Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel by Ivan Kreilkamp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel by Ivan Kreilkamp Sheldon Goldfarb (bio) Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel by Ivan Kreilkamp; pp. 219. U of Chicago P, 2018. $30 paper. Protagonicity—there's a word. Something I learned from this book and meaning "the capacity to become a protagonist," which animals lack, but which human beings have. So, as Ivan Kreilkamp argues, though there are more and more animals in the novels of the nineteenth century, they tend to stay on the margins and don't become full-fledged characters, unless they're in a fantasy novel or a children's book like Black Beauty, a novel Kreilkamp declines to discuss, which is a shame in a way, but he sticks to realistic novels and tries to see how far they can move from anthropocentrism, how far they can move the animals from the margins. Black Beauty, by the way, he finds anthropocentric because it presents a horse who can speak if not English then a language readily translated into English. Kreilkamp is more interested in realistic, mute animals from Wuthering Heights through Great Expectations and Middlemarch to the writings of Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner, looking for ways these animals communicate despite [End Page 163] their muteness, looking at human-animal interactions, and suggesting that the distinction between human and animal is an important one to look at, as important as the trinity of gender, race, and class, a perhaps heretical notion, but drawing on the development of post-humanist theory and literary animal studies over the past decade and referring to theorists from Darwin to Derrida. This is very much a theoretical book. The point is to develop notions about human-animal interaction, and although Kreilkamp refers to specific novels, he keeps sliding away into some interesting discussions of nineteenth-century history and theoretical distinctions between animals and humans, pets and other animals, individuation and collectivities, and so on. His views on individuation are interesting; at first, in the earlier Victorian novels, it seems a good thing. If you are individuated, given a name, and petted, you are less likely to end up as a piece of meat, a concern not only for actual animals but for characters like Pip, who fears annihilation and being forgotten like some anonymous member of the herd. It is to push back against this possibility that Pip tells his story of "memory, atonement, and forgiveness" (86)—an interesting formulation of Kreilkamp's that might have taken him into the heart of Dickens's project in Great Expectations, but instead he keeps resolutely to his focus on animals and tracing the growing compassion for animals that increases in the Victorian era and in his view is connected to the rise of Victorian domesticity (the family and the home) and to the rise of the novel itself. (What would Ian Watt say?) In the second half of the book, Kreilkamp wanders into the tale of Thomas Hardy's strange experimental household, in which the cats received special privileges and even a nasty dog was defended—unlike Dickens's nasty dog, Sultan, which Dickens shot after Sultan attacked a little girl. And the odd thing is that Kreilkamp seems on Hardy's side and against Dickens, against the power of human beings, in favour of trans-species communication and co-operation, finally culminating in a celebration of Olive Schreiner and the attempt in her Story of an African Farm (1883) to have humans and animals connect in a non-dominant, mutually supportive way in which the collectivity becomes more important than the individual. So, whereas in the earlier novels it seems important to be an individual to preserve one's very being, by Schreiner's time and by the end of Kreilkamp's book, being part of the herd seems better. Better to be an altruistic meerkat than a predatory lion, because the altruistic meerkats have a better chance of survival, supposedly (though I wonder what Darwin would say). It is in the last chapter of his book that Kreilkamp goes in for some extended close reading of Schreiner's African Farm. In the earlier chapters, concerning novels...