Embodied Violence Towards Nonhuman Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey

Bibliographic Data

ID12419256
AuthorsValerie L Stevens (Department of English and Modern Languages, Shepherd University Shepherdstown, WV USA, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume29
Issue7
Pages679-694
Publication date2021-12-23
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociety and Animals (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1063-1119 • E-ISSN: 1568-5306
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/15685306-bja10056
OpenAlexW4200472191
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

Aware of her pupil’s plans to torture and kill a nest of birds, and with no authority to stop him based on her class, gender, and professional positions, the governess-heroine of Anne Brontë’s (2010/1847) Agnes Grey kills the nonhuman animals to keep them from needless suffering. Building on Brontë scholarship as well as animal studies understandings of violence and embodiment, this article considers expectations that Victorian sympathy will be a simplistic and pretty play on reader emotions to argue that nineteenth-century sympathetic feeling was more theoretically and ethically complex than we might imagine. Agnes Grey demonstrates how human-animal violence was thought to be an acceptable expression of middle- and upper-class masculinity, while proper women were expected to be complicit with this treatment of nonhumans. By looking at the close relationship between wanton and merciful embodied violence, the article shows how grotesque Victorian human-animal sympathy could be

Aesthetics · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Feeling · Human rights · Masculinity · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Scholarship · Sociology · Sympathy · Torture · Gender Studies · Historical and Scientific Studies · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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