In 1893 Edward S. Holden wrote an article for Nature magazine about “The Suicide of Rattlesnakes.” In it, Holden details his forced drowning of a snake, wherein “the snake ceased any attempt to rise to the surface of the water in the jar,
and in the most deliberate manner struck its fangs deep into its body. I have no doubt whatever that the blow was intentional, and with suicidal purpose. It was a single deliberate blow. There was no flurry. As far as one could see the animal was of sound and disposing mind and memory. It had been full of fury at first, but latterly had only sought to escape from the water to the air at the top. When this became hopeless the snake ended its own struggles.Footnote 1
Accounts of suicidal nonhuman animals were widespread at the time. In fact, in the early nineteenth century, suicide “was [positioned as] a rational and noble escape from intolerable circumstances.”Footnote 2 By the latter half of the period, reports began endowing animals (especially dogs and scorpions) with intention and motivation for self-destruction, with one example being an 1875 installment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ (RSPCA) Animal World featuring a report and illustration of “stag suicide on the south coast.”Footnote 3 The year of Holden's article also saw the publication of Canadian author Margaret Marshall Saunders's bestselling animal autobiography, Beautiful Joe (1893), a story about an abused dog who comes to live with the Morris family and goes on a series of adventures that he relays to the audience through “first-dog” narration.Footnote 4 The novel has a clear proto-animal-rights message, imploring better protections and more empathetic treatment toward them, that is threaded within most exchanges between characters. On one adventure, Joe visits Dingley Farm, owned by Mr. Wood, with his guardian, Laura. In an exchange between Laura and her aunt, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Wood says,
I read the other day of a Buffalo coal dealer's horse that was in such agony through flies, that he committed suicide. You know animals will do that. I've read of horses and dogs drowning themselves. This horse had been clipped and his tail was docked, and he was turned out to graze. The flies stung him till he was nearly crazy. He ran up to a picket fence, and sprang up on the sharp spikes. There he hung, making no effort to get down. Some men saw him, and they said it was a clear case of suicide.Footnote 5
Saunders's passage finds kinship with Holden's in its structure and language. First, there is a detailing of human-inflicted distress and an animal's response. Second, there is a forceful impalement—for the snake by fangs, for the horse by fence. And third, the language is certain, confident in both cases that motivation existed, and that the motivation led to suicide. Reading these passages alongside each other reveals a strong interest in understanding animal experience, especially in the realms of the mind, which can be traced across genres and forms. Saunders's account hopes to elicit a sympathetic response from the reader, through its sensational tone and gendered personal pronoun (him/he) instead of the more objectifying neutral pronoun Holden uses for the snake (it). These articulations, however, are not salient because the objective remains the same: to demonstrate that animal–human continuity exists not only physiologically but also in the emotional and mental realms.
Saunders (1861–1947) was writing at the height of developments in science of the mind, neuroscience, and the brain in the nineteenth century. Anne Stiles's works on theories of brain sciences in the nineteenth century provide rich analyses of the connections between literature and this science, which flourished during a “period of freewheeling collaboration” rather than “disciplinary silos,” a point I examine further in this article.Footnote 6 Animals were central to these developments: they were the subjects of scientific experimentation and corresponding activism and legislation in order to regulate their use.Footnote 7 Stiles and Laura Otis point to Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science (1883) and H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897) as two examples of works that responded directly to the antivivisection debates of the period, which shaped public understandings of scientific research by centralizing the moral and social implications of scientific experimentation.Footnote 8 A novel emphasizing the cruelty enacted by vivisectionists toward their animal subjects as well as vivisection's power to corrupt the scientists themselves, Heart and Science's title limns the gendered dichotomy marked by the rise of experimental medicine between the “sentimental” (often female) antivivisectionists and the “pragmatic” (male) scientists. While Saunders's work does not engage directly with these debates or specifically address animal experimentation, her work nevertheless questions “the boundaries between human and divine, human and animal, human and machine” raised by them.Footnote 9
Suzy Anger observes that “developments in the sciences of the mind in the nineteenth century transformed our notions of what it is to be human,” and, I posit, what it is to be animal.Footnote 10 For Anger, mentality, broadly conceived, “altered understandings of the self,” though examinations of nonhuman animal minds remain underexplored in literary studies.Footnote 11 I draw attention to Beautiful Joe's brief commentary on animal suicide first to reveal how these studies on consciousness, behavior, and sentience influenced nineteenth-century texts. Yet, as this article will demonstrate, the commonalities of these two passages prompt further questions about the kinds of knowledge generated by fiction sometimes in contrast to, and sometimes in alliance with, nonfiction. These two short meditations on animal suicide are brought into conversation to propose that Beautiful Joe's representations of animal behavior—shown through characterizations of reason, intelligence, emotion, and communication—participated in these scientific conversations in explicit, not esoteric or oblique, ways.
Holden was scrutinized for the same reasons as Saunders and the “Nature Fakers,” discussed below. He, too, was accused of “stating his inferences and beliefs as though they were observations,” and as though deduction could serve as evidence.Footnote 12 For Edmund Ramsden and Duncan Wilson, “rejecting conscious thought [in animals] in favor of automatic response separated the objective scientists from their subjects, and transformed the animal into a predictable and productive experimental tool.”Footnote 13 Furthermore, understanding animals as automata meant limiting understandings of their behavior to “mechanical and physiological responses to stimuli.”Footnote 14 Indeed, this thinking set the parameters for truthful, authentic accounts of animal life: specific, physiologically oriented laboratory outputs. Anecdotal reports from farmers, caretakers, trainers, and breeders were considered less credible than scientific studies.
