Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside

the individual to the species from which she would be set apart.

      In Chapter 4, “The Animal: The Life Narrative as a Form of Life,” I continue to focus on first personhood and the sort of generality proper to animal life, and I link this focus back to the capacity for animate motion I consider at length in my first two chapters. I do this by reading Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy in light of Locke’s discussion of personal identity and Buffon’s natural history. Attending both to the first-person form of Tristram’s Life and to the many animal figures it features (mules, bulls, asses, horses, oxen), I argue that Sterne picks up on a tentative strain of Locke’s thought—one in which first personhood is not conceived against animality (as it is in Swift, Hobbes, and much of Locke himself), but is itself a form of animal life. I argue Sterne develops this strain of Lockean thought both within and alongside new midcentury notions of life and of species, best described as Buffonian and vitalist notions. Buffon did as much as anyone in this period to generate new thinking and writing about life, and he shares with Sterne an interest in the intersection between literary and living form. For all of Buffon’s reflections on writing and life, however, it is in Tristram Shandy that we find the form of Life that Buffon’s vitalism would seem to require. It is the form that Sterne glimpses, at times, in Locke: a vital, first-person form of agency and generality associated with the living animal.

      In my final chapter, “The Child: The Fabulous Animal and the Family Pet,” I follow eighteenth-century thinking about animals and other people into children’s literature, the realm in which we most often encounter it today. Imaginative literature written specifically for children rises to prominence in the second half of the eighteenth century, and from the start, it is filled with animals. This chapter seeks to forestall the apparent self-evidence of this development and asks why and how so many eighteenth-century writers turned to animals when they began to produce literature for young readers. In answering this question, I argue that early children’s writers take up the insights of both Locke and Rousseau about the political centrality of children and animals, adapting the preferred literary genres of the period’s two leading philosophers of childhood to the real world project of making people out of animals. From the Aesopic fable that Locke recommends comes a strain of children’s literature that combines elements of fable, natural history, and the life narrative to create a new genre around a new type of being: the fabulous life history of the family pet. Works in this tradition—by writers like Sarah Trimmer, Dorothy Kilner, and Mary Wollstonecraft—compose a multispecies domestic sphere around a mode of speech widened to include the intelligible, suffering bodies of children and of animals, attributing to them the sort of honorary subjectivity and quasi-figurative status frequently associated with pets. I close by reading Anna Barbauld’s experimental and ambitious Lessons for Children, alongside Rousseau’s critique of fable and his recommendation of a redacted version of Robinson Crusoe, as a formally inventive meditation on what it might mean to model persons on pets in this way. For writers like Trimmer, Kilner, and Wollstonecraft, the reader alone is exempt from the domestic economy their fictions depict, his or her humanity secured by the capacity to read and to personify others, to regard (some) other creatures as intelligible, interpretable beings. By contrast, Barbauld’s writing for children makes conspicuous and shifting use of the second person to constitute reading as an activity that identifies every one of us with the dependence and vulnerability of the animal.

      In each of these chapters, I focus on eighteenth-century writers who seek to make sense of the sort of creaturely domestic sphere that Crusoe begins to apprehend, or that Barbauld imagines—a realm that at times would expand to incorporate all of nature (as in Buffon, or Thomson), and at others more anxiously contracts to the narrow bounds of the household.⁵⁷ The domestic has long been a central political-philosophical trope in eighteenth-century studies, but only recently have critics and historians begun to take seriously what writers from Defoe to Barbauld make plain: the eighteenth-century domestic sphere housed more than human beings.⁵⁸ Attending to forms of life and association that do not fit neatly into dominant political models of the period, writers as different as Thomson, Sterne, and Barbauld construe society in domestic terms, understanding domestication as an operation in which agency is widely if unevenly distributed, in ways that do not assert the force of an absolute sovereign, or the freedom and self-sovereignty frequently associated with social contract. Indeed, attending to animal forms of life and association—to creaturely relations of call and response, reproduction, and eating, feeding, and being eaten—can make the period’s dominant political models themselves look quite different. I return to Locke and Defoe in particular throughout the book not for their role in establishing the cultural myth of social contract, at least as it is typically understood, as a “liberal contractual model of political obligation” centered on the self-possessed human subject and his capacity to represent his thoughts and will in words.⁵⁹ Locke and Defoe are important, instead, for their sense that animal life and motion both underwrite and disrupt what counts as speech, and as community. It is this aspect of their writing and influence that I hope to bring out in the following pages: not their consolidation of a human-exceptionalist model of social contract, but their attunement to its animal limits.

      I have been arguing that eighteenth-century writers very often explore the problems and the possibilities of multispecies sociality where we’d least expect: in their adherence to formal conventions, their fondness for self-conscious and often stylized rhetoric, and their play with established genres and generic figures. If we discount these aspects of eighteenth-century literature as preoccupations with merely poetic, rhetorical, or generic conventions, we miss the force of the poetic, the rhetorical, and the generic in this period. We miss that “figures of words” are often also, in the words of Lord Kames, “figures of thought”—the figures by which and as which we live.⁶⁰ The works I discuss in this book are populated by a host of diverse and often conflicting animal figures, with which writers think about the ground and the limits of social and political relations: favorite pets, wild predators, and invasive vermin; household feathery people and sociable persons like Poll; exceptional individuals and the species figures that would seem indifferent to them. Some eighteenth-century writers openly embrace the task of composing society beyond human beings. Others, quite decisively, do not—or, they acknowledge this task only implicitly or anxiously, as the logical and uneasy conclusion of some other thought or commitment. The literature and philosophy of this period offer no clear prescriptions for resolving the conflicts that come with interspecies association. Nor do they cohere into a portrait of a better time for animals. But they do show us that figuring animals is crucial to acknowledging the difficult task of cohabitation across as well as within species, of regarding animals among the people who inhabit our common world.

       Chapter 1

      The Person

      Poetry, Personification, and the Composition of Domestic Society

      When William Wordsworth launched a revolution in poetry by identifying personification with the old regime, he inaugurated a move that is echoed in the founding texts of a host of modern disciplines.¹ From sociology and anthropology (Auguste Comte and E. B. Tylor), to political economy, law, and psychoanalysis (Karl Marx, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Sigmund Freud), writers turn to personification to establish their own modernity, repeatedly defining this modernity against a primitive confusion of persons and things.² After Wordsworth, literary historians have centered their own tale of primitivism and progress on the figure of personification. In a typical articulation of this story, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics locates the line between old and new in the eighteenth century: a moment when “rational attitudes superseded the primitive imagination” and personifications lost much of the “emotional and quasi-mythical power” that they had enjoyed “in medieval morality plays or in Milton.”³ In this compressed version of a familiar Enlightenment narrative, something happens in the eighteenth century that reveals persons (humans) and things (nonhumans) to be the essentially different kinds we (moderns) know them to be. On this view, personification is both a product and a casualty