Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002

Erica Fudge

When Erica Fudge looks at animals other than humans in early modern English culture, she sees an uneasy complexity in terms of how they were represented: “an anxiety which was not about the animals” but about “a struggle over the nature of being human itself” (p. 1). The elaborate quest to achieve human status necessitated that people “define themselves as human in the face of the animal” (p. 1). Perceiving Animals looks at the interdependencies that bind human and nonhuman animals in various cultural enterprises. The prodigious array of relationships that Fudge studies initially may suggest a symbiotic coexistence between people and animals but in the final analysis reveals a one-sided reification of the human.

“Reading about animals is always reading through humans,” Fudge asserts, and “reading about humans is reading through animals” (p. 3). I find it depressing, though accurate, that the culmination of these interactions illuminates humanity’s isolation from other species rather than showing ways in which we might coexist more harmoniously. Perhaps the period under consideration -- the golden age of rationalism, capitalism, imperialist domination, humanism -- predetermines the ubiquitous elevation of man over beast. Finally the animal is ineluctably subaltern, so readers will likely finish the book feeling, despite the title and subject, that they really have not encountered animals as they might have expected to -- not Fudge’s fault, but that of the culture she studies. People perceive ourselves to be the (only) perceiving animals; consequently, we fail to perceive animals, in the larger scheme of things, as richly as we might.

Fudge looks at animals in various cultural venues -- bear gardens, poetry, anatomy theatres, courts of law -- and discovers a wealth of subtle indicators of people’s ultimate power over them -- distancing from them -- and omnipotent construction of our own supremacy. Her most receptive audience will come to this text with a familiarity of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Reformed Humanism and the scientific, religious, political, and epistemological atmosphere of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras. Fudge infuses her discussion intricately with this intellectual backdrop as she examines the idea of the development of the human.

“Paradoxically, humans need animals in order to be human” (p. 4). To illustrate how animals reinforce humanity, consider contemporary speculation on the immortality of the animal soul. Thomas Draxe wrote in his 1613 work, The Earnest of our Inheritance, that animals would take part in the Resurrection and be found in heaven, but the reason they are there is “...the setting forth of Gods glorie: the matter of mans delight, and the exercise of his meditation and thankfulnesse.” That is, as Fudge explains, “Animals are in heaven to fulfill a function; they are not resurrected because they are regarded as sentient beings in and of themselves....They are reminders, even in the afterlife, of the centrality of humanity” (p. 40).

Looking at the prevalence of animals in fables, Fudge finds the same paradox reiterated. At first glance, it may appear that the animal is central, sentient, morally endowed, and bears behavioral and intellectual affinities with humankind. But the nuances of interpreting fables separate the men from the mice, so to speak: Only people are capable of understanding and enacting a fable on its deepest moral level.

In Aesop’s fables, it would appear that the beasts are the instructors to human readers of humanist ideals. The animals possess an unexpected eloquence if, as Fudge suggests, the ultimate goal of the fable is to celebrate the supreme monopoly on rational eloquence possessed by human beings. But the seeming paradox evaporates as readers attend to Sir Philip Sidney’s reminder to remain alert to the allegorical tropes underlying fables: “[W]ho thinks that Aesop wrote it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.” As Fudge glosses: “To read badly is to be a beast.” Only bad readers will feel close connections to the beasts in fables; good readers, meaning human readers, “will never have to face their animality because they have left it behind....Good readers are above the animal through their ability to look beneath the surface” (p. 80).

Perceiving Animals does not broach alternate enlightened epistemologies for the fairer perception of animals. Perhaps, reasonably, Fudge sees such speculation as outside the scope of her project; or, perhaps, I am just missing too obvious a point here, and readers cannot do other than respond antithetically to the prejudices described herein. In any case, whether or not Fudge intends her audience to read against the grain of her cultural analysis, that is what I shall do, and it is how I find her book most useful: as a cautionary tale about the dangers of anthropocentric megalomania, which the culture she describes embodies par excellence.

Note
* Randy Malamud , Georgia State University

 

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