Language, Animality, and the Emerging Modern in Spenser, Baldwin, and Cervantes
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LANGUAGE, ANIMALITY, AND THE EMERGING MODERN IN SPENSER, BALDWIN, AND CERVANTES by Jessica A. Szalacinski A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Middle Tennessee State University May 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Marion Hollings, Chair Dr. William Brantley Dr. Philip Phillips For our family: Gordon, Josephine, and The Cheat Szalacinski. And in memory of Sylvia Szalacinski, who will always be family. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My profound gratitude to my committee, Dr. Marion Hollings, Dr. William Brantley, and Dr. Philip Phillips. I also gratefully acknowledge the College of Graduate Studies for the award of a Provost’s Writing Fellowship that afforded me significant time to concentrate my efforts on this study. The director of my dissertation, Dr. Marion Hollings, with her meticulous editorial eye and championing heart has guided the progress of this study over several years, which began in my first graduate class at MTSU. Her mentorship has been the ultimate support of not only this study but my doctoral program. Too few are as fortunate as I to have had the encouragement of, guidance by, and rapport with an adviser like Dr. Hollings. The members of my dissertation committee—Dr. William Brantley, who has shared with me often-overlooked writings by disenfranchised authors and has overseen the growth of my academic prose, and Dr. Philip Phillips, whose work in medieval and early modern literature ensured the grounding of this study—gave their time, thought, and advice to better this study and its considerations. I have grown as a person and a scholar under their direction. The support of my encouraging colleagues and friends who understood my withdrawal from society during this process and forced my resurfacing from time to time, if only to get me out of my own head. My thanks to Dr. Nancy Roche and Ms. Lisa Williams, who read drafts and offered comments, but who also remained sources of sound advice and encouragement. In particular, I must give special thanks to my writing partner and friend, Ms. Stephanie Graves, whose camaraderie provided structure and iii discipline, and whose dark humor kept us both on track without losing ourselves in the process. I owe the most gratitude to my longsuffering husband and son. My husband, Eric, is not only the most supportive partner, but also the most encouraging, loving, and considerate, even when I was anxious and tetchy. My son, Caleb-Josiah, genuinely curious about my study, read all the primary material and earnestly wished to discuss implications of post-humanism with me, conducts that speak to his sensitive and reflective nature. I am a truly fortunate woman. And this is only the beginning. iv ABSTRACT Language, Animality, and the Emerging Modern in Spenser, Baldwin, and Cervantes JESSICA A. SZALACINSKI This study considers the ways in which notions of animality contribute to early modern discussions of what it means to be human. The talking animals in the selected works of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), William Baldwin (c. 1518-1563), and Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616) are not the animals of beast fable. Spenser’s, Baldwin’s, and Cervantes’ talking apes, foxes, cats, and dogs register a residual animality typical of medieval habits of mind, but compounded with an emerging, early modern notion of a sovereign animal that reveals complex networks of competing cultural forces. By using the genres of the medieval beast fable and the bestiary to contextualize the notion of the “beast” in these authors’ works, the emerging permutations of a “novel” sense of animality can be traced, from Spenser’s poem “Mother Hubberds Tale” (1591), which troubles conventions of the beast fable, through Baldwin’s novel Beware the Cat (1570), which features two kingdoms—cat and human—functioning sovereignly, to Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs (1613), which depicts complex partnerships between members of the canine and human worlds. Considering animality and how it bears on the concept of “human”— especially though techniques of satire and technologies of narrative framing—deepens our understanding of ontological and epistemological shifts in early modernity. Shifting shapes in the works by Spenser, Baldwin, and Cervantes mirror the larger philosophical, religious, and social metamorphoses that both arise from and further transform the changing nature of authority. Representations of animals in the period give humans the v opportunity to think about their own places in society, about animal as greater than “beast,” and reveal the contours of humanity’s reforming self-conceptualization. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION Safeguarding Sovereignty: Animal Relations, Roles, and Representations in Early Modernity .......................................................... 1 CHAPTER I “So Well They Shifted”: Medieval and Early Modern Animality in Spenser’s “Mother Hubberds Tale” ..................................................27 CHAPTER II “He Called Me ‘Knave’ in His Language”: The Sovereign Animal in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat ............................................64 CHAPTER III “We Don’t Just Speak, We Talk”: Complex Partnerships of Social Interaction in Cervantes’ The Dialogue of the Dogs ..................................99 CHAPTER IV “You…Will Finally See Yourselves as You Desire”: Hybridity, Mutability, Liminality, Animal, and Human in the Early Modern Period ..........145 CONCLUSION A Misshapen View of Animal and Human: Experiential Perceptivity and Subjectivity................................................................ 180 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................186 vii 1 INTRODUCTION Safeguarding Sovereignty: Animal Relations, Roles, and Representations in Early Modernity In his humanist political work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Giorgio Agamben explores the notion of humanity’s implied sovereignty over “life.” Agamben examines sovereignty using Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign being as the one who determines inclusion and exception. In other words, the ability to decide what is exceptional indicates the “sovereign.” 1 Agamben considers the idea of Homo Sacer, the “sacred man,” as the person who can be killed but not sacrificed. The two different Greek meanings for “life” are zoe and bios. According to Agamben, zoe— “life as such”—is the life common to all living beings (animal, man, and god), while bios—political life—is a way of living a life changed by institution.2 Agamben asserts that bios has taken over zoe. To have bios, he claims, one must first have zoe, but the attainment of bios is at the abandonment of zoe: the movement from zoe to bios concludes in sacred life or bare life. Agamben goes on to consider the determination of exclusion between zoe and bios: “In Foucault’s statement according to which man was, 1 For reading on the theory of the sovereign as the one who is able to determine the state of exception, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). 2 In Homo Sacer, Agamben criticizes the opposition between bio-political power and sovereign power that Michel Foucault develops at the end of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Vintage Books, 1978). 2 for Aristotle, a ‘living animal with the additional capacity for political existence,’ it is therefore precisely the meaning of this ‘additional capacity’ that must be understood as problematic” (7). Agamben explains the intention with which “a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language” (7). Although other animals have voice to express pleasure and pain, only the human animal has the additional capacity of language, and of creating a political community. Agamben argues that the ideological construction of man as a political animal is based on oppositional binaries: The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion. (8) In other words, through language, man separates and differs himself from his own “bare life” while maintaining a relationship to his zoe through his rejection of it. Although there is no distinct boundary between animal and man, humanity establishes itself through the “inclusive exclusion” of animality.3 In a subsequent work entitled The Open: Man and Animal (2002), Agamben moves from humanism into posthumanism, and deeper into the space of indistinction between what he titles animalitas and humanitas. To consider the division between 3 For further critique of the zoological and biological definitions of “life,” of zoe and bios, see Jacques Derrida, “Twelfth [Lecture] Session: March, 20, 2002,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington (The Beast & the Sovereign, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009]), 305-334. 3 animal and human in realms other than politics, such as religion, science, and metaphysics, is to consider man’s displacement of self and the incongruity of his self- separation: What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae?