In the chapters that follow, restoring animality means thinking with writers like Cowper both with and about animals. It does not necessarily mean advocating for the interests of animals, in any direct or deliberate way—though repeatedly, it does result in some sense of the stakeholdership and participation of all kinds of animate beings in our common world. This is because literary animal figures provide a direct perception of a class that is not coterminous with any given or natural-historical sense of species, but that comes into being by way of representation and reading. In their use of overtly rhetorical figures and conventional literary forms, eighteenth-century texts help to restore the animal as a distinctive mode of being and relation, and one that is common to all kinds of people. Such an animal is indeed a powerful figure for conceiving social and political community. It is also a potential member of it.
Over the course of this book, I elaborate what it means to focus our attention on this lesson of eighteenth-century texts: that our capacity to think about animals, to recognize their participation and their claims, depends on the figures we use. I do this by centering each chapter on a form of life and a literary form or genre: the person and personification; the creature and the emerging realist novel; the human and satire; the animal and the life narrative; the child and the fable in early juvenile literature. Throughout, I read literary writers alongside philosophers like Shaftesbury, Hobbes, Locke, Buffon, and Rousseau, in order to elaborate the conceptual stakes of what can appear conventional or ornamental aspects of literary form or genre. I am more interested in the possibilities raised by particular works, and in local connections between writers who read and respond to one another, than I am in charting an overarching narrative of progress or change over the course of the century. My hope is that by dislodging key works from some of the intellectual and literary-historical narratives through which we tend to receive them (the rise of the novel, the literature of sensibility, the philosophy of social contract, the history of children’s literature, etc.), common threads and sometimes unexpected emphases will come more clearly into view.
The book begins by taking up the cosmopolitical project of James Thomson’s The Seasons as the focus of Chapter 1, “The Person: Poetry, Personification, and the Composition of Domestic Society.” In this chapter, I chart the complex ways in which Thomson uses personification to depict all kinds of beings united in explicitly social, economic, and political relations, joining “soft fearful People” and “houshold, feathery People” (sheep and chickens) with “lively people” and “mighty people” (Greeks and Romans) into one great natural-historical and social system (Su, 378; W, 87, 448, 498). What interests me about Thomson’s extravagant and varied use of personification is that he associates “people” not with human beings but with a mode of agency modeled on animal motion—a mode of animation that is not structured around a subject and the object it acts upon (a structure linked, for Thomson, to violence), but in which the distinction between moving and being moved is difficult to parse. Thomson is the most conspicuously poetic writer I consider in this book—not only because he writes poetry but because of the kind of poetry he writes, the famously “florid and luxuriant” diction by which he animated or personified all of nature.56 This combination goes to the heart of Animals and Other People, and the kind of rhetorical strategies and conceptual resources of which it seeks to make sense. Above all, Thomson’s massive and difficult poem introduces the central concerns I elaborate in the succeeding chapters: a sweeping and capacious vision of a domestic and multispecies society along with worries about both its external and internal limits; the centrality of the animal and of animation to imagining how this society takes shape; and the work of literature, and especially personification, in composing its people.
In Chapter 2, “The Creature: Domestic Politics and the Novelistic Character,” I follow personification—construed as critics like Lord Kames and Hugh Blair construe it, as a figure of animation as well as of speech—to the novel, and to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in particular. The chapter argues that the many animals that surround Defoe’s solitary human figure—dogs, cats, goats, and Poll, the parrot Crusoe refers to as both a “person” and a “sociable Creature”—play a central and unsettling role in the novel’s social and political imaginary (116, 112). It begins by looking at Locke’s lesser-read First Treatise of Government, in which Locke sets out to separate human beings from other creatures, and thus to construct the very being on which his politics depends: the sovereign human person, a type of creature who speaks and cannot be eaten. It demonstrates that the person that grounds the Lockean political order is not a natural being, as Locke often seems to insist, but a product of representation—in effect, a personification. Defoe discloses this fact in the course of Crusoe’s conversations with Poll and with Friday, associating the human faculty of speech with the animal faculty of self-motion. He discloses it too by constituting its central character around the capacious, radically nonspecific category of “the creature.” While Locke takes speaking and eating to stand synecdochally for two forms of putatively natural being (the person and the thing) and two paradigmatic modes of political relation (contract and property), Defoe conceives civil society quite differently—as a process of domestication that is surprisingly uncertain about how to separate persons from animals, speaking from eating. Like Thomson, Defoe uses the figure of personification to bring animals inside the bounds of a society peopled by fellow creatures. But while Thomson does this in the service of an explicit ethical and ecological ideal of a harmonious multispecies society, Defoe does it obliquely, as he worries the limits of political relations constituted around speech. In a nightmare version of Thomson’s promiscuous personification, Crusoe comes to imagine that all animate creatures might be or become persons, and to see society as grounded not in contract but in the domestic—and cannibalistic—logic of eating and being eaten.
Both Thomson and Defoe critique visions of human exceptionalism with which they nonetheless have some sympathy, poignantly depicting the desire of individual human beings to set themselves, and their species, apart from others. In Chapter 3, “The Human: Satire and the Naturalization of the Person,” I turn to Jonathan Swift, who made a career of satirizing that desire—the delusive and dangerous longing to see ourselves as other and as better than we are. And yet, more than any other writer in this book, Swift is committed to setting human beings definitively apart from animals, by identifying that which is essentially and exclusively human. For Swift, I argue, this is personhood understood as a matter of grammar and point of view, in the minimal and also inalienable sense of the first-person perspective. This chapter reads Swift’s “The Beasts’ Confession to a Priest” and Gulliver’s Travels as meditations on the problematic relation between the first person and the animal species. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver undergoes repeated species transformations—at different moments, he is an insect, a kitten, a clock, a pet, a man-mountain, a lusus naturae. Whatever else Gulliver is or becomes, he is the “I” that narrates the story. Gulliver’s first personhood is crucial, I suggest, because Swift follows Hobbes in identifying the first person as the basis of a uniquely human form of generality, a mode of individuation that is simultaneously a mode of speciation. In the persona of Gulliver, Swift seeks to unite the (first) person and the species in a form of life and representation that is specifically and solely human. But he also acknowledges that the union of these orders—self and species—is