Nevertheless, scientists and writers exploring the science of the mind employed creative modes to represent animal experience. In fact, I argue that conversations about mental sciences, which attend to this tension between creative, imaginative attempts and more calculated, “scientific,” “truthful,” and “authentic” accounts of animal life, were woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century life, and especially literary dissemination, in surprising ways.Footnote 15 To do so, this article invokes as it extends what Amanda Anderson terms “the special capacity of literature to capture human thinking and behavior that the new scientific frameworks of understanding either fail to capture, or capture only to distort.”Footnote 16 This novel, in its treatment of animal minds, underlines the connection between literature and science tethered to other works of the period with implications for our understanding of literary character as well as animal subjectivity and selfhood both on and off the page. In coalescing neighboring conversations in literature and science about animal lives, both historical and contemporary, my analysis reveals how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to both literary criticism and wider culture. The text does so through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of realism, representation, and truth, which this article examines first through placing Saunders in context with her contemporaries and emerging discourses on comparative psychology, and then through selected close readings of the novel.
The Cultural Politics of the Animal (Auto)biography
Margaret Marshall Saunders was born in 1861 in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. Saunders's affection for animals translated from real life to the page, with her home in Halifax nicknamed “Noah's Ark.”Footnote 17 Tellingly, Saunders was a member of over twenty reform organizations, including the SPCA—whose juvenile clubs, the Bands of Mercy, feature in this novel—“the National Council of Women, the Humane Society, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Playground Association of America. Saunders was also an active member of the Canadian Women's Press Club.”Footnote 18 In 1892 she visited Meaford, Ontario, with her brother where she met Joe, a dog with a troubled and traumatic history who served as her novel's inspiration. The novel was eventually written in response to an advertisement by the American Humane Education Society (AHES) and was positioned as the canine version of Anna Sewell's equine autobiography, Black Beauty (1877). To qualify Beautiful Joe for the fiction prize offered by the AHES, Saunders located Joe's story in Maine, making the novel “a quilt of Canadian facts woven with American details.”Footnote 19 The novel went on to sell over a million copies, the first Canadian work to do so, making her a celebrity of international repute. Saunders's Beautiful Joe imagines a diegesis where animals can understand and speak human language, made possible through the retrospective first-person narration of Joe, a maimed “brown dog of medium size” (53). The story begins with Joe's horrific start to life, in which a milkman named Jenkins brutally kills his siblings and cuts off his ears and tail out of spite. Joe is rescued and taken in by the Morris family and their menagerie of animals and becomes especially fond of “Miss Laura.”
Beautiful Joe comes from a long legacy of pioneering works in which animals think and talk. Included in this corpus are canine narratives, such as Francis Coventry's The History of Pompey the Little; or, The Life and Adventures of a Lapdog (1750), a work that Laura Brown cites as “the first original dog narrative in the English tradition,” as well as Frances Power Cobbe's The Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867) and E. Burrow's Neptune: The Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog (1869).Footnote 20 The genre drew attention to other animals as well, seen with Sewell's popular equine narrative Black Beauty (1877), Louise S. Patterson's Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat (1901), and Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit (1901). It also moved beyond the domestic purview with Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894). Critics such as Margo DeMello, Tess Cosslett, and Monica Flegel have examined how this predominantly female-authored genre reveals paralleling, and intersecting, discourses about antivivisection and anticruelty movements in England and North America.Footnote 21 These studies also identify the key features of the genre; namely, that animal characters relate their experiences living in a human-centric world through autodiegetic narration, oftentimes live through trauma, and through these accounts their respective narratives work to inculcate a message of kindness and care toward animals to a child audience. Cosslett notes, however, that despite their youthful audience, cruelty and trauma were often “part of their realistic project. Animal characters do not guarantee a cozy, protected space.”Footnote 22 In this way, while clearly marketed for children, Beautiful Joe's novelistic discourse—which includes its extended commentaries on hunting, millinery, and agriculture—reveals this bleeding into more mature themes.
Julie Smith makes the case that “the speaking animals of animal biography and autobiography were considered true to the natures of real animals, enhanced by human speech to the end of promoting kindness. In fact, popular natural history itself often had the same motive.”Footnote 23 This article follows Smith's argument in joining literature and animal-oriented physiological and psychological research of the period. Given the focal positioning animals occupy, the animal autobiography provides ample opportunity for a reevaulation of the cultural ontologies that dictate who can be a self. Our inability to speak animal language should not automatically deem animals lesser; rather, it should speak meaningfully to our inadequacies as well. Thinking through Beautiful Joe from this interdisciplinary angle, and with specific attention to animal psychology, warrants a reexamination of its genre and form as children's literature. A central paradox concerning animal character directs this article, namely, the protagonist/narrator's literary subjectivity exists in tension with the ontological reality that most animals cannot communicate in human language. Animal autobiography pushes us to the extremes of anthropomorphism in which the fantasy of animals speaking in human language is precariously balanced against the very real potential of animal subjectivity, interiority, agency, and behavior. In other words, this genre asks us to suspend our belief that animals can communicate in human language to represent real animal concerns.
The autobiographic genre, and autodiegetic narration, works in a constant tension with the limitations and freedoms inherent to the genre: As Saunders writes, “a conversing dog could never be true to life so these persons say.”Footnote 24 Yet it is in this way that Saunders finds herself in the company of other nineteenth-century writers, whom George Levine observes were not “deluded into believing that they were in fact offering an unmediated reality”; rather, they “struggled to make contact with the world out there . . . and to break from the threatening limits of solipsism, of convention, and of language.”Footnote 25 As narrators, these animals exist in narrative in ways other forms do not allow; they are not constrained by the short-story form or filtered through the perspective of another (human) literary narrator as in other closer-to-realist forms. The narrating “I” can challenge the axiomatic, normative assumption that the speaker, writer, and thinker must always be human. However, given our inability to fully enter the animal mind, most scholars contend representation must always be fantastic, unrealistic projection.
