Month: July 2016

Abstract

by Michael Gamer, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Coming just after the Peace of Amiens failed, 1803-4 was a strange year for British theater. One phenomenon of that season, the pre-pubescent Master Betty, mesmerized Covent Garden audiences with his performances of Shakespeare. The other, Carlo the Wonder Dog, thrilled packed houses at Drury Lane with his daring water rescues in The Cataract (December 1803). Both provoked considerable critical response, who understood their stardom as — on several levels — a challenge to the established star-systems of the time, which placed great actors like Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and Dora Jordan at the center of any celebration of British theater and dramatic heritage. As I show in the first part of my paper, it was the juxtaposition of Betty and Carlo that raised the real concern, and caused the numerous strictures on Betty’s performances to return, again and again, to the question of whether the young prodigy was truly acting or just a well-trained automaton, going through specific bodily motions and vocal modulations with the eerie precision of a perfectly trained animal. What the juxtaposition of child and animal actor does, I argue, is redirect the question of Betty’s success from one of child genius to something more mechanical.

The second half of the paper then jumps forward seven years, to 1811, to the moment when John Philip Kemble, now manager of Covent Garden, facing mounting losses, decides to hire 20 of Astley’s performing horses for a revival of George Colman the Younger’s Blue-beard. The resulting success of this production led to the first hippodrama written for a Theatre Royal, Matthew Lewis’s Timour the Tartar, commissioned by Kemble to follow Blue-beard as the 1811 season closed.

I wish to explore the response to these performances. Writing with the Betty-Carlo phenomenon behind them, theater critics like Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt began, first satirically and then seriously, to engage the question of whether animals could act. I track this series of essays, which not only break down the human-animal diad but also ask the (I think wonderful) question of where performance sits in this more general question of what makes us human.

Abstract

by Shun Kiang, Stetson University

What Bagheera the black panther says to Mowgli, “‘Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle’”—prior to their attack on the village that has held captive the man and wife for showing kindness and giving shelter to the “Devil-child” in the chapter “Letting in the Jungle”—is representative of an impasse that has confounded the affective relationships between Mowgli, the Free People, Bagheera the panther, and Baloo the bear. Throughout the two Jungle Books, the impulse to pin Mowgli’s identity as a human or animal is constant, and this obsession to categorize a life’s proper sphere of existence and affiliation is the cause of Mowgli’s subsequent distancing from both animal and human communities, to both of which he possesses the language and cultural knowledge to belong.

In my paper, I look at Mowgli’s physical distancing away from animal and human communities as an attempt to render intact his affective ties to both realms. Imagining these communities as part of an ecological interconnectedness, which the animal and human characters fail or refuse to see, Mowgli, I argue, becomes a mediating figure that seeks to patch over ontological fissures that preempt the condition of possibilities for animal-human coexistence. Akin to what Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter refers to as “an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes,” or as “[a]ssemblages . . . that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (20-24), the kind of thinking and affective gestures that Mowgli displays throughout The Jungle Books is, as my paper will make explicit, the will of a subject—who sees himself also as an inter-subject—to finding a space therein animals and humans are not distinct but part of a larger livingness rooted in the experiential and relational, not the epistemological and self-containing.

Abstract

by Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I examine Victorian critic and natural historian G.H. Lewes’s contention that science promotes greater intimacy between humans and animals; through readings of his essays in Sea-Side Studies and Studies of Animal Life, I seek to illuminate the often paradoxical Victorian quest for complete knowledge of the world and its people. Lewes argues passionately that all forms of life, animal and human, are intimate, interdependent, and in sympathy with each other: “the Life that stirs within us stirs within them. … The scales fall from our eyes when we think of this … and we learn to look at Nature with a more intimate and personal love” (Animal 47). But as Richard Menke has recently noted, Lewes was also a career-long defender of vivisection; indeed, dissection and vivisection were his primary methods for attaining intimate understanding of animals. He frequently argued that though animals under vivisection appeared to be in agony, such pain was impossible in such low creatures. He contended that our feelings for these animals are the product of misdirected sympathy, citing the widely-held Victorian belief that less “developed and refined organism[s]” had less “sensitivity to pain, from fish and reptiles, to the lower mammals, to ‘savages,’ to the civilized” (Menke “Fiction as Vivisection” 626). I focus on the following often-overlooked tension in Lewes’s essays on natural history: his passionate advocacy of scientific study (vivisection included) as a means to greater intimacy between humans and animals depends upon the denial of animals’ capacity for suffering. My readings offer insight into the contradictory Victorian frame of mind, wherein different classes of people and animals are considered to be intimately interdependent and, simultaneously, isolated from each other upon the evolutionary hierarchy.

Abstract

by Elisha Cohn, Cornell University

It was not uncommon in the 1840s for magazines (like Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal) and novels to feature edifyingly tales of “animal sagacity,” and animal wisdom remained a complex resource for fiction throughout the nineteenth century. But what does it mean to valorize animal morality? I focus on Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854), arguing that Dickens uses analogies that unfavorably compare human society to animal sociability to—quite surprisingly—establish the centrality of a capacity for representation to a definition of the person. However, he imagines this capacity as inarticulate, instinctive, and tacit, diminishing the force of verbal critique of the social order. Dickens uses the model of animal morality because it is never allowed to become fully explicit. Dickens’s novel finds personhood best expressed by the inarticulable, even while a capacity for representation remains the governing framework by which persons matter politically.

Modes of communication attributed to dogs—languagelike but silent, intuitive yet rational, individualistic yet collective—capture the paradox of political representation for Dickens. The novel’s resistance to an overly rationalized social order comes to culmination in the sociability of dogs—telling the story of how the circus dog Merrylegs found his way back by “speaking” with a national network of other dogs. As the circus-master Sleary puts it, describing this surprising feat to the defeated utilitarian Gradgrind, society should privilege an unnamed set of values as difficult to account for as the “wayth of the dog.” His admiration for “the ways of the dog” sketches an importantly tacit account of political representation that remains ambivalent about the value of the explicitness and dialogue even though the story itself depends upon these values.