Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series,
established in 1961 with the generous support
of Dr. John Louis Haney
Animal Characters
Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature
Bruce Thomas Boehrer
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA • OXFORD
Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boehrer, Bruce Thomas.
Animal characters : nonhuman beings in early modern literature / Bruce Thomas Boehrer.
p. cm. — (Haney Foundation series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4249-2 (acid-free paper)
1. Animals in literature. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. 4. European literature—Renaissance, 1450-1600—History and criticism. 5. Symbolism in literature. 6. Animals, Mythical, in literature. 7. Animals in art. I. Title.
PR149.A7B64 2010
820.9’374—dc22
2010004557
Contents
Introduction: Animal Studies and the Problem of Character
Chapter 2. The Cardinal's Parrot
Chapter 3. Ecce Feles
Chapter 4. The People's Peacock
Chapter 5. “Vulgar Sheepe”
Conclusion: O Blazing World
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Animal Studies and the Problem of Character
In February 1944, having just completed the manuscript of Animal Farm, George Orwell submitted to one of the most melancholy rituals to darken any professional writer's life: finding a publisher for his newly finished book. While making the usual rounds, he had the misfortune to send his novel to the American offices of Dial, whose response he recalled two years later in a letter to his agent, Leonard Moore: “I am not sure whether one can count on the American public grasping what [Animal Farm] is about. You may remember that the Dial Press had been asking me for some years for a manuscript, but when I sent the MS of AF in 1944 they returned it, saying shortly that ‘it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.’ Just recently they wrote saying that ‘there had been some mistake’ and that they would like to make another offer for the book. I rather gather they had at first taken it for a bona fide animal story” (Orwell 4:110). For Orwell (who never had much use for the United States), this incident reflects on the obtuseness of the American reading public; for me, it says more about the failures of the literary profession. In addition, it says something about the uncomfortable relationship between nonhuman animals and modern notions of literary character.
This book deals with a period of literary history—the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries—that substantially predates Animal Farm. Still, one way to understand Orwell's novel is to place it within the European tradition of beast fable, poetry, and prose narrative that stretches back to Aesop and encompasses works directly germane to the present study: for example, the Roman de Renart (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale (1396-1400), Skelton's “Speke, Parrot” (c. 1525), and the fables of La Fontaine (1668). However, this tradition has largely gone fallow over the past two centuries, with the result that modern literary works foregrounding animal subjectivity usually tend to be marginalized as genre fiction: for instance, children's literature (The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh) or fantasy (His Dark Materials, The Chronicles of Narnia).1 It is in this general spirit that Dial's reader understood and dismissed Orwell's novel as an animal story. Granted, one may also make sense of modern works dealing with animal characters by classifying them as exercises in allegory or surrealism or experimental fiction (Kafka's “Report to an Academy” and “Investigations of a Dog” come to mind). Indeed, the real failure of the reader for Dial Press is that she misidentified a work we tend to locate in the latter of these categories (allegorical and experimental) as belonging to the former (naive genre fiction). However, even literary works in the second category end up outside the literary mainstream, defined either as retrograde (for example, allegory) or idiosyncratic (for example, experimental fiction). In any case, what Dial Press called “animal stories” seem to require a special dispensation for their continued existence in the modern literary world. They stand as deviations from the norm, to be tolerated rather than encouraged.
John Ruskin offers us a way of understanding this development when he introduces his notion of the pathetic fallacy in Modern Painters (1843). For Ruskin, the pathetic fallacy is “always the sign of a morbid state of mind” (368) while also managing to be “eminently characteristic of the modern mind” (369)—observations that, taken together, lead inevitably to a debased and pathological view of modernity. Indeed, the pathetic fallacy's fallaciousness and its morbidity consist in the very same thing: “a falseness in…our impressions of external things,” which results from “a mind and body…too weak to deal fully with what is before them” (364, 365) and which invests the natural world with the observer's own passions. Weakness of temperament (we might say weakness of character) generates the error, which leads the afflicted individual to invest brute nature with emotions she experiences but which, by virtue of its very brutishness, nature cannot share. The self is so overwhelmed with itself that it imprints itself on the rest of the world.
Ruskin's examples of this phenomenon are all drawn carefully from non-sentient nature: shivering crocuses, dancing leaves, “raging waves,” “remorseless foods,” “ravenous billows,” and so forth (367). However, a moment's reflection shows that nonhuman animals may serve as a marginal case of the same mental event: their obvious ability to react to their surroundings complicates matters since it supplies proof of sentience, but their inner life—their susceptibility to what we might call human passion—remains inscrutable. So what does one do with raging lions or timorous lambs, with stubborn mules or proud peacocks, or with any of the innumerable other commonplaces whereby traditional language assumes a continuity between human and nonhuman animal experience? What, in the broader sense, does one do with the impulse to think of nonhuman animals as subjects—as characters—in their own right?
From the standpoint of the pathetic fallacy, one must concede that this impulse looks suspicious. Even granting that nonhuman animals are in some sense aware, we remain a long way indeed from endowing