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  • Jane Austen and Animals by Barbara K. Seeber
  • Lorraine Clark
Barbara K. Seeber. Jane Austen and Animals. Ashgate. xii, 150. £55.00

Do Jane Austen’s novels argue that men, women, and animals have “equal rights” based on the eighteenth-century sentimentalist argument that they are all equally suffering, sentient creatures? This book proposes [End Page 282] that they do: that Austen’s treatment of animals, rural sports (primarily hunting), and food (especially meat-eating) aligns her with such sentimentalists, progressivists, and revolutionists as Percy Shelley, whose vegetarianism, for example, is aligned with his egalitarianism on women’s rights. Like such progressivists, Austen attacks “hierarchy” – understood as inherently patriarchal and tyrannical – in all its forms: the hierarchy of reason over the passions, and of men over “nature,” understood to include the landscape, women, and animals (the latter two hunted as “meat” or at best treated as “pets,” as in Mansfield Park).

Such a thesis surely strikes most Austen readers as highly dubious, unsupportable by textual evidence. But Barbara Seeber does her best to give Austen a modern-day ideological makeover, with curiously paradoxical results: the more fully she describes the “rights-based” ethics and politics of Austen’s era, the more Austen’s divergence from such arguments inadvertently stands out in sharp relief.

Beginning with “The Animal Question and Women,” Seeber does usefully remind us that there were two ways of “levelling” the human-animal hierarchy in the eighteenth century. The first characterizes humans as equally “brutish” and violent, motivated by the instinct for self-preservation or selfishness (the Hobbesian view satirized in hopes of correction by Hogarth, Fielding, and Burney). The second, sentimentalist view equalizes human and animals on the basis of shared sentience, our capacity for suffering, an innate sympathy or pity that tempers the instinct for self-preservation (Rousseau). More accurately, the relation between instinctual self-interest and instinctual sympathy, self-love and the social, simultaneously informs the philosophical and novelistic debates of the era.

The problem for Seeber is that she does not see the extent to which Austen regards both the Hobbesian and sentimentalist positions as equally “degrading” – because animalistic, brutish, instinctual – points of view. Both positions denigrate reason, reflection, mind in favour of feelings, whether selfish or social. Seeber’s ultimate positioning of Austen as a sentimentalist who regards “pets” (the examples being Fanny Price’s mare and pony) as “valued friends,” breaking down hierarchical species and family distinctions, results in Hogarthian caricatures of Austen’s “villains” (almost all male, except Lady Bertram). Their hunting manifests brutish violence of a kind not found in Austen’s fiction: men who hunt by definition must resort to physical cruelty and violence that manifests itself in similar violence (however metaphorical) toward women. Such scenes aligning animal and human cruelty belong to Hogarth’s prints and to Fielding’s and Burney’s novels, but not to Austen’s. Austen hierarchically “ranks” her comedy, deliberately eschewing such “low” scenes for a “higher” form based on the discerning powers of mind, [End Page 283] intellect, and reflection that accurately target comic follies and vices of character. It is Seeber, not Austen, who attributes the Hogarthian “violence” to Austen’s men, which she then claims Austen critiques.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, which takes me to Seeber’s treatment of food. What kinds of reading does her thesis yield? Dr. Grant is castigated not for his gluttony – surely Austen’s target, since as a clergyman he must hypocritically sermonize against this “deadly sin” occasionally – but for eating meat, inherently “intemperate,” she claims, for Austen. Mr. Woodhouse’s gruel – probably vegetarian? – becomes the praiseworthy mark of his levelling of gender hierarchies (men usually eat meat) and “less exploitative relation to nature” than Mr. Knightley’s “agricultural model,” which tries “to get as much from nature as possible.”

Seeber concedes that Austen may critique hunting and certain kinds of eating as just two of many forms of leisured self-indulgence that Austen opposes to leisured reading, reflection, writing, and rational conversation. And she acknowledges tangentially that Austen, like Mary Wollstonecraft, seeks equality of the sexes on the basis of reason, not sentiment. But her study resolutely insists...

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