Audrey Jaffe dismisses literature's potential to generate an understanding of animal life in a review of Ivan Kreilkamp's Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018):
Even stranger is the notion that animals could or should be central characters in novels, their thoughts and feelings somehow accurately expressed—as if, outside of fantasyland, this were possible. We will never know the true feeling—and of course this is not the right term—of Emily Brontë's dog Keeper, which endured violence at her hands yet remained “loyal” (my quotation marks) to the end.Footnote 26
Jaffe's skepticism touches on this important conflation of literary and real animals, often inevitable in criticism, which gets to the heart of what is so difficult about these analyses. The animal world, so complex, so communicative, evades even imperfect understanding, as a comprehensive species-crossing language has yet to be established. While Gillian Beer wonders whether it may be “more honest to avoid claiming understanding,” it may not be fair or reasonable to dismiss these attempts entirely.Footnote 27 Though we may never know Keeper's—or any animal's (literary or real)—“true feeling,” we do know that as a sentient and conscious being he did have the capacity to feel.Footnote 28 In this way, I agree with Deborah Denenholz Morse's trenchant assertion—in which she quotes George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872)—that Kreilkamp's work (along with many others in the growing field of animal studies) has “‘widened the skirts of light . . . making the struggle with darkness narrower' in asking us to consider the significance of animals in relation to the Victorian novel” (367).Footnote 29
Saunders, and her “Nature Faking” contemporaries, was no stranger to this rebuttal. The “Nature Fakers” controversy implicated Canadian writers Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton as well as Americans Jack London and William J. Long, whose collective claim that their works represented truthful, realistic depictions of animal behavior, consciousness, and emotion unsettled established beliefs about animal intelligence and subjectivity. Their claims triggered a public literary debate between the writers and President Theodore Roosevelt and American naturalist John Burroughs.Footnote 30 As a Canadian writing for an American audience, Saunders was not only familiar with these debates but also wrote a letter in response to them dated June 6, 1907, to Charles M. Roe of the American Baptist Publication Society, Philadelphia: “There is a great outcry now from the President down against writers of my school. I consider that Mr. Long is being persecuted.”Footnote 31 Saunders considers herself in league with Seton and Roberts as part of their “school,” although, as Elizabeth Young has noted, Roberts cast her work as a precursor to his own.Footnote 32 Yet her preface makes clear her desire to represent the real: Joe is a real dog, and “the character of Laura is drawn from life, and to the smallest detail is truthfully depicted. The Morris family has its counterparts in real life, and nearly all of the incidents of the story are founded on fact” (45). Saunders's repetition of “real,” the assertion that Laura is “drawn from life,” and that the story's narrative is “founded on fact” bring forth similar concerns raised by the realistic wild animal story and Black Beauty.
“Intellect in Brutes”: Social-Cognitive Entanglements of Humans and Other Animals
A growing body of research in the sciences may help us better ascertain how theories of animal experience can be parsed through literature. Cognitive scientists Brian Hare and Alexandra Horowitz, for instance, trace canine cognition and subjectivity in their respective Canine Cognition Labs. Horowitz, whose research aims to “empirically test anthropomorphisms,” considers how most animal-human interactions focus on the human in the relationship, not the animal. For Horowitz, we must “replace our anthropomorphizing instinct with a behavior-reading instinct,” which could mean paying attention to physiological (heart rate) and behavioral responses (panting).Footnote 33 Beyond these more tangible markers—and of these there are many—we must recognize that all animals possess their own Umwelt—“the subjective or ‘self-world’ of each individual species”—to not only trouble anthropomorphisms but to also ensure animals are taken seriously as subjects.Footnote 34 While the autodiegesis of Beautiful Joe negates the Umwelt in favor of human perception (i.e., the “I” disavowing the separation between human and animal worlds), the many narratological aspects of the text provide fertile ground to recognize and dispel assumptions about animal behavior—and the entrenched anthropocentric biases that facilitate them.
More contemporary studies of animal cognition like those of Horowitz and Hare stem from earlier comparative psychology and ethology, fields that came into prominence in the nineteenth century through the works of Charles Darwin, W. Lauder Lindsay, and George Romanes; all were reliant on, and criticized for, their use of anecdotal observation, anthropomorphism—and narrative. Commenting on Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Marjorie Garber writes:
In this radically important and influential study from 1872, there are no social-science survey numbers. Darwin's human evidence comes from his study of children as infants, from his responses to stimuli, from ladies who blush, from “a small wager with a dozen young men that they would not sneeze if they took snuff” (they tried so hard to win that they defeated their own instincts, and had to pay him the wager), from Dr. James Crichton-Browne's reports on patients in the insane asylum, from other medical specialists on the mind and on “mental physiology,” from various anthropological accounts, each scrupulously credited, of the expression of emotions in other cultures around the world—and from literature. Time after time, the conclusive “proof” is offered in the form of a literary quotation. Human nature is a literary artifact, and the experts in it are the poets.Footnote 35
Here, I stress Garber's astute observation that the nineteenth-century scientific ventures into human and nonhuman understanding required “literary artifact.” As a work not only of human nature but also of human nature in relation to animal nature, Expression's magisterial study relies upon narratological concepts to illustrate behavior and especially interiority. A recent example of this connection between literature and science can be seen with “Aesop's fable of a thirsty crow dropping stones into a pitcher with water [which] has inspired a multitude of recent studies testing whether corvids understand water displacement.”Footnote 36 The central conceit of this article, then, is that the animal autobiographic genre exists largely for the same reason as biologists, physiologists, and comparative psychologists relied on anecdote—an attempt to understand animals without direct access to their minds. Beautiful Joe seems an unlikely example of Gillian Beer's and George Levine's observation that with literary and scientific work in the nineteenth century, “the cultural traffic ran both ways.”Footnote 37 However, Saunders's attention to a wide range of species and discussions surrounding animal treatment troubles a straight reading of the novel as human oriented. To put it another way, this novel can act as a way into examining these competing approaches to appreciating animal life: on one hand, celebrating the link between humans and animals based on similarities, and on the other, acknowledging alterity and species entanglement. Saunders uses the creative parameters of this genre to imagine a range of means through which animals can negotiate sociopolitical structures, narratological challenges, and anthropocentric discourses that have stifled animal representation as nonrealist and consequently not real.
