Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Minor Creatures is an important and original study that reinterprets the Victorian realist novel as it intersects with both fictional and historical animals. As Ivan Kreilkamp argues: “One of my claims is that, in the Victorian period, the three major normative categories of the human, the home, and the novel are all conceptualized in relation to an animal existence that is at once marginal or excluded but symbolically central and always a shaping influence” (1–2). In order to write this groundbreaking book, Kreilkamp has immersed himself not only in the voluminous interdisciplinary discourses of Victorian and animal studies but also in heterogeneous critical theory (in which Jacques Derrida's late work is preeminent) and philosophy both ancient and modern. He explicitly states that “one of this book's goals is to bring to the evolving field of literary animal studies a sharper attention than is typical within this approach to questions of literary form” (2). He generously acknowledges the scholarship in literary animal studies that underlies his own work, including essays in Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (2007); Monica Flegel's Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015); and Keridiana Chez's Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (2017). Kreilkamp is entering a burgeoning and rapidly evolving discourse on animals and literature in which his own previous articles and chapters have played a significant role. Indeed, the same month that Kreilkamp's book was published (November 2018), Cambridge University Press brought out the collection Animals, Animality, and Literature in their Critical Concepts series.Minor Creatures's purview is capacious. Kreilkamp's study centers upon canonical texts ranging through novels by all three Brontë sisters (Emily's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and Anne's Agnes Grey); Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Great Expectations; George Eliot's Middlemarch; Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (with passages from Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure); Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Priory School” and novel The Hound of the Baskervilles; and Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm. In each chapter, Kreilkamp provides biographical detail about the writer's involvement with animals as well as nineteenth-century history of animal welfare reform, from Martin's Act in 1822 through the founding of the SPCA in 1824 to the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act and the antivivisectionist agitation that crested in the 1870s and 1880s.The chapter “Petted Things: Cruelty and Sympathy in the Brontës,” had its genesis in Kreilkamp's influential 2005 Yale Review essay on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. A good deal of work has now been done on the animal-loving Brontës. Most notably, in addition to Lisa Surridge's “Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights,” which Kreilkamp cites at length, there are a number of works by Brontë scholars that are not cited, chief among them Stevie Davies's germinal chapter “Emily Brontë and the Animals” in Emily Brontë: Heretic (1994) and Maggie Berg's 2002 Studies in the Novel and 2010 Literature Interpretation Theory essays on animal suffering and male violence in Anne Brontë's novels. However, what distinguishes Kreilkamp's work is its original focus on the Brontës' fictionalizing imaginations in relation to envisioning and responding to animal suffering: “The Brontës, I will suggest, understood the creative process by which an author invests a fictional character with life as one fundamentally related to the imaginative act by which a human being grants ethical status to an animal” (38). Kreilkamp explicitly connects early nineteenth-century struggles on behalf of animal welfare (including early antivivisectionist writings) to the Brontës' influential novelistic innovations and cites their fictional creations as deeply influencing the shape and structures of the Victorian novel: “It was therefore through the Brontës' drawing on the discourse of animal suffering and of cruelty to animals, I argue, that Victorian narrative and characterization developed some of their signature techniques and tropes” (38).Kreilkamp's argument centers around this sympathetic response to animal suffering and the necessary marginality of animal characters not only in relation to the Victorian novel's human protagonists but also in relation to the novel's readers: “To be a literate middle-class Englishperson by midcentury was to develop one's sensibility and sympathy through the vicarious experience of reading narratives of animal suffering, which allow the reader to stake a claim to his or her own humanity” (49). In the long