Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (review)

In this fascinating book, Laura Brown continues the investigation begun in her Fables of Modernity (Cornell University Press, 2001) into the relation between human and non-human animals in eighteenth-century literature, a relation characterized in her analysis by sudden shifts between the apprehension of animals as alien to humanity and moments of strong human-animal intimacy. Identifying two historical phenomena—"the discovery of the hominoid ape and the rise of bourgeois pet-keeping" (20)—as key to changing human-animal relations in the period, she focuses on great apes and monkeys, which get a chapter each, and dogs, which get two chapters: one on lapdogs and their ladies and the other on the itinerant heroes of dog-narratives. In this, the last chapter, she moves through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the narratives' pursuit of the "fantasy of species transcendence" (22) that she finds central to the modern imagination.

Brown makes a strong claim for the "special relevance" of imaginative literature within the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, arguing that we need "imaginary animals" to help us understand the human-animal connection (24). Her detailed analyses beautifully demonstrate the contribution of eighteenth-century fiction and poetry to the ways in which that connection is apprehended. The great ape's propensity to destabilize the boundary between human and non-human has been well discussed before, not least by Brown herself. Here she illuminates the imaginative leaps inspired by that destabilization, offering convincing literary genealogies linking Tyson's 1699 account of his dissection of a "pygmy" (chimpanzee) with Scriblerian satire on the "Pygmaean" origins of learning and with Gulliver's description of the Yahoos, and connecting Monboddo's arguments for the orangutan's humanity with the creature of Frankenstein. The chapter on lapdogs uncovers numerous examples of the satiric verse tradition portraying the lady's pet as perverse sexual partner and metonym for her own sexuality (72). Here Brown puts a surprisingly positive twist on a misogynist tradition, finding in it the unwitting seeds of later, more sympathetic attempts to imagine interspecies intimacy. She might usefully have added discussion of the period's more generous attitudes to pets, as found, for example, in William Cowper and in Alexander Pope himself, who figures here as the satirist of Belinda and her Shock, but whose well-known love for his own Bounce prompted him to speculate wistfully on the possibility of immortal souls in dogs. Turning in the next chapter to literary monkeys, Brown examines their role in comedies of manners, where their resemblance to miniature men and their use as women's pets triggers comparisons with various aspects of masculine behaviour from foppishness to unpredictable violence, and informs a critique of marriage that characterizes early eighteenth-century plays and Frances Burney's Evelina. In the final and perhaps most original chapter, Brown considers a range of dog narratives from Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little to Paul Auster's 1999 novel Timbuktu. She argues that canine heroes, by claiming human language and travelling as itinerants through the diversity of human society, allow us to imagine "an alternative to the structures and limits of the present day" (138). The barrier between species is the key limit here, and the chapter identifies a central fantasy of the dog-narrative, in which readers are given a glimpse of an imaginary realm or afterlife in which intimacy between dog and human transcends their separate identities.

Brown's concentration on literary texts (as opposed to literary analysis of all kinds of text) means that she misses some aspects of the period's interplay between disciplines. Her introduction nicely summarizes two alternative theories of animal-human relations. First is the "human-alienating" tradition, in which "the animal" is the alien other, forever inaccessible beyond an unbridgeable gap. Brown traces this tradition from Aristotle through Descartes and twentieth-century behaviourism...