Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (review)

With the recent rebalancing of critical interest toward the nature side of the nature/ culture binary within historical and literary studies, the concept of species has also come under greater scrutiny. In this context, the investigations in Victorian Animal Dreams of representations of animals in Victorian Britain and its Empire are alert to the complex historical and evolutionary relationships between humans and other animal species. If, as Harriet Ritvo argues in her afterword, quoting Claude Levi-Strauss, "animals are good to think with" (275), then this collection also finds rich and complex occasions for writing cultural history and literary criticism about the discourses that draw analogies between certain kinds of people and animals based upon the perception of their shared marginality. Ritvo also points to the "awkward" and "borderline" status of animal studies among the disciplines, remarking that "within my own experience as a scholar, the study of animals has become more respectable and more popular in many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, but it is far from the recognized core of any of them" (275). This volume does not address the disciplinary status of animal studies directly, but rather, as ritvo concludes, provides a series of case studies exploring how "their very marginality allows the study of animals to challenge settled assumptions and relationships" (275) within representations and among fields of knowledge.

Once one begins to notice animals—not just in Victorian evolutionary theory and science but also in novels and poetry, travel literature, autobiographies, fashion and furnishings, and the visual arts—their representations appear both subtle and pervasive. At the same time, the representational linkages between animals and ideas of race, gender, class, sex, violence, and social and ethical relationships proliferate to the point that the resulting cultural repertoire also appears highly varied, malleable, often contradictory, and ultimately highly ideologically versatile. The essays delve into a wide range of activities involving animals and humans: Victorians' memorialization of their pets; the international "harvesting" of whales for their oil and meat and of albatrosses for their feathers; the collecting of beetles, fossils, and other animal specimens by Victorian naturalists and the classification and display of these specimens in taxonomies and museums; the hunting of elephants, tigers, and crocodiles and the popular reception of hunting narratives; the breeding of horses and dogs and the social stratification of human races and "bloodlines"; and the creation of close affective ties with animals, encompassing scientific curiosity, kinship, and domestic cohabitation, and expressing both affection and violence, fear and desire. Several essays investigate symbolic and allegorical representations of animals as companions, criminals, aggressors, and victims. They also explore animals as figures for abjection, loss of identity, racial difference, social marginality, and the exploitation of women, workers, and colonial subjects. These themes are studied in narratives by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anna Sewell, and W. H. Hudson. The collection does a particularly good job of showing how centrally Britain's imperial project should figure in our understanding of Victorian representations of animals and vice versa. In effect, animal figures repeatedly evoke—both overtly and in more indirect, ideologically resonant ways—the symbolic registers and material experience of empire in both Victorian literature and everyday life.

If one wanted to begin a research project, design a seminar, or write a lecture on Victorian animals, this volume would be an excellent place to start. a greater emphasis on staking out the relevance of animal studies to interdisciplinary research in emphasis on staking out the relevance of animal studies to interdisciplinary research in Victorian studies would have been welcome, however. Does the study of animals primarily enrich our knowledge of Victorian culture, or might it fundamentally challenge our views? Can reading for animal representations in a pivotal Victorian novel change our interpretation of that text or our understanding of its place in literary...