This article examines the human-animal relationship at the end of 19^th century by focusing on Jumbo, the elephant exhibited in P. T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth” and the Zoological Gardens of London. Jumbo awed visitors of the Zoo with its colossal body, but, at the same time, attracted them with its intelligence and affections. The star elephant was sold to Barnum in 1882 because the Zoo executives feared that such a huge animal might run wild in the mating season. This ambivalence of love and fear was juxtaposed with a gendered and racial desire of white men who were concerned that overcivilization would lead to effeminacy and decadence. They exploited the primitive land and culture to recover their masculinity. While the most prominent example was Theodore Roosevelt, who promoted a strenuous life and conducted big game hunting in Africa, exotic animals introduced to the domestic domain offered an opportunity to experience the American foreign relation in more accessible locations and in more moderate ways. Barnum’s circus, which sought to improve its reputation in the 1880s by emphasizing educational values and appealing to the middle-class morality, showed a changing relation between human and animals in the time of imperialistic growth.

The exhibition of animals had two meanings: to secure human control over non-human animals, and to demonstrate the superiority of civilization over savageness. Animals from the outside of civilization was recognized as an unknown threat that needed to be tamed. Although trainers in circuses and zoos subordinate fierce animals by force, they, including A. D. Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoo, could not completely ease their concern over the potential danger of the animals. Violence could not prevent animals from going out of control. Even though Jumbo was just a chattel, its owners could not dispose of the elephant as they wished. The sale of Jumbo boosted a nationalistic and sentimental fever for the “poor” elephant. There was an opposition to the expulsion of Jumbo from the “home”. As the public sympathy escalated, the London Zoo switched its stance to argue that the migration was beneficial to Jumbo and Barnum started to utilize the affectionate bond around the pitiful animal for promotion. Barnum acclaimed the close ties between Jumbo and two partners―the so-called “wife” elephant Alice and the trainer Matthew Scott―as an ideal relationship of respectable middle class. Jumbo was characterized by female virtues like tenderness and sensitivity and therefore became a target of sentimentalism that celebrated compassions even for non-human animals. Jumbo died in an railway accident in 1885. Barnum romanticized its death as a tragedy of a noble and heroic animal. After the death, Jumbo continued to tour around the nation as a stuffed and skeletal specimens to evoke nostalgia for the lost innocence. Jumbo was transformed from an uncontrollable threat to a controllable comfort. The wild animals were domesticated through exhibition and remodeled into pets, nonresistant servant of human beings.