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 Jayne Hildebrand KREILKAMP, IVAN. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 240 pp. $30.00 paper; $90.00 cloth; $30.00 e-book. How would our understanding of the Victorian realist novel change if we shifted our attention away from its human plots, and focused instead on the animal life that crowds its pages? This is the question that Ivan Kreilkamp takes on in his compelling new book, Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. [End Page 464] While Victorianist scholars have long explored how the emergence of Darwinism complicated Victorian distinctions between humans and other animals, the “other animals” in this formulation have almost always been implicitly wild ones, imagined as external to human culture. By taking the domestic animal as his primary object of investigation, Kreilkamp brings the Victorian animal home, showing how pets became essential to nineteenth-century conceptions of domesticity, sympathy, and personhood. Although the realist novel can never grant full subjectivity to the animal, he argues, it nevertheless requires the animal’s presence, because “the love of domestic animals had become fundamental to the conception of the Victorian home, family, and perhaps even the very human self” (16). Minor Creatures persuasively and elegantly demonstrates not just that the Victorian novel teems with overlooked animal life, but that Victorian realism constitutively requires the figure of the animal, even as it inevitably marginalizes it. The introductory first chapter articulates the book’s methodology, which Kreilkamp describes as an effort “to read Victorian novels non- (or at least less) anthropocentrically” (14). Reading non-anthropocentrically does not mean denying the anthropocentrism of Victorian realism, but rather acknowledging it and striving “to consider the genre’s normative partial exclusion or marginalization of the animal not simply as a given but as crucial to the form” (14). Kreilkamp thus positions his book as a vital addition to a welcome recent strain of Victorianist posthumanist scholarship that brings to the subfield a deeper focus on literary form. Kreilkamp’s argument is richly conversant with theorists of animal ethics and biopolitics, including Derrida, Agamben, and Foucault, and his analysis is deepened throughout with meticulous historical and biographical research. But what particularly distinguishes this book’s critical contribution is the way Kreilkamp puts animal studies in conversation with novelistic form, showing how attending to fictional animals sharpens our understanding of how fictional form manages its readers’ emotional and ethical investments. Kreilkamp’s second chapter turns to the novels of the Brontës to demonstrate how the figure of the domesticated animal is formally indispensable to the processes of affective and ethical investment that distinguish the Victorian realist novel. Ranging across several of the Brontës’ novels, he argues that the Brontës “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 stature to the animal” (37–38). Processes of characterization, including the processes by which some characters are marked out as more humane or sympathetic than others, take place against and through the figure of the animal. Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights both stage scenes of animal cruelty that test their characters’ capacity for sympathy, and elicit sympathy from the reader. Human characters are also developed through processes of animal analogy, as in the case of Heathcliff, who “becomes an analog for the lost pet” (57) within the Earnshaw household and who, like a pet, is simultaneously individualized and objectified. Ultimately, the literal and metaphorical presence of animals in the Brontës’ fiction shows how “readerly subjectivity, sentimental domestication, and middle-class humanity are defined according to a logic of cruelty and sympathetic witness that requires a suffering creature” (67). In his third and fourth chapters, Kreilkamp further develops his argument about animals’ constitutive marginalization within Victorian realism through readings of novels by Dickens and Eliot. Character in the realist novel is defined by longevity, by the protagonist’s ability to persist in time and memory in a way that sustains extended narrative, yet this persistence is a privilege that animals possess...