Royal Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Animals Research Articles

Reviewed by: The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture by Anna Feuerstein Maneesha Deckha (bio) The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture, by Anna Feuerstein; pp. xi + 250. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $80.00 ebook, £75.00. Anna Feuerstein's The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture demonstrates how domesticated animals (working animals and pets, both contested terms) were made into liberal subjects during the Victorian era, and how novels that focused on the everyday lives of Victorians contested the entwined anthropocentric, class-based, and imperial limits of the particular liberal subjectivities assigned to animals. Feuerstein theorizes Victorian animal subjectivity and animal agency through the prism of literature and politics, contributing to Victorian studies, animal studies, and liberal political analysis in doing so. There are six topical chapters spread out over three parts. In the first two chapters, the author analyzes British anti-cruelty legislation in the nineteenth century and the surrounding animal welfare discourse in civil society through Foucauldian theories of governmentality, biopower, and pastoral power. Feuerstein unpacks how politicians and animal welfare organizations advocated against prevailing Lockean views of animals as property for human use, but only through reinforcing prevailing liberal expectations about proper character for humans and animals. She shows how legislative debates and activist literature, particularly the increasingly influential Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) publication Animal World (c. 1869–79), sought to inculcate compassion for animals among the working and middle classes. They did this by emphasizing the pastoral power of the government over animals (expecting humans to care for and be kind toward animals) and animals' desire to submit to human governance and thus abide by liberal dictates about moral character and individualism (animals were presented as content to provide their labor or companionship, asking only to be treated well). Feuerstein identifies the paradoxical nature of such liberal advocacy that challenges animals' political exclusion and individual property rights at the same time [End Page 135] that it shores up the anthropocentric foundation of liberalism. She juxtaposes the liberal, "silent on vegetarianism" (85) position of Animal World with the non-liberal, socialist "animal politics" of the London Vegetarian Society that claimed kinship with animals (90). But it is to Victorian "novels that purport to represent quotidian life" that Feuerstein primarily turns in her remaining four chapters to showcase contestation of liberal ideologies about human-animal relations (9), even as these novels confirm that "liberalism's obsession with cognition and its [governmental] regulation extended to the animal world" (11). In part two, "Democracy, Education, and Alternative Subjectivity," Feuerstein shows how ascending liberal narratives about democracy, education, and civilization directed at middle and lower classes as well as children emphasized kindness to (some) animals. In part three, "The Biopolitics of Animal Capital," Feuerstein highlights the biopolitical management of animals at home (cows and sheep) and abroad in settler colonies (ostriches in South Africa). All four chapters reveal how liberal anthropocentric ideas that denied animals their alterity bolstered ideologies about class, race, and gender. Such ideologies framed human Others as ideal citizens who accepted humanity's dominion over animals but also respected the property and power of the upper classes and consolidated British national identity and imperial sovereignty. In the second half of each chapter, Feuerstein demonstrates how novels challenged the liberal regulation into which animals' lives were inscribed, contributing a critical animal studies angle to the readings that these novels have attracted heretofore. The book shines in these analyses. For example, Feuerstein traces an anti-liberal animal character and alternative subjectivities in Charles Dickens's rendering of minor animal characters in Oliver Twist (1838), Barnaby Rudge (1841), and Hard Times (1854), distilling a radical politics that nuances previous literary discussion of Dickens's investment in shoring up middle-class virtue. Feuerstein notes how Dickens challenges the pastoral power in legislation and RSPCA advocacy through contradicting dominant expectations for animal loyalty and virtuous conduct by ascribing agency and anti-class-hierarchy sensibility to animal characters. Feuerstein thus counters the sentimental and melodramatic classifications in Poor Law literature that Dickens's works otherwise have...

