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

Abstract

 Reviews church as an entire monastic complex, of which his readers would effectively be co-creators. Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance, the outgrowth of a doctoral thesis, is a highly specialized monograph and unlikely to find an audience beyond serious Wordsworthian scholars. Whether, even within that bounded constituency, it will succeed in rousing interest in poems such as e Tu of Primroses must be open to question, but it offers a lucid, richly detailed, and unusual perspective on religious dimensions of the mature Wordsworth—an establishment figure who is, thanks to enthusiasts like Fay, gradually coming in from the cold. U   W  E R J Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. By I K. (Animal Lives) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . vii+ pp. $. ISBN ––––. Ivan Kreilkamp’s monograph offers a powerful retelling of the realist novel’s development . Extending Alex Woloch’s idea of minorness, Kreilkamp argues that ‘minor, ephemeral, [and] precarious’ animals are symbolically central to the Victorian novel (p. ). Demonstrating how the construction of animality determined who could be included, loved, and petted and who could be excluded, beaten, and eaten, Kreilkamp argues that the Victorian novel not only worked to differentiate humanity from animality, but also protagonicity from minorness. With chapters covering the Victorian century, Minor Creatures tracks the rise of the realist novel, the development of naturalism, and the move to early modernism, showing how these later novelists moved beyond sympathetic treatment of animality to cultivate ideas of animal agency. In a major revision to theories of literary sympathy, ‘Petted ings: Cruelty and Sympathy in the Brontës’ argues that scenes of animal suffering work to construct readerly subjectivity, sentimental domesticity, and middle-class humanity— narrative and characterization techniques that became signatures of the Victorian novel. Placing scenes of cruelty to animals in Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights in relation to the rise of animal welfare and anti-vivisection movements of the s, Kreilkamp argues that the Brontës’ novels operate through ‘a logic of cruelty and sympathetic witness’ that ultimately produces readerly ‘somatic suffering—and witnessing—that is at once sympathetic and sensational’ (p. ). Turning from animal suffering to animal dismemberment, Chapter  argues that Dickens’s interest in the brutalities of slaughterhouses—where animals exist as deindividuated processed meat—challenges the idea of individual protagonicity. Kreilkamp argues that in Bleak House and Great Expectations the decomposed animal poses an existential threat to characterological duration, intimating the possibility of dying dismembered and unremembered. While this reading ignores the possibility of Dickens’s pleasure in breaking down human/animal boundaries, per the ‘attraction of repulsion’, Kreilkamp presents a vivid picture of Dickensian MLR, .,   characterization as beset by an anxious humanism that is fearful of slipping into animal precarity. Expanding the book’s analysis of creaturely life to embrace animal and plant species, ‘Middlemarch’s Brute Life’ provides a rich analysis of the ethics of caring for abjected, precarious, and parasitic life. Connecting biological incorporation to matrimonial absorption, Kreilkamp argues that, in Middlemarch, marriage’s ‘transindividual’ processes pose important questions for the ethics of biopower (p. ). Building upon the idea that granting ethical status to an animal is akin to investing life in a fictional character (introduced in Chapter ), Kreilkamp ultimately argues that Eliot’s authorial power gives her a ‘godlike force that wields biopower’ over her characters and her readers (p. ). Marking a turning point in Minor Creatures, Chapter  argues that the marginalized animal undergoes a transformation in omas Hardy’s novels: ‘it begins to seem more possible for the animal to attain some degree of personhood or characterization ’ (p. ). While Hardy attempts to ‘animalize the novel’, Kreilkamp argues that realism limits representations of animal personhood (p. ). Analysing Far From the Madding Crowd’s pastoral conventions, Kreilkamp reveals the ‘sacri ficial, carnivorous logic’ of the pastoral relationship, where every flock ‘ends in mutton’ (pp. , ). Hence, Kreilkamp concludes that Hardy’s abandonment of the novel was motivated by his realization of its ‘intransigent human-centeredness’, which contained ‘a species-specific logic that could not ultimately be dislodged’ (p. ). Taking up another facet of human-centred logic—the long-standing idea that lack of language prevents animals from...