Victorian Animal Dreams

Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Deborah Denenholz Morse, Martin A. Danahay, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Martin A. Danahay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351875950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.

PART I
Science and Sentiment

Chapter 1
Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets

Teresa Mangum

Ear-piercing canine choruses assault the ear. Fetid steam wells up from wet heaps of manure and permeates eyes, nose, and skin. Congealing blood oozes under and over leather shoes. The glistening, flaccid skin and featherless pores of stripped, dripping carcasses border a market path formed by counters of iced fish, dank with salt, sea, and death. Londoners of the nineteenth century lived in a veritable animal sensorium. Responses to this intimate apprehension of living, working, preening, suffering, dying, and dead animals varied intensely. Urban and animal historians alike document the extreme emotions roused by this animal assault upon the senses—from fear to disgust to outrage to compassion—and the consequent actions.¹ The fearful called for clearing the streets in the interest of public health; the disgusted demanded the removal of slaughter houses and “knacker’s yards” to the periphery; the outraged sought legal protection for working animals; and the collectively compassionate formed organizations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824 and denominated “Royal” in 1840, or launched seemingly quixotic rescue projects such as the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs, initiated in 1860 and established in the famous Battersea location in 1871.²

In this essay, I look at another emotional call and response to urban animals, particularly to those who were or could be conceived of as pets. That is, I want to examine the intersecting rituals and emotions that we call loss, mourning, and memorialization when we are discussing humans. Then as now, pets, in particular dogs, received the greatest attention—whether they were abandoned, abused, valued, or mourned. Work animals, hunted animals, and even animals caught in the entertainment and exhibition industries provoked concern and efforts for their protection. This concern could be motivated by the amorphous form of attention we call “love” for animals or by an intolerance of suffering in any sentient being. In any case, animals that could be imagined as pets evoked unique and distinctive sensations that ranged from deliberate avoidance to guilt, dread, fury, longing, deep personal attachment, sentimental idealization, and anthropomorphism. These emotions easily tangled into the web of feelings and social practices we characterize as mourning and, further, into the impulse to memorialize objects of affection that mourning calls into being.

Synthesizing the voluminous literature on death and mourning during the nineteenth century, Gerhard Joseph and Herbert Tucker assert that Victorian beliefs about death produced two master narratives: the first narrative is rendered visible in representations of the moment of death and the second in newly prescriptive descriptions of the mourning process.³ While ostentatious mourning for public figures declined after 1880, Joseph and Tucker note that extravagant expressions of grief continued throughout the century in private life, at least for those families able to afford the time and materials requisite for the full repertoire of mourning. Moreover, the process was never guesswork: etiquette manuals provided detailed instructions regarding the number of months that particular forms of dress should be worn, imposed prohibitions against social activities, and even delineated distinctions between appropriate grief and melancholia (Tucker, p. 119). Historians have long documented the material history this mourning has left us—the crepe-draped carriages, the child “mutes” hired to follow the hearse, the black, gray, then lavender clothing, the rings and lockets containing a lock of the loved one’s hair, jet fashioned into every kind of ornament imaginable, the painted miniatures, and later the photographs of the dead themselves.⁴ However, Esther Schor’s important book Bearing the Dead shifted the focus from practices and commodities toward the cultural significance of represented mourning. She argues that “an individual’s traumatic grief” is “a force that constitutes communities and makes it possible to conceptualize history.” She adds, “Even as we give life to the dead, the dead shape the lives we are able to live.”⁵ As Victorians deepened their attachment to pets, many turned to these existing forms of mourning to express loss but also to find a legitimizing community.

Animal historian Keith Thomas claims that by 1700 symptoms of obsessive pet-keeping were pervasive. Substantial evidence suggests that among the wealthier classes the memorializing of animals became increasingly commonplace through the eighteenth century and fairly widespread among upper- and middle-class pet owners by the late nineteenth century.⁶ In her fascinating history of and attitudes toward dogs, Susan McHugh notes that images of canine faithfulness appeared on “Classical funereal iconography, and these idealized depictions in turn appear to have modeled the primary significance of dogs in early medieval Western religious paintings.”⁷ McHugh’s Dog, like Robert Rosenblum’s The Dog in Art from Rococo to Postmodernism and Ruth Silverman’s The Dog Observed: Photographs, 1844–1983,⁸ reproduces monuments to humans which represent abstract qualities such as loyalty and faithfulness through the figures of sculpted dogs (especially greyhounds, according to McHugh) as well as monuments designed by humans to honor individual dogs. These studies demonstrate that Victorian memorialization of animals built upon a time-honored practice. However, the profusion of animal memorials, the intensified attachment to animals, and the engulfment of pets in the elaborate rituals and commodities unique to nineteenth-century mourning together signal a profound shift in human–animal relations during the nineteenth century.

