Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
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focus on inner being, privileging unseen mental processes as these are relayed through literary conventions such as free indirect discourse, comprises a mainstay of recent character theory, and as the foregoing examples illustrate, it is usually regarded as arising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. Katharine Eisaman Maus, on the other hand, argues for a model of the inner-directed character that predates the Enlightenment and that privileges the drama. For Maus, 1980s-era critics “who…claimed that the Renaissance lacked a conception of inwardness” had it wrong (32); on the contrary, “in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century England the sense of discrepancy between ‘inward disposition’ and ‘outward appearance’ seems unusually urgent and consequential for a large number of people” (13). As I hope is already clear, neither Maus's position nor the more conventional one presents any particular problem for the present study. On the contrary, I have no interest in denying an inner life to citizens of pre-Enlightenment Europe, and my own reading of late Renaissance culture as marked by a crisis of species distinctions bears some broad resemblance to Maus's view that the period was subject to ongoing “crises of authenticity” (Maus 32). For Maus, the disjunction between inner life and outer life serves as the source of these crises; in my judgment, it comes closer to supplying the solution. That is to say, discrepancies between the inner self and its outward manifestations become increasingly representative of human experience, in proportion as an inner self is denied to nonhuman experience. With interiority or its lack thus fore grounded as the prime determinant of human identity, the stage is set for the introspective, self-absorbed characters of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment fiction.
While expressing interest in the interior function of literary character, scholars have also remained mindful of the Aristotelian commitment to character as a delineation of general “ethical types” (Lynch 39). For instance, Deidre Shauna Lynch has recalled the persistence of the Theophrastan character study into eighteenth-century literature (39–55), while noting that the Aristotelian system for “thinking about typicality as such” existed in tension with the impulse to endow characters with “individuated, psychological meanings” (9). Distinguishing between the mimetic, synthetic, and thematic functions of character—that is, character's simultaneous impulse to reproduce living beings, to fabricate nonexistent beings, and to delineate exemplary figures—James Phelan has likewise acknowledged that “the distinction between the mimetic and thematic components of character is a distinction between characters as individuals and characters as representative entities” (13). Most recently Elizabeth Fowler has opted for a model of character as “social persons” or “sets of personae” (2) that seem particularly indebted to the Aristotelian tradition: “abstract figurations” such as “alewife, merchant, and buyer,…Moor, Scythian, and Briton” or “senex amans, author, and allegorical personification” (16–17). While I agree with Phelan that character as individuation—the mimetic function—and character as ethical or social type—the thematic function—may and often do coexist in literary character depiction, I adopt a fairly conventional view of the history of literary character as marked by a gradual impulse to privilege the former over the latter, an impulse that gains unprecedented strength in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Concurrent with their focus on interiority and typicality, recent theorists of literary character exhibit one other trait worth mentioning at the outset of this book: they usually—and most of the time quite casually—assume that characters are by their very nature human. Martin Price ends the first paragraph of his book on character by defining the term as “the spectrum of attitudes and feelings we loosely call human” (xi). Dorrit Cohn speaks of character as “revealing the hidden side of the human beings who inhabit” a fictional world (5). More suspicious of the humanist project than these authors, Deidre Lynch still ties eighteenth-century character writing to the project of “anthologiz[ing] and…sum[ming] up human nature” (55). Elizabeth Fowler's study Literary Character is subtitled The Human Figure in Early English Writing. The common assumption here is obvious enough, and on the surface it seems reasonable enough as well: literary character is an imitation of the human that tells us something about what it means to be human.
However, as James Phelan observes with particular acuity, there are “messy problems” underlying any such assumption: “[A]11 this talk about characters as plausible or possible persons presupposes that we know what a person is. But the nature of the human subject is of course a highly contested issue among contemporary thinkers…. [To explore this issue properly would] require lengthy excursions into biological, philosophical, psychological, sociological, and economic territories” (II). The present study addresses this issue from one limited perspective: the perspective of animal studies that questions how well the human may be understood as a category qualitatively distinct from non human animal life . To that end, it is worth returning briefly to Elizabeth Fowler's sense of characters as social persons, for Fowler is operating in the same chronological and conceptual universe to be explored in the following chapters: the Aristotelian and pre-Cartesian universe, in which character functions primarily as a categorization of types. One thing to note about the type categories Fowler invokes is that some of them—for instance, “allegorical personification,” or, as Foucault has shown, the “author” (Fowler 17)—can be called “human” only in the most capacious and indeed figurative sense of the term, whereas others—for instance, “Scythian” and “Briton”—are geographical or racial designations that extend just as properly to kinds of nonhuman animals (Scythian horses, British bulldogs) as they do to kinds of people.
This is not a frivolous objection. Fowler offers us a sophisticated way “to make sense of pre-modern ideas of person” (249), and her system for doing so is grounded on commonly recognized social types: figures of kinship, civic entities, economic agents, legal entities, and so forth. However, premodern society admits nonhuman animals into these categories on a regular basis, in ways that modern or postmodern analysis has trouble accommodating. When it comes to kinship, the term “family” originates in Roman legal thinking as a means of classifying property, including livestock,12 and as late as the 1800s at least one English writer could still call the pig “an important member of the family” (quoted in Harrison 63). As mascots, commodities, and emblems, animals were indissolubly associated with civic and economic life. On the legal level, “[d]omestic beasts were often treated as morally responsible” (Thomas, Man 97), with the result that they—and wild animals as well—were notoriously liable to prosecution and punishment in European courts of law.13 As Keith Thomas has observed, “In the towns of the early modern period, animals were everywhere…. Dwelling in such proximity to men, these animals were often thought of as individuals…. Shepherds knew the faces of their sheep as well as those of their neighbors…. [D]omestic beasts…were…frequently spoken to, for their owners, unlike Cartesian intellectuals, never thought them incapable of understanding” (Man 95–96). To neglect this aspect of early modern life is not only to misunderstand the nature of early modern animals; it is also to misunderstand the nature of early modern personhood.
Of the animal characters studied in the following chapters, some have been endowed by their creators with a semblance of inner life: for instance, Lodovico Ariosto's Baiardo, William Baldwin's Mouse-slayer, John Skelton's Parrot, Jean Lemaire de Belges's Amant Vert, and Tybert from The History of Reynard the Fox. Others, such as the theatrical sheep of Middleton and Shakespeare and The Second Shepherds’ Pageant (c. 1475), seem innocent of in-teriority. In one instance—the “Cherubic shapes” that motivate “The Chariot of Paternal Deitie” in Milton's Paradise Lost (6.753, 750)—we seem to encounter an amalgam of animal and divinity whose consciousness transcends not just the human but species distinction of any sort. In every case, however, we meet with figures that speak to the nature of personhood, that provide models for significant behavior across the species boundary, and that attest in the process to the interrelation of the human and the nonhuman.
In pointing this out, I do not seek to make broad claims for the politically or ethically ameliorative power of this book. I agree with Cary Wolfe that “there is no longer any good reason to take it for granted that the theoretical, ethical, and political question of the subject is automatically coterminous with the species distinction between Homo sapiens and everything else” (1). However, I see no reason to claim that this book therefore helps detach