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.
