Victorians and Their Animals

Beast on a Leash

Brenda Ayres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429768675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book, Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves albeit with varying degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthuman and other theories, including queer, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Marxism, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals. They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book's chapters deal with animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores or to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyse the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.

1 Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency

Brenda Ayres

In her account of the massive decimation of hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs in England during World War II, Hilda Kean (2017) notes, “There has been a striking absence in scholarly discussion on the role of companion animals in, for example, the changing nature and composition of the family or women’s lives, even in the period after this offering” (11). Her implication was and is still accurate: When one reads writers like Elizabeth Gaskell with a feminist eye toward both the reinvention of womanhood and the changing roles of women during Victorian times, we ought to factor in the agency of animals in the part that they played in effecting these changes.

Animal Agency

The word “agency, n.” (2017) has been in use at least since the early 1600s and means, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, the “ability or capacity to act or exert power; active working or operation; action, activity” and “action or intervention producing a particular effect; means, instrumentality, mediation.” The word appears often in Darwin’s writing to convey the interaction of plants with plants, animals with plants, and animals with animals for mutual survival. For example, in The Origin of the Species, Darwin (1861 [1859]) observes that trees provide nourishment to the mistletoe, which has flowers with separate sexes, which depend upon insects to gather pollen from them. The insects also depend upon the flowers for their pollen, and as agents, the insects then pollinate the flowers. He uses the term “agency” in this process (8); more specifically and more relevant to our discussion, he often refers to “insect agency.”

Borrowing Darwin’s semantics, this chapter explores the interaction of insects and other animals with women in Gaskell’s novels. At times the animals act as agents to “cross-pollinate”—that is to stimulate romance that leads to marriage—but at other times they are agents that validate and empower women. In general, literary insects and other animals appear to symbolize the symbiotic agency of animals and women to secure the right to their own existence as sentient beings, and the right to freedom and resources with which to engineer their survival.

“Animal agency” suddenly became a buzzword in academe in the 1990s. If one keys “animal agency” with quotation marks in Google Books, one will get 9,700 hits.¹ Without the quotation marks, there are 2,940,000 hits. Nearly half of the titles of works that contain these words were published in the 1990s and the other half in the twenty-first century. The popularity of the term has to do with its outgrowth from posthumanism, the idea, simplistically put, that humans are not the center of the universe. This shift in world view radically adjusted the way we understand ourselves in relation to the others that share our universe. A. Irving Hallowell (1960) coined the phrase “other-than-human persons” to refer to spiritual and supernatural beings (21). The title of the science fiction novel More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon (1953) introduced another phrase to represent the “next evolution” of human beings that have been physically and mentally altered with super enhancements by accident or design or fabrication in the laboratory. The phrase predates Eugene F. Stoermer’s term Anthropocene, meaning “the new human.”² While Stoermer’s jargon still conveys a perspective that the global environment is human driven, his emphasis is on how the global environment has changed because of human bane, and in turn, how that changing environment is altering humans and animals. The ontogeny of human animals is also theorized in “transhumanism,” a term published by Canadian philosopher W. D. Lighthall in 1940 but further developed by the biologist Julian Huxley (Harrison and Wolyniak 2015: 465). In an article that gives the term’s history, Peter Harrison and Joseph Wolyniak define “transhumanism” as “a movement that seeks to promote the evolution of the human race beyond its present limitations through the use of science and technology” (465).

An elusive and elastic term itself, “posthumanism” has become a catch-all phrase for the decentralization of the human or for the transcendence or redefinition of the human. Cary Wolfe (2010) essays a book-length exploration of the word. His understanding of Derrida’s important work “The Animal That Therefore I Am” contributes a useful definition for my treatment of Gaskell’s novels: As a “semiotic system” or system of signs, posthumanism “exceeds and encompasses the boundary not just between human and animal but also between the living or organic and the mechanical or technical” (Derrida 2002: xviii). When one considers animals as “conscious beings that form their own perspective regarding the life-worlds” instead of “mere objects” subordinate to human regulation (Räsänen and Syrjämaa 2017: 2), then we can rethink how nonhuman animals, as agents, affect the human world and how they affect the way we see the world.

