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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE
Animal Visions
Posthumanist Dream Writing
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an
‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human
exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt
the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary s tudies.
Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions.
How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from
other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with
other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals
in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the
implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language
is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other
species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of
communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy
this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by r ethinking
representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are
conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of
specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights
of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figura-
tion with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously
embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding
of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than
simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of ani-
mals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to
the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series
focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discus-
sion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film
to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera)
with which English studies now engages.
Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
Animal Visions
Posthumanist Dream Writing
Susan Mary Pyke
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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Acknowledgements
v
vi Acknowledgements
vii
viii Contents
Glossary 287
Index 309
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
Emplaced Readerly Devotions
humans that are (most often) cis, white, male and in a position of
influence.
The marginalisation of most animals as a reduced category is so
entrenched, the assumption of dominion so ‘natural’, that innovative lit-
erary resistance is needed to depict animalities in ways that make room
for a specific creature’s personhood. I suggest that literary depictions
that seek post-anthropocentric ways of seeing the world can be enriched
through dream writing. Dreams offer unexpected and moving ways of
viewing the world that are not obvious in a conscious state. Depictions
of dreams are often accompanied by an intense form of writing.
Mesmerising and affective texts dream with their readers in surprising
ways that can unsettle the given, including the unconscious privileging
of one species over others. French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous
has brilliantly argued—and demonstrated through her own writing—that
when creative works give themselves over to the affect of words—when
they dream write—they can open new conceptual spaces for their read-
ers. Cixous characterises dream writing by drawing on her engagement
with the philosopher, Jacques Derrida, and by association, with psycho-
analytic thought. Sigmund Freud is the always-present ghost in the sensi-
tive thinking of these two theorists.
Dream writing is a practice, and Cixous is an exemplary dream writ-
ing practitioner. Thinking my species into less harmful relations with
other species, begins, for me, with dream writing nonhuman animals
with personhood, leaving space for cognitions beyond human under-
standing. Anthropomorphism must be faced critically in this process, as
writing and reading nonhuman animals as would-be-humans can erase
nonhuman agency. Being specific about animal similarities and differ-
ences helps, as does being tuned into the individual predilections of each
animal, no matter their species. This non-anthropocentric dream writing
invites readers to re-imagine themselves as the vulnerable animals they
are, co-dependent with other species in a shared and fragile world.
My emphasis on dream writing is not intended to take away from
foundational efforts to understand nonhuman species in and for them-
selves. Indeed, it is such work that allows literature to granulate and
change the ways animal subjects, animal people, are written and read.
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) achieves a great deal of
ground-breaking work towards this end, and his thinking is politically
enriched with the feminist perspective in Carol Joy Adams’s The Politics
6 S. M. PYKE
of Meat (1990). Cultural theorists Cary Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti add
distinct yet related modes of post-anthropocentric thinking to such dis-
courses of animal advocacy. Gruen’s work, grounded in a lifetime of
fighting animal exploitation, gathers her thinking under practically the-
orised terms, where empathy and sanctuary are couched in stories of the
rodents and primates that have shaped her life. Together, these thinkers
offer a strong argument that a shift towards a more socially just world
requires fundamental changes in cross-species relations.
Philosophical developments in animal justice are increasingly inform-
ing literary analysis. I was introduced to literary animal studies through
Grace Moore’s insightful reading of the triangulations between dogs
and humans in the work of Charles Dickens, in a prescient collection of
works, Victorian Animal Dreams (2007). This led to my first paper at
an animal studies conference, where I met the indefatigable political sci-
entist and animal advocate, Siobhan O’Sullivan. Not only did her pecan
love cake offer the final sweet push that turned me vegan, a brilliant
workshop she arranged, with Anat Pick, Robert McKay and Tom Tyler,
committed me to this area of study.
Like resetting a body’s habits of reading and eating, resetting lan-
guage for change is difficult and often contested. My investigation into
dream writing activates key conceptualisations that indicate the directions
of my research. I provisionally define these terms in their first use, and
in the glossary following my final chapter. Words can hold humans in
ontological stasis. Even the difficulties in using the term animal are clear,
as indicated by the fissures Descartes identifies in his own thinking. Peter
Harrison suggests Descartes’ position is not clear cut, detailing his read-
iness to include humans in the category animal, and making the point
that while he only granted ‘thought and self-consciousness’ to humans,
he had no doubt that other species could feel (1992, 220). Derrida com-
plicates these destructive divisions between humans and other animals
with the neologism ‘l’animot’, a difficult but helpful term, well summa-
rized by Mathew Calarco as an escape from the ‘metaphysically-laden
concept’ of animal (2009, n.p.). I await a word that allows for the mul-
tiplicity of animal people. Such terms are needed to improve the relation-
ships between humans and other animal species.