Ivan Kreilkamp convincingly argues in another essay in this volume that animals, particularly dogs, had a fragile hold on human sympathy and imagination. I would argue that this same precariousness—implicitly analogous to the anxious, unpredictable human hold on subjectivity and social status in a rapidly changing nineteenth-century world—encouraged compensatory attachment to pets. We find traces in intensified expressions of emotion, guilt, loss, and mourning of animals. Moreover, the devaluing of most animal life, on one hand, and the heightened attachment to pets, on the other, is a crucial and inherent contradiction in nineteenth-century human–animal relations, a contradiction to which I repeatedly turn in this essay. While mourning focused on an individual pet, the attention to animal suffering often encompassed animals that could have been “pets”: mutts, despised street mongrels, overworked carters’ dogs, and any animals scientists would refer to as research subjects and animal rights advocates would lament as vivisectors’ victims.⁹ This contradiction deeply threatened animals’ well-being. Those who dismissed animals as worthless callously inflicted neglect, abuse, abandonment, and painful scientific experimentation. Those who “loved” animals doomed most (the non-pets) to misery when they demarcated and exalted a few species as “pets.” Both responses demanded the abjection of animals as a condition of co-existing with humans. Whether taken as models for human behavior, Job-like figures of endurance, members of what we might now call an extended humanimal family, or as projections of the (human) self or of idealized human virtues, dogs could be at once praised and vilified, loved and quite deliberately lost. Kreilkamp painfully demonstrates how imagery and action that positions human characters as dogs debases the human. In this essay I flip the coin to consider the corresponding appreciation, in all senses of that word, when pet owners attempted to signify the value of an animal through our species’ practices of mourning and memorialization.

In the case of animals woven into human domestic lives, memorialization obscured the paradoxical economic and objectified status of the pet. How could one own a being and yet refer to it as an equal in phrases such as “man’s best friend”? Mourning rituals allowed pet “owners” to represent symbolically the loss this animated property could so curiously compel. Surprised by the intensity of grief, many animal owners sought to reconcile cultural confidence in human superiority with personal feelings of bereavement that sometimes dealt a stronger blow than grief for departed human companions. Perhaps such unanticipated emotional priorities help explain why in the latter part of the nineteenth century the same excessive mourning rituals that comforted a widowed queen promised to ease the misery of losing a family pet. In fact, like the Queen, her subjects who could afford to do so sought representational strategies to memorialize their animals—from portraits to tombstones to tourist artifacts to epitaphs, poems, and stories. Turning to aesthetic forms used to honor human dead and comfort the living, pet owners endeavored to give shape, significance, and legitimacy to the unfathomable loss they felt at the death of “mere animals.”¹⁰ In so doing, pet owners would have come face to face with the paradoxical nature of human–animal relationships. An animal’s death asks the human companion to reconcile personal, domestic experiences of loss, on one hand, with the tumult of animals and the uses and understandings of animals—for example, the pleasure in eating and wearing animals, the threat of rabies, the dependence upon the labor of animals, the ambivalent need for and horror of vivisectionists’ experiments—on the other hand. How deeply did this experience of contradictions affect those whose pets died? Presumably, then as now, many pet owners mourned a single animal whom they believed to be utterly unique (though usually replaceable). Others were taught by grief to see animal suffering all around them and to work on behalf of animals’ welfare.

Pet mourning practices may have encouraged the avoidance of responsibility toward “animals” as a whole, but the obvious fact of many Victorians’ attachment to pets and grief at their loss ought to be acknowledged. And in order to accept grief as a legitimate response to an animal’s death, Victorians first needed to believe that animals themselves were capable of love—that should “we” be the first to go that the animal would grieve the loss of “us.” Cultural discomfort with deep emotional attachment to animals, the valuation of animals that attachment implied, and the social responsibilities to animals such value would impose thus led to a curious displacement of grief. In effect, the nearly obsessive depictions of dogs overwhelmed by grief for lost masters and mistresses or faithfully attached to places associated with the dead may be the most powerful, if also the most oblique, animal memorial projects of all. This desire to be monumentalized by an animal’s grief inspired a host of images, many of such imaginative force that they still circulate today. Schoolchildren in Scotland learn of “Greyfriar’s Bobby,” a Skye Terrier who kept vigil by his policeman owner’s Edinburgh grave for fourteen years. Bobby allegedly mourned at “Auld Jock’s” tomb from his death in 1858 until the dog’s own death in 1872.¹¹ Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum are still moved by Sir Edwin Landseer’s sentimental portrait of a forlorn working-dog, “The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” (1837), in which the collie rests his chin on the shepherd’s humble coffin. College students read Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Helvellyn” (1805...