From Romantic Teleology to Decadent Animal Activism: Human-Animal Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel

Robison, Christopher

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Year:: 2020
Contributor:: Robison, Christopher (creator); Schultz, Gretchen (Advisor); Ravindranathan, Thangam (Reader); Weil, Kari (Reader); Brown University. Department of French Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Animal Studies; Zola, Émile, 1840-1902; Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 1737-1814; Rachilde, 1860-1953
Extent:: viii, 150 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation explores the aesthetic and ethical treatment of nonhuman animals within a diverse range of nineteenth-century novelists. Drawing from contemporary work in Animal Studies and the history of the life sciences, the project traces the varied conceptualizations of both animality and humanity within the shifting biological and literary paradigms of the nineteenth century. The project is structured around three primary novelists from three drastically different literary movements of the long nineteenth century (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Émile Zola, and Rachilde), all of whom sit alongside one another in this corpus by virtue of their shared investment in questions of both natural science and animal ethics. By tracing the three respective scientific frameworks these novelists explicitly and consistently espoused throughout their work—namely: Saint-Pierre’s novelistic mobilization of his own anthropocentric teleology developed in his Études de la nature (1784); Zola’s absorption of the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and the materialist physiology of Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865); and Rachilde’s resistance to and subversion of the aggressively masculine fin-de-siècle life sciences and their invasive experimentation on both nonhuman animals and women—this dissertation analyzes how shifting conceptions of an interspecies ontological hierarchy informed the ways in which novelists identified and sympathized with the diverse range of creatures roaming their texts, giving rise to novel (in all senses of the word) ways of conceptualizing the question of animal ethics. More broadly, this dissertation argues that a closer look at the specific dynamics of animal sympathy manifested in each aesthetic/biological paradigm provides a critically undervalued vantage point from which to consider the ideological shifts separating the nineteenth century’s diverse literary movements.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020

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Citation

Robison, Christopher, "From Romantic Teleology to Decadent Animal Activism: Human-Animal Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel" (2020). French Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129434/

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French Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the French Studies department.
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