Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Haney Foundation Series)

245 Pages·2010·3.979 MB·English

by  Bruce Thomas Boehrer

Animal Characters
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd ii 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1177 AAMM
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series,
established in 1961 with the generous support
of Dr. John Louis Haney
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd iiii 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1177 AAMM
Animal Characters
Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature
Bruce Thomas Boehrer
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia • oxford
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd iiiiii 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1177 AAMM
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 Th omas.
Animal characters : nonhuman beings in early modern literature /
Bruce Th omas 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
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd iivv 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1188 AAMM
Contents
Introduction: Animal Studies and the Problem of Character 1
Chapter 1. Baiardo’s Legacy 28
Chapter 2. Th e Cardinal’s Parrot 74
Chapter 3. Ecce Feles 107
Chapter 4. Th e People’s Peacock 133
Chapter 5. “Vulgar Sheepe” 164
Conclusion: O Blazing World 191
Notes 203
Works Cited 209
Index 229
Acknowledgments 237
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd vv 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1188 AAMM
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd vvii 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1188 AAMM
Introduction
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: fi nding a publisher for his newly fi nished book.
While making the usual rounds, he had the misfortune to send his novel to
the American offi ces 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 remem-
ber 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 off er for the book. I rather gather they had at fi rst taken it for a bona
fi de animal story” (Orwell 4:110). For Orwell (who never had much use for
the United States), this incident refl ects on the obtuseness of the American
reading public; for me, it says more about the failures of the literary profes-
sion. In addition, it says something about the uncomfortable relationship be-
tween nonhuman animals and modern notions of literary character.
Th is book deals with a period of literary history—the fi fteenth 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
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd 11 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1188 AAMM
2 introduction
Fontaine (1668). However, this tradition has largely gone fallow over the past
two centuries, with the result that modern literary works foregrounding ani-
mal subjectivity usually tend to be marginalized as genre fi ction: for instance,
children’s literature (Th e Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh) or fantasy
(His Dark Materials, Th e 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 ex-
perimental fi ction (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 misidentifi ed a work we tend to locate in the latter of these catego-
ries (allegorical and experimental) as belonging to the former (naive genre
fi ction). However, even literary works in the second category end up outside
the literary mainstream, defi ned either as retrograde (for example, allegory)
or idiosyncratic (for example, experimental fi ction). In any case, what Dial
Press called “animal stories” seem to require a special dispensation for their
continued existence in the modern literary world. Th ey stand as deviations
from the norm, to be tolerated rather than encouraged.
John Ruskin off ers 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 fallacious-
ness 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
affl icted individual to invest brute nature with emotions she experiences but
which, by virtue of its very brutishness, nature cannot share. Th e 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,” “remorse-
less fl oods,” “ravenous billows,” and so forth (367). However, a moment’s
refl ection shows that nonhuman animals may serve as a marginal case of the
same mental event: their obvious ability to react to their surroundings com-
plicates matters since it supplies proof of sentience, but their inner life—their
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd 22 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1188 AAMM
Animal Studies 3
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 common-
places 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 them with the
mental and emotional furniture of human experience. To do so—especially
in light of our proved tendency to extend this endowment to rocks and trees
and other nonsentient natural entities—looks very much like a fi rst step in
the direction of sentimental anthropomorphism. In this respect, to allow that
animals are more like us than like stones seems to entail a rich panoply of
cultural silliness, ranging from pet cemeteries to childish fantasies about talk-
ing pigs. Indeed, when considered from the standpoint of the pathetic fallacy,
animals appear particularly noxious. Th ey are, as it were, the thin end of the
wedge.
Humanity, Modernity, Character
Ruskin’s work brings pressure to bear on the notion of modernity, which he
considers especially susceptible to the silliness at the heart of the pathetic
fallacy. Th e following pages, by contrast, focus on animal character in the
early modern period, for it is the span from about 1400 to about 1700 that
witnesses the birth of the intellectual dispensation Ruskin takes for granted.
At heart, one could describe the present book as a set of interrelated zooliter-
ary histories, or perhaps less pretentiously, as a series of character studies of
early modern animals. It concentrates on animal character, in turn, because
I consider this crucial to the development of notions of literary character in
general. My underlying argument here is simple: that the problem of literary
character may best be understood from the standpoint of animal studies, as
an instance of broader philosophical and scientifi c problems in theorizing the
human-animal divide.
Th at the concept of literary character is a problem—or at least en-
tails problems—I take as axiomatic. It was certainly so for L. C. Knights
1122991133--AAnniimmaall CChhaarraacctteerrss ((BBooeehhrreerr))..iinndddd 33 55//1199//1100 1111::4411::1188 AAMM