The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

249 Pages·2019·4.632 MB·English

by  Claire Nettleton

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE
The Artist as Animal
in Nineteenth-Century
French Literature
Claire Nettleton
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of
as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may
have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a
wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and
to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations
of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally
read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically
human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of inter-
disciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with
the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embody-
ing a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of
how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than
simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of
animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with refer-
ence to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods.
The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating
related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from
theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other
cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
Claire Nettleton
The Artist as Animal
in Nineteenth-
Century French
Literature
Claire Nettleton
Pomona College
Claremont, CA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-19344-7 ISBN 978-3-030-19345-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19345-4
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A
cknowledgments
I would first like to thank Justin Slosky, my incredible husband, for his
numerous painstaking edits, brilliant insight and years of unparalleled sup-
port and encouragement. I am eternally grateful for his help, and this
project would have never been completed without him. I am grateful
for our son Henry and his enthusiasm regarding animals and art as well as
for our newborns Alicia and Genevieve. I would also like to thank my
mother Susan Nettleton as well as Larry Morris—for their extraordinary
help in brainstorming, editing and researching since this project was in its
infancy. I would never have been exposed to the Musée d’Orsay or Paris in
general if it were not for them. This project was inspired by my years with
our dear friend U.G. Krishnamurti, who is a true artiste-animal whose
discussions of perception are the basis of my argument. I thank him and all
of our friends, including Shilpa Guha, who helped on some of the final
edits of this project, as well Sumedha Guha, Louis Brawley, Jack and
Barbara Lyon and so many others. I would also like to thank my father
Craig Nettleton for all his unconditional support.
I gratefully acknowledge the help and mentorship of Susan McHugh,
one of the series editors of the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
whose pioneer research in the field of animal studies has deeply informed
my scholarship. I would also like to thank my mentor Robert Ziegler, a
prolific scholar of the fin de siècle, whose writings on Octave Mirbeau’s
Dans le ciel and Rachilde’s L’Animale incited my interest in Decadent
studies. He spent many countless hours editing the initial manuscript and
giving feedback throughout the years. He has also read multiple versions
of my Rachilde chapter, since I presented it at the Nineteenth-Century
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
French Studies colloquium in Richmond, Virginia, in 2013, and I deeply
appreciate his feedback. I also thank Melanie Hawthorne for excellent ref-
erences on Rachilde and Pierre Michel for his immense knowledge and
encouragement regarding Octave Mirbeau.
I would like to acknowledge my colleagues at Pomona College who are
outstanding mentors and interdisciplinary scholars, including  Kevin
Dettmar and the Humanities Studio for giving me the opportunity to
complete my manuscript revisions during the Writing in Place workshop. I
thank Virginie Duzer, the Chair of the Department of Romance Languages
and Literatures who wrote L’Impressionisme littéraire (2013), one of the
founding texts of the discipline, and Peggy Waller, a nineteenth- century
scholar whose suggestions and support have been immeasurable. I would
also like to thank Jack Abecassis, whose research interweaves science and
literature in profound ways that inspire me daily. I will forever appreciate
his help and guidance. I would like to thank Paul Cahill, whose open
doorway I have stood in almost daily over the past three years, as he self-
lessly answered my research questions. In addition to departmental sup-
port to present at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association
Conference at Brown University in 2016, Pomona College’s Conference
Travel Grant (2017) and Large Research Grant (2018) have helped me
complete my final research initiatives. I would like to especially thank the
Josephine De Karman Foundation for providing me a Final Dissertation
Fellowship (2009–2010), which supported research for the three initial
chapters of this book.
A debt of gratitude goes to my dissertation committee members and
mentors at the University of Southern California, including Antonia
