Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
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Aristotelian tradition. Most famously, Descartes inherits the notion of the rational soul, which he transforms into the cogito through the process of inner-directed skepticism described above. As is well known, this process accords with Descartes's Thomist Catholicism, which regards the immortal soul as an exclusively human property;10 in this respect, Cartesian philosophy may be understood as an effort to resolve the inconsistencies in Aristotle's theory of animals while also preserving the species barrier. The Darwinian tradition, although less directly indebted to Aristotle, nonetheless insists on a notion of relationally across the species barrier—what Gary Steiner calls “a continuum between human beings and animals”—that conflicts with the insistence on difference in kind.
The model of literary character explored in the following chapters derives expressly from Aristotle's notion of the interspecies continuum, as this is manifested in his zoological treatises and remains implicit in the ethical work of his successor Theophrastus. This latter work helps convey the term “character” into English as a word for the fictional persons created by writers, but even before the term becomes thus established, the sense of character that underwrites it is available for literary exploration. This sense of character openly creates a space for the interaction of human and nonhuman species. Aristotle describes the latter as generating “imitations of human life” (mime-mata…taes anthropinaes zoaes) [3:251; 612b19–20]), but it takes little effort to imagine this mimetic impulse as reversing course, in which case nonhuman animals put pressure on the development of human personality as well. Indeed, this is just how Theophrastus presents the figures in his Characters: for instance, the boor “stands in rapt attention at the sight of a cow, an ass, or a goat” (4.8); the obsequious man “is apt to keep a pet monkey” (5.9); the garrulous man “appear[s] to chatter more than the swallows” (7.7). Here, too, lies one arguable reason for the preoccupation of Enlightenment authors with creating singular human personalities in their work: earlier notions of literary personhood take species mixing for granted, developing in a dynamic and indefinite space for which Leviticus reserves the special name of “confusion” (Leviticus 18.23). Under the circumstances some clarification might seem in order.
The Immediate Field of Study
Starting with the model of pre-Cartesian literary character delineated above, the rest of this book is devoted to a series of what might be called brief literary biographies—if we accept that the subjects of these minibiographies are nonhuman rather than human and that they are the creations, rather than the creators, of literature. In terms of genre choice, distant antecedents here thus include Theophrastus, Pliny, the bestiarists, and (in a different way) Plutarch, Aubrey, Hall, and Sir Thomas Overbury. The main literary evidence on which I base my character portraits comes from European works produced between 1400 and 1700. Given my own training, it is inevitable (if perhaps regrettable) that English-language materials should take up the lion's share of the bibliography. However, I also discuss selected relevant works from France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and the Holy Roman Empire.
In keeping with the Aristotelian-Theophrastan tradition, these character portraits focus on broad groups rather than singular beings; in other words, they presume that character exists primarily as an instrument of class taxonomy rather than as a mode of individuation. Particular traits help to define broad affinities, and these, in turn, do not simply distinguish one species or genus of animal from another; they also trace modes of similitude and affiliation between different species and genera. As a result, each of the animals studied in the following chapters displays particular qualities that find a complement of sorts in human behavior and human social groupings. Given early modern European culture's well-attested fixation on issues of religious practice and social rank, it should come as no surprise that the animals studied here all interact with these variables in especially suggestive ways.
As for the particular species of animal I have chosen for study, I have chosen these in part because they represent each of the three principal uses to which early modern Europeans put the beasts in their lives: haulage, companionship, and food. For the latter two of these categories, two chapters apiece are devoted to beasts with high and low social associations, respectively. In the first case, that of haulage, a single, exceptionally lengthy chapter focuses on the horse. This seems appropriate given that horses assume such preeminent material and symbolic importance in early modern culture, given that different breeds of horses acquire very different rank-specific associations during the period from 1400 to 1700, and also—most important—given that the precise nature of the horse's elite social significance undergoes an important shift during the same period.
The unmanageable breadth of equestrian reference in early modern European literature also prompts me to pursue a limited authorial focus in these two opening chapters. Rather than seeking to produce a thick description of horses in European culture from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries—a topic worthy of many volumes—I have attempted a reading of equine character as manifest in the works of the period's principal writers of continental romance—Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso—and its influence on the two dominant English authors of the same age: Shakespeare and Milton. One could portray the resulting story, in its English dimension at least, as a contrast between secular and sacred idioms, or between Tory and Whig politics. For his part, Shakespeare invokes equine character in ways that recall the horse's traditional chivalric associations, while also registering the English gentry's incipient transformation from a warrior class to a leisure class. What emerges is a conflicted vision of horse character: one drawn nostalgically to conventional models of equestrian heroism while also recognizing the limitations of these models in an era of courtly display and administrative intrigue. As for Shakespeare's dramatic representatives of this new era, they figure either in the comic mode, as effete ninnies, or in the tragic mode, as figures out of step with the world of sixteenth-century courtiership and the Machiavellian political theory that underwrites it.
Milton, by contrast, seems to feel no nostalgia at all for the age of knight-errantry. His epic references to chivalric lore and classical horse culture are extraordinarily consistent, reflecting a wholesale rejection of the martial values endemic to traditional heroic verse. However, if Milton turns his back on the age of classical and medieval equestrian exploit, he also turns inward, to a spiritual realm that serves as a prior and superior model for the debased heroism of the classical epic tradition. Here, in the heaven of Paradise Lost (1667), one encounters another sort of steed entirely: fiery angelic coursers through which the Father's transcendent power manifests itself in something like animal form. This reconstitution of the equine within the field of the spiritual marks a particularly fascinating moment in the history of literary character and its accommodations to the nonhuman.
If the western world's most important species of animal transportation, the horse, undergoes a change of character between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the same is also true of certain key species of companion animal. Dating as it does to ancient times, the practice of pet keeping is by no means an early modern innovation; however, the early modern period witnesses an explosion in both the number of animals and the range of different animal species kept as pets. Likewise, the nature and intensity of human intimacy with companion animals seems to undergo a transformation during the same period. In England, as Keith Thomas has remarked, “it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that pets seemed to have really established themselves as a normal feature of the middle-class household” (Man 110); indeed, the noun “pet,” as a referent for companion animals, first enters English usage in the early 1500s.11 In the growth of pet culture, as in other ways, English practice lags a bit behind that of the Mediterranean nations, where household animals and private menageries begin their proliferation about a century earlier.
When it comes to the pets of distinguished individuals, I focus on an order of birds I have had occasion to write about before and which leaves a far less extensive trail of documentary evidence in the early modern period than do horses: the order Psittaciformes, consisting of parrots and cockatoos. Here I trace the emergence of parrots as conventional figures of mindless mimicry in European satire and comedy. As it happens, this familiar model of animal character evolves directly from the association of exotic birds with the sacred and secular Catholic nobility of the late Quattrocento. As the Reformation gains head in early sixteenth-century Europe, its exponents increasingly employ these birds—which initially served