section of this chapter titled “Creature Heathcliff,” Kreilkamp launches a brilliant discussion about the animalization of Heathcliff, a subject he introduced in his Yale Review essay in 2005 and that was expanded upon by Stevie Davies in Emily Brontë: Heretic and by me in the edited collection Victorian Animal Dreams. Kreilkamp's arresting and original focus is on Heathcliff not as an othered foreigner alien to the domestic space but rather as the family pet, the dog as suffering animal, a position that evokes sympathy. But Kreilkamp also interprets Heathcliff as enacting the abuses of the human vivisectors and abusers of animals, particularly dogs. This analysis is prefaced by the familiar (and perhaps apocryphal or exaggerated) story about Emily Brontë and her bull mastiff Keeper that Elizabeth Gaskell tells in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in which Emily both savagely beats and tenderly nurses her beloved animal companion.The chapter “Dying like a Dog in Dickens” is a wonderful exegesis of Dickens's immensely complicated response to animals as pets on one end of the spectrum and as meat on the other. Kreilkamp stresses Dickens's anxiety about “the tendency of life toward voracious consumption,” an anxiety that compels Dickens to focus on bodily decomposition and the instability or state of “questionable or precarious humanness” that accompanies the human recognition of and intimacy with other animal life. Kreilkamp comments on the migratory, disheveled Peepy Jellyby and the vampirish lawyer Vholes as a “self-scalping cannibal” as well as on Jo the crossing sweeper as “very, very like” (Dickens's own words) the drover's dog. The brilliance of the chapter for me lies in the marvelous discussion of the precarity of human identity in Great Expectations, “the anxieties of dehumanization and the fear of animalization. . . . [I]n Dickens's novel, the possibility or threat of being seen or treated as a dog bears a strong correlation to an anxiety about being forgotten” (76–77). This anxiety is also a narrative one, since “animals generally lie on the wrong side of a division separating those ephemeral beings who will be forgotten and whose stories are brief from those entitled to continued life, development, and full-fledged narrative treatment” (77). Kreilkamp's analysis of Orlick's threats and near murder of Pip—threatening to annihilate his body so that no one will know the story of what happened to him—centers upon the loss this would entail of the animal/human distinction “that signals a terrifying threat: of a loss of identity, language, narration, memory” (87). The crucial question Kreilkamp asks in this awareness that defines “a set of ethical challenges” is: “Can one welcome the animal into human space?” (87).From the distinguished chapter on Dickens, Kreilkamp goes on to interpret Middlemarch as informed by Eliot's partner G. H. Lewes's 1859 scientific treatise Sea-Side Studies. Emphasizing the definition of the “formally robust character” as “always defined in relation to the weaker minor character,” Kreilkamp crucially proposes that the refusal to devour is an ethical stance, relating it to Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke and other “ethically admirable” characters in Eliot's magisterial, Darwin-influenced novel. Kreilkamp analyzes this ethical stance as a part of “pastoral care”: “Every living being potentially maintains a pastoral relation to other creatures, overseeing their lives and determining which to permit to live” (94). Through this lens, Kreilkamp looks at Dorothea's forbearance in a marital argument to the “weak animal” Casaubon, citing the narrator's representation of Dorothea's state of mind as “something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature” (99). In contrast to Dorothea's refusal to devour, Kreilkamp considers Bulstrode's terrible ethical lapse in allowing the “creaturely” (104) Raffles—who knows damning secrets about the respectable, wealthy Bulstrode's criminal past—to die from mistreatment Bulstrode could have forestalled. Finally, Kreilkamp ponders the complicity and acquiescence of both author and novel reader in this process: “Eliot herself seems fascinated by the way fictional narrative itself functions as a godlike force that wields biopower, defines the limits of the living and the nonliving, and in effect assumes responsibility for the creatures it represents” (105–6). Since I heard the lecture that was the embryo of this chapter several years ago, I never teach Middlemarch without citing Kreilkamp's work.In the next chapter of Minor Characters, Kreilkamp considers Hardy, the first of the novelists considered who “took an active interest in the animal welfare movement” (109), and how his animal activism and domestic intimacy with animals influence his novels. There are wonderful anecdotes here of Hardy having to walk