There are promising struggles towards a new vocabulary. Critical
theorist and feminist Donna Haraway offers a range of terms that blur
harmful distinctions between species. Her term ‘littermates’ is par-
ticularly appealing (2016, 31). Perhaps there is another like-term that
1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 7
Metaphor helps humans make physical sense of their world. The central
text that drives my analysis, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published
in 1847, is brilliantly metaphorical. This wonderfully complex novel, still
being reprinted and downloaded as I write these words, offers an alter-
native to anthropo-theological thinking, even while—or sometimes
because—it describes its characters through all kinds of animals. A range of
textual responses to this canonical text echo Brontë’s non-anthropocentric
metaphorical inflections. Their readings create a body of works that
demonstrate the importance of Brontë’s text to literary animal studies.
These textual responses to Brontë’s canonical novel offer more than
superficial reflections of this work’s triangular love story. Unlike many
Wuthering Heights remakes, the texts I consider here lead their readers
and audiences deeper into the dark inchoate expanse of dream writing
that marks Brontë’s work. In taking this direction, they offer a radical
affect that may encourage less harmful human relations with other ani-
mals. The lyrical poetics in Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (1997),
is an especially generative response to Brontë’s novel. I also respond
strongly to Kathy Acker’s “Obsession” (1992). Like Carson’s work, this
is a long poem, but where Carson’s poem speaks to visions, Acker offers
her readers a nightmare. Carson and Acker, through their works, reveal
themselves as dream readers of Brontë’s text. Similarly, dream readings
are performed, again very differently, through the two novels I focus on
here; Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven (1989) and Stevie Davies’ Four
Dreamers and Emily ([1996] 2002). Plath’s dreamy modernist poem,
“Wuthering Heights” (1961), while brief, is also a fascinating textual
response to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
In addition, I focus on four audio-visual adaptations in my sur-
vey of dream readers. I begin with the unprecedented modulations of
Kate Bush’s pop-song “Wuthering Heights” (1978a), emphasising
the ‘red dress’ music video produced at the time of her single’s release
(1978b). The significant reference to this work in Christina Andreef’s
arthouse film Soft Fruit (1999) helps qualify this work for inclusion.
I read William Wyler’s early Hollywood Wuthering Heights (1939)
for one ghostly scene with Lockwood, and also consider the political
silence of Cathy in Peter Kosminsky’s mainstream Wuthering Heights
(1992). I spend considerable time with Luis Buñuel’s surreal Abismos de
Pasión (1954), focusing on this work’s allowance for animals other than
humans, and I also analyse the depictions of different species in Andrea
Arnold’s critically acclaimed Wuthering Heights (2011). As with other
1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 11
the first generation that repeat in the second, there is a dizzying confu-
sion of names that are continually switched in the appellations of other
characters. There is Nelly, Ellen and Mrs Dean, one person, known dif-
ferently by other characters. Then there is the interchangeability between
Cathy (Catherine) Linton née Earnshaw, and her daughter, Catherine
(Cathy) Heathcliff née Linton. While not wanting to obscure this impor-
tant confusion, for clarity’s sake here, I will refer to Catherine Linton née
Earnshaw as Cathy, and Catherine Heathcliff née Linton, as Catherine
and use Nelly, not Ellen or Mrs Dean.
This productive refusal to honour the myth of the rational indi-
vidual is at its most psychologically revealing in the descriptions that
fuse Cathy and Heathcliff. As Cathy (Catherine Linton née Earnshaw)
famously tells Nelly (the elderly Mrs Dean and the youthful Ellen),
‘I am Heathcliff ’ ([1847] 1997, 82). This is no empty boast. The
younger socially ambitious Cathy marries Heathcliff ’s rival, Edgar,
based on a perceived need for economic power. In a doubling motion,
the older Heathcliff seeks economic security that will give him agency
over his life. The older Heathcliff becomes unrestrainedly passion-
ate as the younger Cathy gives full vent to her emotions. The older
Cathy is as hypersensitive as the fragile younger Heathcliff. Vitally,
the sharing of subjectivities between Cathy and Heathcliff splits fur-
ther, to include the other creatures that join them in the moor. To
re-employ Steven Vine’s delightful terminology, Heathcliff and Cathy
shapeshift through the ‘wuther of the other’ (1994, 339). Cathy iden-
tifies with the lapwings of the moor, moving through her life in col-
laboration with the wind. Together, she and Heathcliff wing their
ways across the buffeting gusts of their life just as they run from ‘the
top of the Heights to the park, without stopping’ ([1847] 1997, 48).
They flock together, are cruelly tarred with the same feathers. There
is a fluidity of being that flows between Cathy, Heathcliff and other
creatures. Similarly, the coltish Heathcliff tosses his ‘mane’, herding
Cathy in his thoughts (59). Animal psychologist Gala Argent points
out that equine interactions are focused on working together; horses
are ‘inherently cooperative’ (2012, 113). Heathcliff and Cathy see the
other’s intent and move together with this equine synchrony. They
herd together, protect each other against a predatory world. The
vulnerable animality of Heathcliff and Cathy brings the dangers that
humans present to other animals into focus, and the compassion in
16 S. M. PYKE
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