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Homeless Dogs
Melancholy Apes
Homeless Dogs
& Melancholy Apes Humans and Other Animals in the Moder n Literary Imagination
L au r a Brow n
c o r nell u niversi t y pres s Ithaca & London
Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2010 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Laura, 1949– Homeless dogs and melancholy apes : humans and other animals in the modern literary imagination / Laura Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4828-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. American literature—History and criticism. 3. Animals in literature. 4. Human-animal relationships in literature. 5. Pets in literature. I. Title. PR408.A55B76 2010 823'.009362—dc22 2010010713 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing
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For Walter “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
contents
Preface 1 2
ix
Speculative Space: The Rise of the Animal in the Modern Imagination
1
Mirror Scene: The Orangutan, the Ancients, and the Cult of Sensibility
27
3
Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog
65
4 Violent Intimacy: The Monkey and the Marriage Plot 5
91
Dog Narrative: Itinerancy, Diversity, and the Elysium of Dogs Index
145
vii
113
preface
T
his book began in an undergraduate seminar on The Idea of the Pet in Literature and History, a course that I offered in the English Department at Cornell University. Describing the status of “the pet in history” to this group was a straightforward project, compared with our discussions of “the pet in literature.” My own interdisciplinary syllabus exacerbated the complexities. I began with historical studies of the lived relationships between humans and other animals in western Europe from the early modern period to the present. And I incorporated materials and information from Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, in particular Bernard E. Rollin’s textbook, An Introduction to Veterinary Medical Ethics, and a discussion with a Cornell colleague, Professor Katherine Houpt, VMD, a veterinary behaviorist and a key figure in Cornell’s cuttingedge Animal Behavior Clinic. In this context, our literary readings had a strangely irrelevant potency and priority. Students experienced the animals represented by William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Jack London, Albert Payson Terhune, James Merrill, and Paul Auster with an immediacy and a poignancy that even Rollin’s most needy and Houpt’s most misunderstood pets did not inspire. But of course—with Houpt’s and Rollin’s examples before our eyes—we were repeatedly forced to register the almost unbridgeable distance between “White Fang” or “Lad” and those real animals who share our world. Students quickly found the task of measuring the precise distance between the imaginary and the real nonhuman beings to be exhausting and fruitless. This course tested my a