In her co-authored book Animals and Agency, Sarah McFarland construes “agency” to refer to those animals who have the “intellectual capability and self-awareness necessary to be considered agents in their one lives” (McFarland 2009: 3). By “agents” she means that they have the cognizant abilities to realize that they have “the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (1), and that they have the “free will, ability, rationality, mind, morality, subjectivity” to pursue those rights (3). These are phrases and words that reverberated during the women’s movements in both England and the United States, but here McFarland is referring to nonhuman animals. She says that Eileen Crist’s work in Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind interprets Darwin’s view—that animals are those beings capable of performing actions—in light of and in contrast to the common human perception that actions simply happen to animals.³ From his Encountering the World, Edward Reed (1996) adds more impetus to the power of an agent: “This is just what agency means: agents make things happen, they make their way in the world…” (19). In the same vein as McFarland and Crist believe that animals do not just react to humans and should not be defined only by humans, Reed argues that animals do act autonomously from humans, that their actions are “typically self-initiated and modified” by animals themselves, and this makes them agents (19).

Linda Kalof’s definition, to me, is the clearest and the most comprehensive. She defines “agency” as “the ability to engage in self-directed and purposeful action in their environments and in relationships with other agents” and it is a “continuum of characteristics that all animals (humans, dogs, apes, horses, cats) have in varying degrees” (Kaloff 2017: 8). In my Gaskell study I am interested in the interrelationships between her novels’ animals and female characters as agents that mutually mediate for each other in an environment in which neither has hegemony.

Gaskell and Darwin

Charles Darwin was a cousin to Gaskell⁴ and the model for Roger Hamley in Wives and Daughters⁵ and for Job Leigh in Mary Barton (Endersby 2009: 302).⁶ In a letter to her editor that outlines her plan to write Wives and Daughters, Gaskell conveys that she wants to give the surname of Newton to Roger,⁷ indicating her intention of creating a quintessential character of science (Litvack 2004: 729). Even though Roger is of the aristocratic class but is not the heir apparent, he has not received the best education, and his worth has been generally depreciated by his parents. Consequently, he has evolved into a hard-working, highly motivated, and humble naturalist. The also humble Job is a self-educated weaver, and like Roger, is also a botanist and an entomologist, one of those men

who may be seen with a rude-looking net, ready to catch any winged insect, or a kind of dredge, with which they rake the green and slimy pools; practical, shrewd, hard-working men, who pore over every new specimen with real scientific delight.

(Gaskell 2008 [1853]: Mary Barton 37; ch. 5)

In addition to Darwin’s having been the inspiration for the creation of Roger, Gaskell’s North and South delineates the theories of life and death” of her famous cousin (Martin 1983: 91). Carol Martin’s article on Darwin and Gaskell adduces the novel’s demonstration of “survival of the fittest,” with the struggling agrarian South being unable to compete financially with the tour de force of industrialization in the North (Martin 1983: 91–92). As is well known, the term “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer in his Principles of Biology (1864) after his having read Origin (Darwin 1861 [1859]). Darwin’s book came out four years after North and South, but his theories had been widely disseminated in the 1840s. Furthermore, many of them were not unique but had been proffered by naturalists in the eighteenth century.

Not only did Darwin’s theories influence Gaskell, but also Gaskell influenced Darwin in the elucidation of his theories. According to his son Francis, Charles Darwin enjoyed reading novels and listed Mrs. Gaskell as one of his favorites.⁸ Martin identifies the “intraspecies struggle” between master and laborer and between industrialists competing for dominance in the market (95–98). Mary Noble’s article “Darwin Among the Novelists” assesses Darwin’s use of novels in his argument that “humans and animals share behavioral traits which indicate similar states of consciousness” (2011: 99). She deduces this from Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions, published in 1871. Perhaps even more convincing is Noble’s discovery that Darwin “viewed fiction as a source of reliable empirical observations, comparable to the ethnological and travel literature on which he also drew heavily in his work on human evolution.” Darwin credited novelists as “excellent observers” (103); in fact, he particularly commended Gaskell for being an “excellent observer” (Darwin 1873 [1871]: 151) and quoted from Mary Barton a description of a baby’s crying as she was being fed.⁹ As Noble (2011) points out, Darwin’s notebooks in the late 1830s were inscribed with references to a variety of novels.

