Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Literary Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination

171 Pages·2010·0.98 MB·English

by  Laura Brown

Homeless Dogs
(cid:2)
Melancholy Apes

Homeless Dogs
&
Melancholy Apes
Humans and Other Animals
in the
Modern Literary Imagination
(cid:3)
Laura Brown
cornell university press
Ithaca & London
Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be
reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address
Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2010 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, Laura, 1949–
Homeless dogs and melancholy apes : humans and other animals in the modern literary
imagination / Laura Brown.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4828-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. American literature—History and criticism.
3. Animals in literature. 4. Human-animal relationships in literature. 5. Pets in literature.
I. Title.
PR408.A55B76 2010
823'.009362—dc22 2010010713
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to
the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based,
low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of
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Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Walter
“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments,
prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

contents
Preface ix
1 Speculative Space: The Rise of the Animal in the Modern Imagination 1
2 Mirror Scene: The Orangutan, the Ancients, and the Cult of Sensibility 27
3 Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog 65
4 Violent Intimacy: The Monkey and the Marriage Plot 91
5 Dog Narrative: Itinerancy, Diversity, and the Elysium of Dogs 113
Index 145
vii

preface
This book began in an undergraduate seminar on The Idea of the Pet in Literature
and History, a course that I offered in the English Department at Cornell Uni-
versity. Describing the status of “the pet in history” to this group was a straightforward
project, compared with our discussions of “the pet in literature.” My own interdis-
ciplinary syllabus exacerbated the complexities. I began with historical studies of the
lived relationships between humans and other animals in western Europe from the early
modern period to the present. And I incorporated materials and information from Cor-
nell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, in particular Bernard E. Rollin’s textbook, An
Introduction to Veterinary Medical Ethics, and a discussion with a Cornell colleague, Professor
Katherine Houpt, VMD, a veterinary behaviorist and a key fi gure in Cornell’s cutting-
edge Animal Behavior Clinic.
In this context, our literary readings had a strangely irrelevant potency and prior-
ity. Students experienced the animals represented by William Wordsworth, Matthew
Arnold, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, James Merrill, and Paul Auster with an
immediacy and a poignancy that even Rollin’s most needy and Houpt’s most misun-
derstood pets did not inspire. But of course—with Houpt’s and Rollin’s examples be-
fore our eyes—we were repeatedly forced to register the almost unbridgeable distance
between “White Fang” or “Lad” and those real animals who share our world. Students
quickly found the task of measuring the precise distance between the imaginary and
the real nonhuman beings to be exhausting and fruitless. This course tested my ability
to grasp and to express the signifi cance of purely literary animals—their vitality in our
imagination and their pertinence to our experience. Which literary animal most fully
expresses the raw alterity of animal-kind? Which are most evidently people in animal
suits? We concluded, fi rst, that neither alterity nor anthropomorphism, in itself, can
account for the versatility and complex nature of the imaginary animal, and second, that
ix