Victorians and Their Animals by Brenda Ayers

Author:Brenda Ayers [Ayres, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Each creature has its own temporal and spatial experience of world, and within the material experience of that world, objects signify different meanings for each being. Uexküll (2010), in his attempt to recreate the environments of the minute organisms he studied (the most notable of which was the tick), called his investigations “walk[s] into unknown worlds” and his writings a “travelogue,” inviting readers “to come along as we wander through these worlds” (41, 43). He provides illustrations of what the world might look like from another creature’s point of view, which Agamben (2004) notes are useful for their “disorienting effect,” taking the human reader out of his or her normal perspective (45). Likewise, the appearance of insects in The Return of the Native shifts the sense of scale and perspective, continually reminding one that “amid … the larger animal species” there exists a varied and “unseen insect world busy in all the fulness of life” (278).

As critics have often noted, Hardy’s vision of the human and nonhuman animal worlds emphasizes the relativity of perspective, of time, and of scale. In the words of Gillian Beer (1983), “Hardy’s reading and his observation alike made him hyperconscious of multiple scale, multiple time, and of the unique problem consciousness created in persuading the human to attempt to live in all of them” (252). Even as a young man, Hardy was keenly aware of this sense, commenting at the end of 1865 on the individual relation of various Umwelts to time: “To insects the twelvemonth has been an epoch, to leaves a life, to tweeting birds a generation, to man a year” (Hardy 1984: 56). While the statement reflects the relativity of individual experience, it places the human in the same malleable temporality as insects and birds. Kevin Padian (2010), writing on evolutionary legacy and deep time in Tess, argues that “Hardy constantly reminds us that we are as ephemeral in the landscape as are the … insects…. Seen at this scale, it is as if Hardy were tending a cosmic ant-farm” (222). In his brilliant chapter on “Hardy’s Insects,” Michael Irwin (2000) remarks that “[t]he teeming presence in the novels of insects, creatures so small, so ubiquitously numerous, is a continual reminder that each of us is ‘one of a long row only,’” quoting from Tess’ musings on the fleeting aspect of the human life (30).

Perhaps nowhere is the shift in scale clearer than in The Dynasts (1904–1908), where even a caravan of royalty is pictured in emmet-like terms: the perspective on the scene of the caravan is “withdrawn high into the air, till the huge procession on the brown road looks no more than a file of ants crawling along a strip of garden-matting” (Hardy 1924: 278). The movement between worlds suggests, as J. Hillis Miller (1970) argues, that

[e]ven the widest vision is still limited and may be seen as large or small, inclusive or exclusive, depending on how one looks at it …. There is a way of seeing which views both the activities of an anthill and the whole span of history as equally small and unimportant.

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