| This dissertation explores the representation of animals in literary and cultural productions in the United States between 1850 and 1950. I open with a reading of Edward Hicks' series of widely circulated paintings, "The Peaceable Kingdom," and ask, "What is the value of an animal to an artist and to his or her culture?" The shift in Hicks' animal iconography---from singularity to multiplicity, from human exceptionalism to relativism, from allegorical isolation to involvement in a labor economy, from hierarchy to equality---traces the evolution of wider debates in American culture about the nature of the human interaction with the non-human. In the years after Darwin presented his challenge to anthropocentrism, the authors in this study shaped and re-shaped the hierarchy of animal and human. In questioning the boundary between the species, their animals also address issues of identity, selfhood, and the narrative voice.In Chapter One, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Thoreau negotiate the interaction of observed animal and observing human---occasionally turning that paradigm on its head. For Hawthorne, animals seem to threaten his status as author and artist for Thoreau, however, animals become not merely inspiration for, but full collaborators in, the writing of his Journal. In Chapter Two, I read Anna Sewell's Black Beauty and Mark Twain's animal sketches against the post-Darwinian Gilded Age's interest in pet-keeping, selective breeding, and the prevention of animal cruelty. Sewell's novel valorizes Darwin's "mutual affinities of organic beings," but only at the cost of preserving a reactionary class rhetoric. Twain, in contrast, imagines a world in which the boundaries of both species and class are meaningless. In Chapter Three, I argue that popular magazines at the turn of the century framed competing animal discourses: while ethnologists published articles that appropriated natural science to classify and derogate Native Americans, Native American authors Charles Eastman and Zitkala-Sa presented animal folktales and trickster legends that challenged the hierarchies of ethnology and subverted, even redeemed, the discipline's association of human and animal. In Chapter Four, I contrast two popular authors writing in the shadow of the Great Depression, who have conflicted urges to portray animals sentimentally, yet need to market them economically. In Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, animals are both a means to escape the strictures of a commodity culture, and texts that Laura must read in order to participate fully in that culture. For Robert Frost, the voice of a rustic seer masks a shrewd ironist who sees that animals may ultimately reject the burden of poetic metaphor. E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952) is the point of closure: if postmodern America no longer confidently embraces the idea of human exceptionalism, it also has adopted a relationship with animal and human life this is more humane and familial. |