in his socks for the first three weeks of their kittens' existence, the cats having aerial boardwalks, and the terrier mix Wessex eating off the table even when distinguished guests were present. Hardy and both his first wife Emma and second wife Florence created “an ideal, even utopian space for animals defined by its safety, consideration, softness, and protection from the damaging forces of modernity” (115). Kreilkamp argues that Hardy's egalitarian respect for animal lives is reflected in his fiction. Citing the famous scene of Tess breaking the suffering pheasants' necks, Kreilkamp ponders: “We might even say that Hardy was the first major English author to be fully willing to try to listen to ‘the squirrel's heart beat’, in Eliot's image, to dare to confront ‘that roar which lies on the other side of silence’ by offering sympathy and respect for animals beyond a few select pets” (111). Hardy tries to “decenter the human and to find new ways to represent and acknowledge animal consciousness, agency, and being” in an effort to “animalize the novel” (116). Through trenchant explications—of the scene of Jude in the cornfield, identifying with the hungry crows; of pregnant Fanny Robin in “On Casterbridge Highway” in Far From the Madding Crowd, being helped by the loving dog who serves as prosthesis as she drags herself to the Union to give birth; and of Gabriel Oak in relation to pastoral care in Madding Crowd—Kreilkamp argues his thesis that Hardy is challenging the boundaries of animal/human relations in his fiction. As he concludes, “Hardy explores the possibilities for recognizing nonhuman animals—sheep and dogs—within the character space of the realist novel” (132). My only quibble with this remarkable chapter is that Kreilkamp might have cited Anna West's accomplished Thomas Hardy and Animals (Cambridge 2017), which has a long discussion of Fanny on Casterbridge Highway—although Kreilkamp's book might indeed have been in press when West's book was published.In the final chapters of Minor Characters, Kreilkamp first traces language through animal signifiers (tracks, pawprints, footprints) and animal articulations (the Hound's cry) in Hardy's novels and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction. This chapter provides new material on the attempts of these late-century Victorian writers to represent animal language. Kreilkamp gives short shrift to animal subjectivity narratives such as Black Beauty as he defines his argument, although there are a number of scholars who have written on this enormously influential text in the wake of Kirsten Guest's and Adrienne Gavin's fairly recent editions. The absence of Steven Wise's Nonhuman Animal Project and the legal struggles for animal personhood among all of Kreilkamp's theoretical and literary contexts in his wide-ranging discussion of “persons” and “personhood” from Darwin through the wonderful final discussion of South African feminist writer Olive Schreiner might also be noted. After Hardy, Kreilkamp views Schreiner as the “second later-Victorian novelist who sought to move beyond some of the anthropocentric strictures of the Victorian novel—to push the limits of how animal life, consciousness, or personhood might be represented in fiction” (148). In an expansive essay that is informed by Derrida's late work on posthumanist ethics as well as by the focus on “an ethics and aesthetics of renunciation and passivity” (152) in Anne-Lise François's Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience, Kreilkamp argues that Schreiner's Story of an African Farm is not simply a bleak naturalist novel but can be viewed as “containing more affirmative implications” (153). Of the end of the novel, an “[anti]-bildungsroman” (178), Kreilkamp writes about the chickens climbing on Waldo's dead body: “Perhaps Waldo even attains the wisdom of the chickens, the nonhuman wisdom of empty-handed desistance that Schreiner associates with the possibility of an ‘infinite compassion’—and of a novel form that might make room for the nonhuman without fully incorporating or domesticating it” (179).Kreilkamp is compelled ultimately to admit that “realist fiction's commitment to discursive character, to the English language, and to print means that nonhuman life ultimately remains to some degree marginalized and minor within it” (180). Yet all readers of Victorian novels will be deeply grateful that Kreilkamp has written this wonderful book tracing the attempts to broaden novelistic form beyond the anthropocentric. Although he returns to Eliot's lines about listening “to the squirrel's heart beat” several times, it is with another line from Middlemarch that I will conclude this review: Kreilkamp has “widened the skirts of light . . . making the struggle with darkness narrower” (367) in asking us to consider the significance of animals in relation to the Victorian novel.