Making Nonhuman Animals Real

society & animals 27 (2019) 229-231 brill.com/soan Making Nonhuman Animals Real Josephine Donovan. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2016. Josephine Donovan’s (2016) The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals is a welcome contribution to the cultural project of making nonhuman animals more than props that represent human experiences. As a Professor Emerita of English, Donovan applies her expertise to a discipline rich with animal references and characters but often still as human-centric as any other academic field. She notes early in the text that animals continue to be “ ‘stand in’ or surrogate, where the animal acts as a substrate for a human” (p. 46). Her goal with Aesthetics is to give animals agency through critique of traditional aesthetic theories and analysis of literary works. Put simply, she ar- gues for making animals real through literature. Divided into ten chapters with an introduction and conclusion, Aesthetics contains three main areas of inquiry: theory (chapters 1, 3, 4, and 10), literary analysis (chapters 2, 5, 6, and 7), and the animal sacrifice metaphor (chapters 8 and 9). From a theoretical perspective, Donovan seeks alternatives to the aesthetics of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, prominent philosophers whose influence established the “‘I-it,’ ‘sado-dispassionate’” notion of modernity (p. 73). In contrast, through an aesthetics of care, Donovan offers an “I-thou” conception of human interactions with animals and the environment. She applies this aesthetic to the works of Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, J. M. Coetzee, and nineteenth-century “local color” authors. While animals manifest in many ways therein, Donovan dedicates two chapters to the specific metaphor of animal sacrifice and concomitant issues of gender. While Descartes and Kant’s worldviews are certainly worthy of critique, I question how much space they take up in contemporary works that seek to supplant them, especially outside the discipline of philosophy. While schol- ars must show knowledge of the opposition, I don’t believe we need to match them—theory by theory, point by point, Greek word by Greek word—to be seen as valid critics. Descartes and Kant merit mention, but they take up too much space in Aesthetics. Donovan shines more brightly when developing her own ideas than when seeking to replace theirs. The core of the book lies in a “reconception of the status of animals in literature … so that they will no longer be commodified, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/15685306-12341602 230 Review section used, and abused for human purposes” (p. 111). A new literary theory can be as modest as that without mining old texts for fear of committing the academic heresy of spending insufficient time on dead white men. As noted, Donovan is most successful when her attention is on new ways of reading literature. The English literary canon was challenged when Postcolonialism, in theory and practice, made its way into the academy. For instance, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) gave life to Bertha Mason, an integral but stereotypical character from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). An insane Creole woman, Bertha is the frightening counterpoint to Jane, the definitive English rose. Wide Sargasso Sea shows that Bertha is a stand-in for some women’s lived experiences, not just a throwaway representation of a col- onizing culture’s worst fears. In kind, Donovan opens avenues for re-reading animals in literature as beings with agency, not just representations of human anxieties and aspirations. With this literary tool, she demonstrates the ways one can read Cather’s O, Pioneers! (1913) as a novel about “how humans may nondominatively know, relate to, and interconnect with, the natural world” (as cited in Donovan, 2016, p. 65). When a character named Alexandra admires the beauty of a wild duck, she does so as an equal, for “the duck really is a duck” with whom Alexandra feels an emotional connection (p. 69). Such a reading aligns with the goal of the animal rights movement to help others see real animals underlying their meals, clothing, entertainment, etc. An aesthetics of care can help us see real animals in our literature well. In terms of metaphor, none is as cliché as that of the animal sacrifice: the animal abused, exploited, and slaughtered in representation of the human condition. Focusing on the works of Tim O’Brien, Coetzee, and the association of women with animality, Donovan critiques the literary trope of animal sacrifice in which “the point of view or subjectivity of victimized animals is elided” (p. 168). In place of the trope, Donovan uses standpoint theory “to counter [the] aestheticization of violence in literature” and restore the subjectivity of the victim (p. 190). In doing so, she gives animals independent experiences and draws attention to their status in the world outside the text (i.e., the plight of shelter dogs via Coetzee’s Disgrace). Within these studies, there are times when Donovan tends towards overly Edenic views of the pre-industralized world. When discussing local color literature, for instance, she glosses over the reality that while animals on farms may have been viewed familially in pre-industrial rural communities, those animals were ultimately exploited for what their bodies could give to humans. The Industrial Revolution accelerated the pace at which we can misuse others, but it did not invent speciesism, just as it didn’t invent worker exploitation. Society & Animals 27 (2019) 229-231.

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