the footnote that \u201cHe was not a Crustacean. He has since discovered that he was an Arachnid, or something similar. But he says it does not matter. He says they told him wrong once, and they may again.\u201d Once again, Kendall\u2019s Trilobite asserts that it does not matter. He ridicules both sides of the argument that humanity is so heavily invested in as pointless. Yet he refuses to fix his mistake. For the sake of a rhyme and correcting a technical inaccuracy of the poem, Kendall included this note, but it speaks so perfectly to the human resistance to changing a long-held view. As the Trilobite has observed, people don\u2019t truly form an attachment to the logic of their stance but rather the simple familiarity of them. In this way, the scientific method is a deeply non-ergonomic design in which scientists continually readjust their beliefs and suspicions as to how the world works based off of new information. This naturally creates a distrust of the process that asks people to discard their old beliefs and never promises to be correct. It is uncomfortable, even to the Trilobite, who adopts a humanism in refusing to adjust his previous belief. (This same human tendency is represented in Dracula when Professor Van Helsing must slowly lead John Steward to the conclusion before him. Having built up the logic of one belief system all his life, Steward cannot bring himself to abandon it for the truth.)<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Longman Anthology includes this quote by John Morley, \u201cit was the age of science, new knowledge, searching criticism, followed by multiple doubts and shaken beliefs.\u201d The discoveries of Darwin and the accompanying implications of the contemporary early archaeology have thrown off thousands of years of faith in creationism and made them ridiculous. May Kendall\u2019s … Continue reading Lay of the Trilobite: A Crustacean\u2019s Indictment of Humanity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125361],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}