"The Coral Insect Lives"

In a broad range of widely circulating newspapers, magazines, novels, anthologies, and song-books, antebellum Americans imagined the lives and labors of coral insects. This paper argues that popular coral insect poetry, song,... [ view full abstract ]

In a broad range of widely circulating newspapers, magazines, novels, anthologies, and song-books, antebellum Americans imagined the lives and labors of coral insects. This paper argues that popular coral insect poetry, song, and prose registers a surprisingly widespread antebellum interest in challenging the taxonomic thinking and biological essentialism that increasingly determined the legal value of persons, and even sustained slavery. Such antebellum fascination returns to and rehearses a specific, eighteenth-century moment in the history of coral science—the 1726 discovery that coral was partly animal in nature—when coral punctured scientific certainty, straddled taxonomic boundaries, and became material evidence that, in the words of British zoologist John Ellis (1755), "Life is distributed through the Universe of Things." When antebellum writers such as Sarah Josepha Hale (1834) proclaimed "the coral insect lives," they asserted that nature was a vast assemblage of collectively and continually changing matter that resisted even the most basic taxonomic divisions, such as that between plant and animal, subject and object, and even living and nonliving.