Besides the benefit of what he deemed to be empirical observations by astute novelists, Darwin may have referred to novels to reduce the resistance readers might have otherwise given to his arguments for an evolution of expressions of emotions shared by animals and humans (Noble 2011: 112). Implementing the same strategy as novelists like Gaskell, who used animals to cross “class, gender, national, and racial boundaries” and to induce empathy, Darwin asks readers to identify with trans-species and thus accept the idea that “human morals evolved from animal emotions” (Noble 2011: 115). Darwin understood that novelists express suffering by both human and nonhuman characters in order to “stimulate readers’ sympathy for alien groups” (119). Noble refers to the preface to Mary Barton in which Gaskell states that her purpose for writing such a novel is to reveal the suffering of factory workers to those unaware (122–23), and in turn to pressure politicians to pass legislation or perform some “merciful deeds” to alleviate such suffering (Gaskell 2008 [1853]: 5). Whether intentionally or otherwise, Gaskell also revealed the suffering of women. She employed animals to “stimulate readers’ sympathy” for women, who like animals, were often marginalized in their societies and were regarded as Others.

Gaskell would have become familiar with the theories of Darwin if from no other source than her husband who was an avid reader of articles on science and who was a member and later chair of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (Litvack 2004: 730). He subscribed to journals that published scientific papers, such as: Westminster, Quarterly, Edinburgh, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s, National Review, Fortnightly Review, British Quarterly Review, and Revue des Deux Mondes (741).

Additionally, the Gaskells socialized with such scientific friends as Francis Egerton (a patron of Manchester science), Benjamin Brodie (Oxford professor of chemistry), Edward Schunck (analytical chemist), William Fairbairn (engineer), James Nasmyth (engineer), William Benjamin Carpenter (physiologist), James Prescott Joule (physicist), William Whewell (scientist), Jane Marcet (author of books on introductions to science), and Mary Somerville (polymath) (Litvack 2004: 730). As mentioned above, she also visited Charles Darwin. She spent a couple weeks in 1830 sojourning with the family of William Turner, a distant relative of hers (Secord 2013: 135) and a prominent Unitarian minister who was also passionate about science. He lectured often at the three scientific societies in Newcastle, including the Natural History Society (Uglow 1993: 57–60). His nephew, James Aspinall Turner, became a friend as well (230). He was a prominent cotton manufacturer in Manchester (“Deaths” 1867: 686) but also a renowned entomologist and founder of the Manchester Field Naturalist Club (Beolens, Watkins, and Grayson 2011: 269).¹⁰ In February 1864, she stayed at the house of George Allman. He was the husband of an old friend and a professor of zoology (Uglow 1992: 559–61). Gaskell’s own husband organized the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1861 which would have offered her more than ample opportunity to know a host of scientists (Boiko 2005: 89).

Therefore, it should not be unreasonable for Phoebe Poon (2010) to theorize that Wives and Daughters is a “response” to The Origin of the Species with its focus on individual struggle and natural selection. She also suggests that the novel “can be seen to anticipate certain aspects of evolutionary theory” that appear in Darwin’s la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beast on a Leash
• 1. Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency
• 2. Old and New Beef: Caring for Animals in Household Words
• 3. George Eliot’s Use of Horses in Measuring the Moral Maturity of Characters in Her Novels
• 4. Pigs in Great Expectations: Class, Dehumanization, and Marxist Animal Studies
• 5. Ants, Insects, and Automatons: Classifying Creatures in Hardy’s The Return of the Native
• 6. It’s Raining Cats and Dogs in the Novels of George Eliot
• 7. A Fine Kettle of Fish Cultural (and Culinary) Preservation in Anglo-Jewish Ghetto Stories
• 8. Gendered Metamorphoses in the Natural History Museum and Trans-Animality in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle
• 9. The “Animality” of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books
• List of Contributors
• Index