Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
The persistent appearance of personification at the threshold of the modern suggests that we might be wary of dismissing the figure so quickly. Personification is not simply an empty archaism or vestigial remnant, as many modernizers would claim. Instead, the figure of personification appears peculiarly apposite to modernity itself, an order that Bruno Latour identifies with two logically interconnected but notionally segregated practices: purification, which fixes human persons and nonhuman things as distinct ontological kinds, and translation or mediation, which mixes these two kinds together.4 Indeed, the term “personification” is newly invented in the eighteenth century: the OED identifies Samuel Johnson’s dictionary entry as the first English use of the term. There, Johnson brings Latour’s modern practices together in a single phrase. Personification, Johnson writes, is “the change of things to persons.”5 After Johnson, critics and rhetoricians devote considerable time and space to charting the broad terrain of “things” and “persons” that this new figure is meant to bring together. Poets, in turn, take up the figure in a variety of different ways: from the vices and virtues of Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, Pope’s Dunciad, and Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, to the situations and emotions of Collins’s odes, to the animate vegetation and natural processes of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanical Garden.6 Personification emerges as a term and a central poetic practice in a period that proclaims itself newly modern. And the eighteenth-century fondness for personification reveals modernity to be marked less by the clear distinction between persons and things than by the persistent instability of these terms—an instability that often turns on the figure of the animal.7
In this chapter, I turn to one of the most widely read poems of the era, James Thomson’s The Seasons. In a period known for personification, Thomson is a peculiarly copious and various personifier, using this unmistakably literary device to pose ontological and ethical questions about the composition of persons, and about the relationship between different forms of life. Then, as now, Thomson’s poem was known for its precise natural descriptions and its technical literacy in a striking range of natural-philosophical discourses (including microscopy, hydrology, geology, optics, and natural history). It was also known for its use of all manner of personifications, from the allegorical personifications of abstract ideas, to the ascription to animals, objects, and elements characteristics that are more often associated with human beings, to the periphrases that designate birds, sheep, insects, bees, and chickens as, in turn, plumy, peaceful, unseen, happy, household, and feathery “people.” Critics have tended to laud Thomson’s achievements in natural description—to celebrate him as Wordsworth does, for returning British poetry to “external nature.”8 They have tended to dismiss his personifications much as William Hazlitt does, as “trite and mechanical common-places of imagery and diction.”9
My contention in this chapter is that Thomson’s personifications are neither mechanical nor trite. They are not an example of the “vicious style” or “false ornaments” that Wordsworth derides in Thomson’s poetry, nor of the unnecessarily “florid and luxuriant” diction of which Samuel Johnson complains.10 Instead, Thomson uses personification to do serious natural- and social-philosophical work. More specifically, he draws on the wider context of eighteenth-century discussions of the figure, as well as its much older prehistory, to connect uncertainties about both persons and things with animation—a mode of action that Thomson associates with animal life, and extends to all kinds of beings. In doing so, he registers the sorts of questions that emerge when the newly coined figure of “personification” creates its two grand realms of persons and things by uniting what classical rhetoric had considered separately: roughly, figures that represent speech and figures that represent action. In Quintilian, for example, “Prosopopoeia” or “personating Characters,” designates a figure that occurs whenever we “speak, as it were, by the Mouth of others,” and “speak, as we suppose they would have spoken.”11 Quintilian imagines a striking variety of mouths by which one might speak: one’s own, or that of an adversary, a god, a ghost, a town, or Fame, as well as of “Boys, Women, People, [and] inanimate Objects.”12 And he distinguishes this figure that represents speech from a species of trope that represents action: those “bold, and what we may call dangerous, Metaphors, [that occur] when we give Life and Spirit to inanimated Objects.”13 Quintilian’s examples of this type of metaphor include poetic phrases like Virgil’s “The wond’ring Shepherd’s Ears drink in the Sound” and colloquial expressions like “the Fields are thirsty.”14 In classical rhetoric, then, there is one figure that has to do with speech; there is another that confers “life and spirit,” the animation implied in the act of drinking, or sense of thirst.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Quintilian’s two rhetorical kinds are increasingly brought together, first under the heading of “prosopopoeia,” sometimes as “personation,” and finally, as “personification.”15 Critical discussions of the figure are marked by difficulties that stem from this move, as writers try to work out what it means to set action or animation (notions that are themselves not clearly distinguished) alongside speech and on the side of persons, as attributes that are figuratively conferred on other kinds of beings. Lord Kames defines personification, then, as “the bestowing of sensibility and voluntary motion upon things inanimate.”16 James Beattie identifies it as “those figures of speech that ascribe sympathy, perception, and other attributes of animal life, to things inanimate, or even to notions merely intellectual.”17 Hugh Blair calls personification “that figure by which we attribute life and action to inanimate objects,” which occurs whenever we “speak of stones and trees, and fields and rivers, as if they were living creatures, and … attribute to them thought and sensation, affections and actions.”18 And Joseph Priestley characterizes the figure similarly: personification, he writes, “converts every thing we treat of into thinking and acting beings. We see life, sense, and intelligence, every where.”19
These definitions are remarkable for two reasons. First, all register a shift in emphasis. Unlike Quintilian, eighteenth-century rhetoricians do not detail a multitude of possible personifieds, extensive lists of all the things that might be treated by this figure (ideas, objects, dead human beings, women, children, cities, gods). Instead, they seem content with vaguely comprehensive epithets like Kames’s “things inanimate,” Blair’s “inanimate objects,” or Priestley’s “every thing we treat of.” But now there is a proliferation on the other side of the figure, in the range of attributes that it is imagined to bestow: sensibility, voluntary motion, life, action, affection, sympathy, perception, intelligence. The second remarkable feature of these accounts is the kinds of attributes they catalog. Even though eighteenth-century rhetoricians define personification with the attribution of both speech and action, their definitions focus primarily on action, in its broadest sense of animation. While Johnson defines “person” as “human being,” the attributes that personification bestows properly belong, for Kames, to “sensible beings” and for Beattie, to “animal life.” Personification may change things to persons, as Johnson proclaimed. But very often, in these discussions, the attributes of personhood have more to do with sensible or animal life than with any specifically human being. The question that emerges from these discussions, then, is this: Is personification distinct from animation?20
Descartes famously claimed that it was not, collapsing the distinction between speech and action into a solely human capacity for response or meaningful answer. Eighteenth-century discussions of personification follow Descartes in taking both speech and action to be the constitutive attributes of human personhood, and thus in aligning animals with things, as inanimate objects moved from without. But with their extensive lists of the kinds of actions that personification might bestow, these accounts also register uneasiness with Descartes’s conclusions, embedding epistemological and ontological questions about animal life and motion in their rhetorical definitions. Later literary critics and historians, by contrast, repeatedly imagine personification to operate as though the Cartesian divide between human and nonhuman, person and thing, were straightforward and set. Personification, in the Princeton Encyclopedia’s quite standard definition, is “a manner of speech endowing nonhuman objects, abstractions, or