By the late nineteenth century, research on animal minds was rapidly developing alongside the emergent field of ethology, the scientific study of “animal behavior, cognition, and expression” usually in “natural” conditions, pioneered by Darwin, among other nineteenth- and twentieth-century ornithologists.Footnote 38 Though early researchers on animals were often lambasted for their use of anecdotal observations and anthropomorphic inferences to parse animal communication, culture, learning, and emotions, Harriet Ritvo asserts, “the kind of information that had been excluded as anecdotalism reemerged in a more respectable form within only few decades as ethology.”Footnote 39 The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the publication of works that interrogated animal-human continuity and nonhuman animal psychology, such as W. Lauder Lindsay's Mind in the Lower Animals (1873), Alfred Russel Wallace's Automatism in Animals (1874), and Ludwig Büchner's Mind in Animals (1876; translated by Annie Besant in 1880). The reading nineteenth-century public also “read and wrote widely” in public forms “on subjects connected to the mental sciences.”Footnote 40 One such medium was Nature magazine, founded in 1869 as a public forum for scientific research, which circulated numerous announcements, reviews, and opinion pieces on this emerging science by the public and leading figures alike.
Nature, a popular periodical with public reach, functioned as an arena for discussion and debate about the limits of animal intelligence and reason, featuring articles on such varied topics as animals employing tools and calculating, clever spiders, and memory in birds. In 1879 Arthur Nicols wrote a letter to the editor about “Intellect in Brutes,” writing specifically about his own observation “that rats had gnawed a hole in the leaden pipe to obtain water.”Footnote 41 After consulting with Darwin, Nicols concludes he may
have an example of an animal using his senses to obtain the data for a process of reasoning, leading to conclusions about which he is so certain that he will go to the trouble of cutting through a considerable thickness of lead. Obviously man could do no more under the same conditions.Footnote 42
For Nicols, what is most interesting about these circumstances is determining what differentiates the actions and motivations of rats from those of humans placed in the same situation.
Nicols's provocative submission undoubtably attracted significant attention. Curate and Lamarckian defender George Henslow concluded animals could possess “purely practical reasoning” and not “abstract, which brutes never acquire; but the boy will as his intelligence develops.”Footnote 43 Yet Henslow's dichotomy came under significant fire from explorer and surgeon John Rae as well as comparative psychologist George Romanes. Romanes, mentee of Darwin and respected physiologist, maintained “that it can be ‘proved’ that animals ‘possess abstract thought’ . . . and the phenomena of dreaming which is presented by several animals would seem sufficient proof that some animals, at least, possess a tolerably well-developed ‘imagination.’”Footnote 44
Attention is drawn to this debate for three reasons. The first is to give a sense of the liveliness of these conversations about animal consciousness and intelligence in the latter half of the century, as this thread spans over a year and maps several exchanges between respected scientists and the public. The second is to highlight the importance of Romanes's claim as well as the ways in which he comes to his conclusions: speculation and imagination. Put succinctly by C. Lloyd Morgan more than a decade later in 1892 in his article “The Limits of Animal Intelligence,” hypotheses about animal intelligence are and must be “entirely based on observation and induction.”Footnote 45 Finally, the third is to make clear that to convey these conclusions about animal minds, scientists and writers alike were reliant on the workings of narrative, illustrating instances of observed (or reported) animal behavior that they found fascinating, startling, and unsettling.
Romanes used observation, inference, and anecdote, for which he sustained intense scrutiny, to explain his theories of animal intelligence and animal-human kinship:
But in cases where such verification is not attainable, what are we to do? We may clearly do either of two things. We may either neglect to investigate the subject at all, or we may do our best to investigate it by employing the only means of investigation which are at our disposal. Of these two courses there can be no doubt which is the one that the scientific spirit prompts. . . . [I]n the science of psychology, nearly all the considerable advances which have been made, have been made, not by experiment, but by observing mental phenomena and reasoning from these phenomena deductively. In such cases, therefore, the true scientific spirit prompts us, not to throw away deductive reasoning where it is so frequently the only instrument available, but rather to carry it with us, and to use it as not abusing it.Footnote 46
Romanes's practice resembles what we now call “critical anthropomorphism,” his claim finding agreement with Gordon Burghardt's positioning parsed by King:
critical anthropomorphism is a careful and useful tool in decoding animal behavior. When we combine knowledge of an animal's natural history with our own insights, as sentient animals ourselves, about the behavior we see, we'll come out ahead of the game with good hypotheses to test: anthropomorphism is scientific when done right.Footnote 47
What I see at stake in analyzing Saunders's text is what constitutes “abuse,” as Romanes puts it, in inferring and labeling certain forms of animal behaviors as anthropomorphic. But also, perhaps most importantly, in demonstrating how this form participated not only in conversations that advocated for animal welfare but also hitherto unacknowledged consequences for this animal-human bifurcation. Its hybridized state as a text preoccupied with realist concerns but inherently nonrealist, in its narration, Saunders's animal autobiography envisions a range of creative possibilities for characters, plot, and themes inaccessible to realist fiction.