Alice in Wonderland’s Animal Pedagogy: Governmentality and Alternative Subjectivity in Mid-Victorian Liberal Education Anna Feuerstein (bio) Representations of animals and relationships with them have long been a part of liberal discourses and their strategies of social organization and management, especially within the Victorian period. Nineteenth-century debates over the government’s role in regulating the treatment of animals through anti-cruelty legislation, for example, both challenged liberal ideology and embraced its strongest principles. While opponents of this legislation decried the regulation of private property, supporters believed kindness toward animals educated the lower class in bourgeois morality. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), formed in 1824, asked citizens to see mostly domestic animals as feeling and rational, yet constructed them as subjects who internalized an animal-human hierarchy. This mode of imagining animal subjectivity within pastoral power, what Foucault calls a power of care regulating conduct (154), suggests representations of animals were influenced by hegemonic notions of liberal subjectivity.1 Indeed, in the same period that liberal discourse cultivated what Elaine Hadley calls liberal cognition—“a wide range of strikingly formalized mental attitudes . . . such as disinterestedness, objectivity, reticence, conviction, impersonality, and sincerity, all of which carried with them a moral valence” (9)—animal interiority was represented in similar ways. Representations of animals as deserving of human care, for example, reinforce Susan Pearson’s claims that through a discourse of sentimental liberalism, animals were incorporated into the liberal state’s account of their dependence. Animals were thus employed in social reform movements, while representations of them were affected by the strategies of governmentality that Lauren Goodlad posits as central to Victorian liberalism: a set of ideas, discourses, and practices inspired by legislation, social reform movements, and political philosophy, constituting an often-regulatory set of habits.2 Placing animals within this history exposes the contradictions and anthropocentrism of Victorian liberalism and highlights the wide reach of liberal thought as it attempted to bring more subjects into its fold. While there is a large body of work discussing the animal welfare movement, and scholars such as Tess Cosslett, Monica Flegel, Ivan Kreilkamp, and Theresa [End Page 233] Magnum, among others, have analyzed the incorporation of animals into the nineteenth-century British novel, children’s literature, and discourses of the family, Victorianists have yet to place animals more fully in the history of Victorian liberalism and uncover how animals and representations of them were influenced by and challenged Victorian liberalism.3 Doing so invites us to understand governmentality’s opposition to alternative subjectivity and alterity. By alternative subjectivity, I mean a way of thinking beyond liberal cognition, a non-normative subjectivity that attempts to resist the individualizing effects of liberal discourses, especially those perpetuated by pastoral power. Looking at how Victorians envisioned animal subjectivity highlights how liberalism imagined and regulated non-human subjects, adds to the growing body of work concerned with liberal subjectivity, and places Victorian animal studies more firmly within other dominant discourses of the period.4 It also shows how representations of animals had the possibility for disruption; as Colleen Glenny Boggs suggests, animals are “integral to liberalism . . . a structuring force that destabilizes the liberal subject at its core” (9–10). This essay discusses the role of animals in Victorian liberal education alongside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I examine how a pedagogically charged animal subjectivity reflects and challenges the goals of liberal education, particularly as children’s literature develops and changes alongside mid-Victorian liberalism.5 I connect representations of animal subjectivity to mid-Victorian debates about education, democracy, and liberalism’s incorporation of, or resistance to, alternative subjectivities. In the mid-Victorian period, when the widening franchise and expansion of the political sphere were subjects of debate, anxieties concerning education and cultural difference became increasingly prominent. Beginning with John Locke in the late-seventeenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth century, representations of animals were charged with the task of instructing children in liberal norms; animals taught children to negotiate the political and social spheres, and reinforced social, species, and political hierarchies. As Cosslett argues, nineteenth-century talking animal stories often reinforce such hierarchies (2). Yet as Carroll...

Royal Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Animals Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Royal Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Animals

When cat rescue fails — Part 1. Lion-clip shaving, enilconazole bathing and oral itraconazole treatment failed to control an iatrogenic Microsporum canis outbreak in a shelter: but a novel ophytrium-chlorhexidine shampoo and mousse treatment succeeded in the home

Dealing with a Multi-Rabbit Household When Breeding is Uncontrolled

Do Animal Welfare Education Campaigns Really Work? An Evaluation of the RSPCA’s #DogKind Campaign in Raising Awareness of Separation-Related Behaviours in UK Dog Owners

Analysis of exotic pathogens found in a large group of imported dogs following an animal welfare investigation.

Genuine Concern for Animals in England's Nineteenth-Century Animal Protection Movement: The Case Against Reductionist Interpretations

Women Against Cruelty: Protection of Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Diana Donald

The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture, by Anna Feuerstein

BEM-ESTAR ANIMAL: CARACTERIZAÇÃO DA AMBIÊNCIA E DO MANEJO NA PRODUÇÃO E ABATE DE FRANGOS DE CORTE

The Legal Regulation of Non-stun Slaughter: Balancing Religious Freedom, Non-discrimination and Animal Welfare

The Sooner the Better: The Arguments for the Use of Extended Welfare Assessment Grids in Animal Welfare Cases

The Cat Desexing Policies and Activities of Private Veterinary Practices in Queensland.

Orígenes del movimiento proteccionista: algunos conceptos y fundamentos

Mental health of animal hoarders: a study of consecutive cases in New South Wales.

Socioeconomic Influences on Reports of Canine Welfare Concerns to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in Queensland, Australia.

Breed Group Effects on Complaints about Canine Welfare Made to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Queensland, Australia.

Investigating the Impact of Indemnity Waivers on the Length of Stay of Cats at an Australian Shelter

Alice in Wonderland’s Animal Pedagogy: Governmentality and Alternative Subjectivity in Mid-Victorian Liberal Education

Prevalence of and risk factors for FIV and FeLV infection in two shelters in the United Kingdom (2011–2012)

Owners' Perceptions of Their Animal's Behavioural Response to the Loss of an Animal Companion.

Evidence for seasonal reproduction in UK domestic cats.

Lead the way for us