Animals and Other People: Literary Form and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century by Heather Keenleyside (review)

Are animals people? If you are looking for the definitive answer, you have picked up the wrong book, although its title certainly indicates an opinion. Ms. Keenleyside offers a microscopic picture of the issue rather than a bird's-eye view—although much is made of birds' eyes in the text. Animals and Other People is not, she wisely warns readers, an investigation of trends in how animals were perceived by the general population throughout the period. This book's achievement, instead, is to demonstrate the power of figurative language within several notable eighteenth-century works to participate in and shape perceptions of what constitutes the animal. "Rhetorical devices make real-world claims," Ms. Keenleyside contends, rejecting a tendency of literary critics to dismiss personification, especially, as purely figurative and often unsophisticated.

Each of the five chapters in Animals and Other People pairs a philosopher with a work of fiction, placing emphasis on genre or form; after all, the subtitle of the book, Literary Forms and Living Beings, endows those two categories with the same emphasis. Befitting a book heavily invested in the taxonomic, the organization of Animals and Other People impressively manifests itself in periodicity, text, genre, and overarching theme. Chronologically organized, the chapters are demarcated by author, main literary text, and genre, focusing respectively on The Seasons (poetry), Robinson Crusoe (novel), Gulliver's Travels (novel and fable), Tristram Shandy (life narrative) and, among related examples, Barbauld's Lessons for Children (children's stories, especially fables).

Despite its mischievous title and whimsical cover art, Animals and Other People is a serious work of literary philosophy or philosophical literature, depending on one's preferred view. Of course, whether animals are people cannot be debated without invoking philosophy, and Ms. Keenleyside's pairings of text and philosopher are more than justified by close readings that show the literary author echoing, expanding, or contesting the philosophical take on what is and is not an animal. Although the generic and thematic organization might suggest that readers could selectively peruse sections of their own interest, her chapters are heavily interrelated, particularly her argument about the centrality of the first-person perspective, which is initiated in chapter 2 but arrives in full force during chapter 4; similarly, discussion of Gulliver's misapprehension of fable returns in chapter 5. Moreover, the philosophy introduced in each chapter is accretive, and later chapters place their philosophers in conversation with earlier philosophers. Fans (and detractors) of Locke will be delighted at his many cameos.

With all this interplay among philosophers, literary texts, scholarly tradition, and Ms. Keenleyside herself, the (implied) main question—are animals people?—periodically falls out of sight. She suggests that all the texts under consideration are menaced by a more pressing question—are people animals? She tips her hand once again by offering in her chapter titles a progression from "The Person" to "The Creature" to "The Human" to "The Animal" to "The Child"; this mix of terms we might think of as "us" and "not us" is certainly intentional.

In the first chapter, Ms. Keenleyside carefully isolates personification in The Seasons to suggest that the agency characteristic of "people" might be modeled on animal motion, and correspondingly, that animal motion is not, as Descartes believed, unthinkingly mechanical. Readers will be gratified to see a rehabilitation of Thomson's poem (and of personification, which she despairingly notes fell out of vogue as the century went on) as "neither mechanical nor trite." Thus, animals are people, at least in The Seasons.

In chapter 2, Ms. Keenleyside applies Locke's political person as defined by the capacity for speech and the ownership of property (in this case, demonstrated by who gets to speak and what can be eaten) to Robinson Crusoe and the various animals he encounters on his otherwise "unpeopled" island. Locke's separation of animal and man is not as clear as one might wish...