“Only True Stories Are to Be Told Here”: Recounting Reality in Beautiful Joe
One of the ways Beautiful Joe “tests” these anthropomorphisms is through anecdotal stories shared by human and animal characters. Keridiana Chez argues that Joe “becomes a container for the stories of other animals that he encounters, including other dogs (Jim, Billy, Bruno, and Dandy), horses (Fleetfoot, Scamp), a cat (Malta), and an eloquent parrot (Bella).”Footnote 48 But Joe is also a container or filter through which we come to experience stories about animal life from the Band of Mercy gathering, in which pressing conversations in culture, politics, and science about animals’ capacities for suffering, reasoning, intellect, and emotion are foregrounded. The Bands of Mercy were transatlantic, middle-class animal welfare organizations focused on youth and education, where individuals volunteered anecdotal accounts of “good” animal behavior to promote kindness toward animals. One such shared story involving animal reasoning and memory features Ned the horse, who, after being sold, jumps from a boxcar and finds his way home. Ned's story, among others from the Band of Mercy, can be categorized as updated, reimagined versions of the “sagacious” animal stories from earlier in the century.
Ned's story follows a familiar trope, that of the wise and perceptive horse, which appears again with Mr. Wood's story about his horses, Cleve and Pacer, and is a core message of Anna Sewell's equine text, Black Beauty. The relationship Harry describes between Cleve and Pacer—that they “are always nosing each other”—parallels Beauty's and Ginger's intimacy in its focus on physicality as well (198). Animal bonding, however, is but one example of consciousness and cognition. As Harry goes on to explain, “A horse has a long memory,” and it is this mental intelligence that leads to the resolution of a robbery that implicated Pacer (198). When Mr. Wood takes him out for a ride, Pacer instinctively followed the route he had taken when he was stolen by a hired man named Jacobs. Mr. Wood can thus deduce the culprit and events leading to the robbery because he could “see by Pacer's actions that he had been on this road before, and recently, too . . . instead of going up to the house, [he] turned around, and stood with his head toward the road” (199).
This scene bears resemblance to a passage in Black Beauty involving Squire Gordon, Beauty's guardian at Birtwick Park. Squire Gordon, a compassionate and well-respected man, speaks out against a man who begins mistreating his bay pony when the pony mistakenly assumes he should follow a familiar route: “‘You have often driven that pony up to my place,’ said master, ‘it only shews the creature's memory and intelligence; how did he know that you were not going there again?’”Footnote 49 Written to delineate the connection between horse and human intelligence, these stories can help us think through Romanes's distinction between imagination as subjective experience and instinctual reactions to stimuli. For Romanes, imagination involves the formation of a mental picture, or “memory . . . provided the memory implies some dim idea of an absent object or experience and not, as in the case of an infant disliking the taste of strange milk, merely an immediate perception of contrast between an habitual and present sensation.”Footnote 50 Sewell's bay pony and Saunders's Pacer present memory of an “absent experience” (previous drives in their respective directions)—the paths they follows are rooted in recollection.
Like Beautiful Joe's core narrative, the Band of Mercy meeting Laura and Joe attend is veiled with religious messaging and practice, such as recitation and hymnals, with two such recitations stemming from the animal welfare paper “Dumb Animals.” Flegel notes that in the RSPCA's Band of Mercy journal, “the child reader saw continual linkages between child and animal as loved members of the family.”Footnote 51 The emphasis on the home and family connection is made legible by the meeting's agenda, as “home animal” stories are told separately from “foreign” stories, signifying a clear species separation and, in turn, established hierarchy. The first shared stories concern a horse saving his rider from quicksand—“The man . . . took hold of the horse's tail, and told him to go. The horse gave an awful pull, and landed his master on safe ground”—and a dog rounding up cattle and leading a stubborn steer into the cattle paddock (158). In both instances, the boy is “loudly cheered” and applauded for his stories of animal servitude. In contrast, when another boy shares a story about a monkey, he is met with skepticism:
My uncle's name is Henry Worthington. He is an Englishman, and once he was a soldier in India. One day when he was hunting in the Punjab, he saw a mother monkey carrying a little dead baby monkey. Six months after, he was in the same jungle. Saw same monkey still carrying dead baby monkey, all shriveled up. Mother monkey loved her baby monkey, and wouldn't give it up. (159)
When he takes his seat, the president responds, “That's a very good story, Ronald if it is true . . . you know there is a rule in the band that only true stories are to be told here” (159). In this scene, the skepticism that ensues seems mostly directed toward the possibility of the dead baby monkey remaining intact, carried by the mother after six months; however, this scene also pushes beyond assumed limits of emotion for humans and domesticated animals.Footnote 52 Unlike the dog and the horse stories, which focus on their usefulness to humans, the monkeys exemplify intraspecies bonding outside the bounds of animal-human relationships. In her survey of animal autobiographies, Flegel examines both interspecies and intraspecies friendships and kinships, placing emphasis on how intraspecies relations “model affection as something that can be learned from animals, challenging and undermining the narrative of human dominance so central to the animal autobiography as genre.”Footnote 53 In attending to the emotional, mental, and cognitive potential of these stories, this article builds on Flegel's desire to bring together the “distance between sentimental, nineteenth-century imaginative constructions of talking animals and contemporary biology and ethology.”Footnote 54 This moment, in other words, points to wider nineteenth-century concerns about human exceptionality and the complexity of animal experience.