Szabari, my advisor who introduced me to the field of ecocriticism, Pani
Norindr, who enriched my knowledge of visual culture, and Akira Lippit,
a scholar of animal studies and cinema whose book Electric Animal (2000)
continues to influence the field and my new research projects. I would also
like to thank Natania Meeker for advising that I include Rachilde’s
L’Animale in my research in 2008. The University of Southern California’s
generous support—including an International Conference Grant to pres-
ent at the Minding Animals Conference in Australia (2009) and an
International Research Grant to conduct research at the archives of the
Jardin des Plantes in Paris (2008)—was fundamental to my scholarship.
Finally, I would like to thank Dan Finch-Race and Stephanie Posthumus,
groundbreaking scholars and editors of the volume French Ecocriticism
(2017), in which I published an essay on Zola. Their helpful suggestions
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
inspired me to take my research on Zola in new directions for the purposes
of this book. Dan’s innovative spirit in organizing the Cambridge French
Ecocriticism Colloquium also motivated me to organize interdisciplinary
colloquia that illustrate the relevance of nineteenth-c entury texts to
contemporary environmental issues and experiments in biotech.
Praise for The Artist as Animal
in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
“Claire Nettleton’s The Artist as Animal brings us to the intersection of animal
studies, the history of science, aesthetics, and urbanization, and in drawing from
these fields, offers fresh insight into the figure of the “animal artist” in the works
of the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Laforgue, Mirbeau, and Rachilde. Nettleton’s
book shows a fine sensitivity to the changes in urban landscape in the period and
marks a significant contribution to the animal studies in French turn-of-the cen-
tury fiction. Nettleton is a consummate stylist. Her writing is vibrant and ener-
getic. Readers of her book will find it hard to put it down.”
—Robert Ziegler, Professor Emeritus of French Literature,
Montana Tech, USA
“Claire Nettleton’s expertly researched and outstandingly argued case for a careful
consideration of the animal-artist trope maps important and yet unexplored nodal
points in the rise of modern art – compelling, informative, and well written”.
—Giovanni Aloi, Art Historian, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
USA, and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal
of Nature in Visual Culture
“What might a literary history of the Anthropocene look like? What would be its
leitmotifs and how would its pictures come to life? Claire Nettleton’s The Artist as
Animal in Nineteenth-Century French Literature brings together literature, art,
and science to broach such territory. Nettleton reveals the interconnections
between writers Emile Zola, Jules Laforgue, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde, artists
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Paul
Cézanne and Alfred Sisley, and naturalists Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, Charles
Darwin, Georges Cuvier, and Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. The book provides
a scintillating take on how nineteenth-century evolutionary theory influenced rep-
resentations of animal-human relations in French art and literature. With lively
prose and vivid imagery, the book follows the winding path of the ‘artist-animal’
through the French cultural landscape of the Second Empire (1852-1870) and the
Belle Epoque (1871-1914), showing how this figure prodded society at large to
think more ‘animalistically’ than ‘humanistically.’”
—Charissa N. Terranova, Professor of Visual and Performing Arts,
University of Texas at Dallas, USA
ix
x PRAISE FOR THE ARTIST AS ANIMAL IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH…
“Claire Nettleton’s Artist as Animal brilliantly expands the field of animal studies
by bringing it into a compelling conversation with literature and visual studies.
Her notion of the animal artist posits at once a subjectivity but also creativity to
animals, producing the possibility of imagining animals not as the objects of litera-
ture and art, but as their origins.”
—Akira Mizuta Lippit, Vice Dean of Faculty, School of Cinematic Arts,
University of Southern California, USA
“This timely book presents a unique and original standpoint on the intricate rela-
tionships between art and nature in the nineteenth century, filing a gap in the
history of art as well as the history of science.”
—François-Joseph Lapointe, Professor of Biological Sciences and Bioartist,
The University of Montreal, Canada
“Claire Nettleton’s book builds bridges between recent works on the animal ques-
tion in various regions of the world while retracing historical genealogies of animal
perceptions in a French context. By focusing on the collapse of the animal-human
divide in nineteenth-century French literature, the author adds an important con-
tribution to a currently flourishing discourse on (anti-) speciesism in critical animal
studies.”
—Bénédicte Boisseron, Associate Professor of Afroamerican and
African Studies, Univeristy of Michigan, USA, and author of
Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018)