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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
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.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Philip. “What Animals Mean, in Moby-Dick, for Example.” Textual Practice, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 93–111.
Baym, Nina. “Again and Again, the Scribbling Women.” Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, edited by John L. Idol and Melinda M. Ponder. University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, pp. 20–35.
Boggs, Colleen Glenney. Animal Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. Columbia University Press, 2013.
Borgards, Roland. “Introduction: Cultural and Literary Animal Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015, pp. 155–160.
Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman. “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 1–14.
Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 2, 1997, pp. 263–288.
Duane, Anna Mae. “Introduction.” The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane. University of Georgia Press, 2013, pp. 1–14.
Fielder, Brigitte Nicole. “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2013, pp. 487–514.
Garrett, Paula. “Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott).” Legacy, vol. 14, no. 2, 1997, pp. 137–144.
Ginsberg, Lesley. “Hawthorne, Grace Greenwood, and the Culture of Pedagogy.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47–71.
———. “The Making of Grace Greenwood: James T. Fields, Antebellum Authorship, and the Woman Writer.” Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, edited by Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 189–214.
———. “Minority/Majority: Childhood Studies and Antebellum American Literature.” The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane. University of Georgia Press, 2013, pp. 105–123.
Greenwood, Grace. History of My Pets. Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851.
Grier, Katherine C. Pets in America: A History. University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Henderson, Desirée. Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790–1870. Ashgate, 2011.
Jacques, Zoe. Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. Routledge, 2015.
Jones, Paul Christian. “A Scribbling Woman’s Rebuttal: Grace Greenwood Responds to the Hawthornes.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, pp. 166–181.
Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton University Press, 2000.
Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Weil, Kari. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? Columbia University Press, 2012.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73850-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73851-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)