Recent considerations, including those by Chez, Flegel, and Young, have shown an increasing attention to the novel's commitment to realistic representations of animal life alongside critiques of its anthropomorphism. For Teresa Mangum, “Beautiful Joe at once romanticizes human and animal attachment and registers each species’ distance from the other.”Footnote 55 David Herman, writing on the potential for narration beyond the human in animal autobiographies, sees Beautiful Joe as “marked by [a] thoroughgoing use of human-centric projections, with the attendant risk of a desire for trans-species solidarity trumping equally exigent, and species-specific, needs for autonomy.”Footnote 56 Herman's observation is important, as it points to the connection between human exceptionality and animal alterity that the novel runs up against, especially in instances when animal servitude is extolled. Nevertheless, the novel does articulate a worldview that seems more in line with posthuman notions of entanglement and theories of evolutionary continuity than what we might expect from a book that proselytizes Christian stewardship.
To examine those characters and textual politics that trouble such straight readings of animal-human dynamics, we must first look to one who indexes type: Mr. Wood. He asserts to Laura, “Man is a God to the lower creation. Joe worships you, much as you worship your Maker. Dumb animals live in and for their masters. They hang on to our words and looks, and are dependent on us in almost every way” (238). In contending that “animals live in and for their masters,” he implies animal subjectivity is conditional upon human projection and exemplifies the kind of animal-human relationships both Chez and Kreilkamp have explored in their respective studies of animals in Victorian literature. For Kreilkamp, dogs in Victorian literature were “inconsistently treated as incomplete or part-humans.”Footnote 57 Following a similar thread, Chez's analysis of Beautiful Joe sees Mr. Wood's pronouncements, that “horse or man, or dog aren't much good till they learn to obey,” as reflective of “prosthesis logic,” wherein animals feature as supplements to—or extensions of—their human counterparts.Footnote 58
Perhaps more than symbolizing animal dispensability, Mr. Wood's statement underlines the novel's commitment to a politics of domestication. Human and nonhuman animals do and can act of their own accord; however, Saunders's narrative limns “goodness” and submission as traits to be cultivated by (often forceful) human hands. But what of a creature whose will cannot be bent? Mr. Wood's dog, Bruno, a “snarling, cross-grained, cantankerous beast,” must be done away with.Footnote 59 Bruno is shot in the head not because he is bad at his job—Mr. Wood says he was “some good at tracking sheep” (223). As Chez puts it: “The dog's crime: a refusal to love and attach to his human. In effect, a dog that cannot produce positive affect—cannot be loved on human terms—is useless.”Footnote 60 Bruno's presence is thus easily replaced by Joe's: “we'll have a good dog about the place, and here's an end to the bad one” (124). Mr. Wood's contention thus reifies not only human superiority over animal life but also the value of submission and servitude over individuality and independence, painting animals, in this case domestic animals, as vulnerable, reliant, and profitable.
Naturally, Beautiful Joe's animal-human relationships primarily serve human ends. What is framed as an agricultural worldview—existing outside the city on a farm in the country—in which nonhuman animals are commodified and consumed as creatures under human control presents an important line of engagement that connects and differentiates the pastoral from the urban as well. Though the scenes set on Dingley Farm most vividly illuminate this belief in animal servitude, in the Morris household viewing animals as capital is encouraged as well.Footnote 61 Laura's brother Carl, “a born trader,” was “very fond of what he called ‘his yellow pets,’ yet he never kept a pair of birds or a goldfish, if he had a good offer for them” (104). One of the most explicit scenes of this entrepreneurship occurs when Mrs. Montague visits the Morris house after her housemaid breaks her canary Dick's leg. The leg must be amputated, leading Mrs. Montague to reject her “disfigured bird” and ask Carl to “sell her a new one” (108). In return, Carl gifts her a new bird, offering her Barry, his favorite bird, and is in turn commended for this generous act. Saunders complicates these anthropocentric textual politics, however: though “disfigured,” Dick's narrative closes the chapter, and his character is given a thoughtful conclusion.Footnote 62 Joe relays that he “became a family pet” and lived in the family parlor where he sang and enjoyed looking at himself in the mirror, a final image that subtly undermines his previous rejection based on appearance (110).
Crucially, animal-human relations such as those between Mr. Wood and his farm animals and Mrs. Montague and Dick reveal the varying levels of dependency and entanglement at play in the novel. There is, at times, a jarring difference presented by moments of resistance and loopholes of retreat, but, more often, Saunders's novel underlines the complexity of animal-human relationships in the nineteenth century. Though Mr. Wood argues that animals “are dependent on us in almost every way,” he is similarly dependent on them: “With my way I seldom lose a sheep, and they're the most profitable stock I have. If I could not keep them, I think I'd give up farming. Last year my lambs netted me eight dollars each” (220). With this final sentence, Mr. Wood paradoxically confirms his reliance on the lambs as “netted” capital while also positioning them as participants in the labor scheme. When Laura presses, “don't you hate to have these creatures killed that you have raised and tended so carefully?” she reframes the sheep from “profitable stock” to “creatures,” a semantic shift that sees them as living beings and still upholds the comfortable hierarchal structure extolled by her uncle (221). Although they are “petted like children,” the lambs are nameless and never reach personlike status (221). Instead, their precarity is palpable when Joe talks of them as being
all huddled together on the top of some flat rock or in a bare place, and [they] seemed to be talking to each other with their heads close together. Suddenly one would jump down, and start for the bushes or the other side of the pasture. They would all follow pell-mell; then in a few minutes they would come rushing back again. It was pretty to see them playing together and having a good time before the sorrowful day of their death came. (225)
This oscillation in the lambs’ characterization between playful children and helpless commodities awaiting slaughter demonstrates the tug-of-war that exists in animal-human relations on and off the page. The lambs encapsulate “the boundary between the natural and cultural human” as domesticated but not familial “petted things,” to borrow Emily Brontë's term.Footnote 63 Crucially, these lambs are “petted” but not protected, a taxonomy that stresses—and stretches—the limits of sympathy toward animals bred for consumption. In exploding the prevailing pastoral narrative in which the realities of agriculture are hidden from the public eye, this scene cuts through sentimentality with a realism that lays bare the exploitative and uneven interdependency between humans and other animals.
Through Mr. Maxwell, the founder of the local Band of Mercy, however, we see an inversion of the farm's dynamic of dependency in his relationships with his companion animals based on mutual vulnerability and friendship. Upon visiting Laura following a Band of Mercy meeting, Mr. Maxwell, a man described as “lame” who walks with crutches, reveals:
I've been dependent upon animals for the most part of my comfort in this life . . . and I sha'n’t be happy without them in heaven. I don't see how you could get on without Joe, Miss Morris, and I want my birds, and my snake, and my horse—how can I live without them? They're almost all my life here. (239)
Mr. Maxwell articulates a different kind of dependency than that which Mr. Wood displays with his sheep, as one of deep emotional bonding. As animal studies and disability studies scholar Sunaura Taylor posits, companion animals depend on us for their existence, but is it not true that all beings rely, to a large extent, on other beings and networks? Acknowledging this mutual dependence and vulnerability “can create frightening opportunities for coercion, but it also holds the potential for new ways of being, supporting, and communicating—new ways of creating meaning across differences in ability and species.”Footnote 64 Taylor's positive positioning of the inherent vulnerability displayed by animality and (dis)ability can be accordingly negotiated through Mr. Maxwell's characterization as a character not meant to be pitied but instead seen as empowered and empowering, given his role as leader of the Band of Mercy. Though we are never told the cause of Mr. Maxwell's lameness, Joe conveys that “his lameness made him love animals. They never laughed at him, or slighted him, or got impatient, because he could not walk quickly. They were always good to him, and he said he loved all animals while he liked very few people” (169–70). But Mr. Maxwell's reliance on animals is more nuanced than Joe's admission—he does not merely instrumentalize their presence based on his misanthropy but heals and cares for them.
Perhaps most striking of all, Mr. Maxwell articulates his desire for animals to be extended passage to heaven—a sacred place for human beings. Philip Howell observes that pet cemeteries and memorials—and especially the famous Hyde Park cemetery opened in the late nineteenth century—“challenge[d] . . . the established boundaries of anthropocentric orthodoxy.”Footnote 65 Furthermore, Maxwell is not alone in his desire for God to allow passage to heaven to the animal kingdom; he calls upon the works of “Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Jeremy Taylor, Agassiz, Lamartine” to illustrate his point. Though strikingly different, Saunders's inclusion of Mr. Wood's and Mr. Maxwell's articulations of animal-human relationships works to unsettle humanity's position as “God.”Footnote 66 However, I want to suggest a more powerful claim, that if Saunders's novel had been a moralizing tract and not the more complex text that I consider it to be, these countering perspectives, and those I go onto discuss, would not have been included. This is not to say that Saunders does not proselytize Christian stewardship; what I am suggesting is that Beautiful Joe lucidly reproduces the varying temperatures of these conversations and the stakes of these impasses.
One such moment in which Saunders's complicated animal politics are foregrounded happens onboard the train Laura takes to visit her uncle and aunt at Dingley Farm. Joe notices a “queer looking old gentleman” who “looked like a poodle” staring at them (134). Described in this way, the man is approximated to nonhuman animals by his affiliation with the canine species. But he is also othered, the connotation of foreignness linked to the breed. After this man espouses his vegetarianism because “three of [his] family have died of cancer,” and due to his knowledge of the “suffering of animals in transportation,” he is labeled “strange” by Joe, both in appearance and in belief (135). By Beautiful Joe's publication date, the vegetarian movement “was acquiring a much stronger ideological impetus,” heralded by the likes of Henry Salt and Alice Drakoules.Footnote 67 Including this controversial perspective provides an additional angle to the novel's animal-focused commentary, one promulgated by Christian doctrine. The notion that nonhuman animals experience emotions, Elsa Richardson suggests, “necessitated a redrawing of tautological boundaries, and vegetarianism contributed a great deal to this renegotiation.”Footnote 68 Saunders, however, hesitates in redrawing these boundaries and instead couches this character's admission within a broader dialogue of animal welfare. Another man onboard the train extols a similar rhetoric to that of Mr. Wood—that animals exist for humans and thus “[t]hey've got to suffer and be killed to supply our wants. The cattle and sheep, and other animals would over-run the earth, if we didn't kill them” (135). For all characters involved in the conversation, and in harmony with the broader novelistic and cultural discourse, it is the expression of pain and suffering that is most troubling. Saunders's ethos thus falls in line with the “cautious moderation and conciliatory approaches” of the RSPCA.Footnote 69
The character thus looked upon most favorably is “a very sweet-faced old lady” whose “expression was as pleasing as my dear Miss Laura's” (135–36). She acknowledges that cruelty is rampant in North America; however, she locates its basis in ignorance that can be resolved through education and legislation. Preventing animal suffering, and not complete abstention from meat consumption, lights the path forward. This scene is one of the most striking instances of the novel's political impetus, though Saunders stops short of a larger kinship claim that would suggest a reimagining of more equitable animal-human relations. Yet this scene also highlights the ways in which Saunders plays with animality. The old gentleman is framed as ill-tempered and emotional in contrast to the serene old lady, his “pawing the floor” symbolizing his impatience. His animality, in other words, works against him, his embodiment a product of otherness rather than a means of extending readerly sympathy, especially when placed alongside the “stately” elderly woman.
