Abstract
History of My Pets was immensely popular during the nineteenth century, but has since moved to the margins of scholarly attention. The chapter uses liminality, a concept that evokes the dynamic interplay between the center and the margin as well as a crossing of thresholds and boundaries of various sorts, to argue two points. First, the essay recovers Greenwood as an influential nineteenth-century author. Second, while History of My Pets’ emphasis on the close bond between children and animals, replete with stock images of cross-species kindness and premature deaths, seems to center Greenwood’s book squarely in the register of sentimentality, the author contends that Greenwood’s representation of human–animal bonds is often unrulier. History of My Pets invites us to dig beyond the traditional understanding of camaraderie between humans and pets and instead contemplate the more radical—symbiotic and transformative—implications of human–animal bonds.
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Notes
- 1.
The book was copyrighted in 1850, but Ticknor and Fields list 1851 as the publication date.
- 2.
Grace Greenwood was the pen name of Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott. History of My Pets is largely autobiographical, but because “Grace,” not Sara, signs the preface I will refer to the writer of this book as “Greenwood.”
- 3.
In addition to Garrett and Ginsberg, article-length studies on Greenwood include work by Nina Baym, Paul Christian Jones, Karen M. Morin, and a dissertation by Carole Marie Greene.
- 4.
The legacy of poststructuralist thinkers on animal studies is undeniable; any recent overview of animal studies’ ideological underpinnings refers to the prominent names of these schools of thought, among them Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Dominick LaCapra, and Bruno Latour.
- 5.
Book-length studies on animals and nineteenth-century US culture, such as Katherine C. Grier’s Pets in America (2006), Jennifer Mason’s Civilized Creatures (2005), Susan J. Pearson’s The Rights of the Defenseless (2011), and Colleen Glenney Boggs’s Animal Americana (2013), take up Locke’s prevailing theory of liberal subject formation to show that human–animal relations during this era signify the formation of a prevalent middle-class interiority that was especially influenced by sentimental values of empathy.
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Rudolph, K. (2018). Contesting Sentimentalism: Human–Animal Bonds and Boundaries in Grace Greenwood’s History of My Pets. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_10
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