“For the Victorians,” writes Anna Feuerstein, “animality signified a wide array of qualities and epistemologies, both positive and negative,” operating, most often, within a “human politics” that posits “reason above instinct, civilization above nature, the human above the animal.”Footnote 70 Saunders illustrates human-animality once again and further exemplifies it with graphic discussions of hunting and cruelty. Here, male characters become animal-like to be successful in their hunting pursuits. When a male member of the Band of Mercy describes his moose-hunting trips in New Brunswick, Canada, he notes that “in stalking, we crept on them the way a cat creeps on a mouse . . . we'd find their tracks and places where they'd been nipping off the ends of branches and twigs, and follow them up” (181). In mimicking the behavior of a cat, the men stress the advantages of following the predatory mannerisms of a nonhuman animal. Yet, in another moment, the man presents an inversion of terms, in which he describes a particular bear who would “sit down and skin that sheep just like a butcher” (183). Ironically, it is thus not the bear's pursuit of “getting their meat as other wild animals do,” but instead the humanlike method of their slaughter that triggers anger and disgust.
Strikingly, Saunders's most graphic use of language is seen in her descriptions of human-led hunting: hanging a moose “for days, raging and tearing around, and scratching the skin off his legs”; using hounds to hunt the moose though the rifles would sometimes kill the dogs as well as the moose; employing steel traps that would break “the skin and flesh” until the bear “was held by the tendons”; and tying guns to a trap so that the animal would effectively shoot himself (183). In one particularly visceral recounting, a mother bear and cubs are killed for taking corn from a field. The man telling these stories rhetorically allows, “Yes, weren't we brutes?” but justifies these actions as protection of property. The man's rhetorical and almost shameful admission of the cruelty of wild game hunting is softened, too, by its comparison to sport-hunting: “Now if they were hunting cruel, man-eating tigers or animals that destroy property, it would be a different thing.” These remarks seem to propose an anticolonial politics that differentiate the North American motivation to kill based on survival from the pleasure-seeking pursuits of the metropole. And yet why does Saunders include such visceral moments when she could simply follow her contemporaries in adopting aesthetic distance? Collins, in his antivivisection text Heart and Science (1883), for instance, traces cruelty through character—“in fatally deteriorating the nature of man.” More directly, what is the formal purpose of pain?
One way to answer this question is by revisiting Saunders's invocation of suffering through the novel, which works to engage a politics of compassion and to promote a sense of evolutionary kinship. The aestheticization of cruelty, as a sensational trope, is self-evident, but I argue that these descriptions do more than shock and can instead blur the difference between physiological and psychological pain, most explicitly demonstrated through Joe's initial recounting of his mother's suffering and brutal upbringing. Pain, then, becomes evocative of a kind of personhood loosely cordoned around these wild animals but easily extended to domesticated animals. Rather than a clear-cut argument, Saunders reveals a muddy anthropocentrism through this man's hunting monologue—one that conflates and confuses human behaviors as animal and animal behaviors as human. Beautiful Joe's ongoing oscillation provides a continual dialectic between these ethical valences.
Coda
In her review of Joanna Bourke's Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia, and Post-Human Love (2020), called “What Does Fluffy Think?”, Amia Srinivasan parses the complicated nature of “love” for animals—love, of course, encapsulating many emotions and responsibilities, including care, respect, and affection. As Srinivasan argues,
The idea that it is impossible to know what non-human animals are feeling or thinking can serve as cover for their exploitation, domination and extermination. Do we really know nothing of how animals, even animals as physiologically different from us as lizards or bats, feel about the burning of their forests, the melting of their ice floes, the contamination of their water? Or is it that we do know, and simply fear what acknowledging it would mean?Footnote 71
Echoing concerns raised from centuries past that plagued individuals, such as Holden and Saunders, who worked to understand nonhuman animals, Srinivasan questions the nature of this skepticism amid ongoing fears of endowing animals with subjectivity, agency, and rights. For Horowitz, “The onus is on us to find a way to confirm or refute these claims we make of animals,” a call I see extended beyond the limits of scientific experimentation to tracking animal presence across literature and culture.Footnote 72 Saunders's narrative limns many kinds of animal relationships—both inter- and intraspecies—revealing affection between dogs and humans, lamb friendships, and the taming and euthanasia of certain unruly animals. The novel also reveals more radical moments that consider animal suffering, the capitalist and extractive nature of agriculture, the ways in which animals are “pretty much like us in most ways,” and the potential and motivations for animal suicide (229). This interplay between upsetting and reproducing human-centric hierarchies in the novel is bound to the same logics that undergird Srinivasan's commentary about the “knowability” of animal life. In this way, Saunders's novel employs an animal menagerie to not only comment on human and animal behaviors but also to engage in complicated discourses that, on the surface, affirm human dominion over animals but, when pressure is applied to them, reveal their cracks.
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