If you were told that Professor Ivan Kreilkamp, who heads Indiana University’s Victorian Studies Program, had written an article about a Prince, you’d naturally assume his subject was Prince Albert, the ruler formerly known as Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who became Queen Victoria’s royal consort.
But Kreilkamp has a parallel gig as a pop music journalist. So, in fact, his article “Prince’s Erotic Democracy” is about the rock idol formerly known as Prince, who died in Minneapolis in 2016.
Kreilkamp’s CV reflects both interests: it mentions articles in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Spin, as well as in Victorian Literature and Culture and the Yale Journal of Criticism.
However, his most recent book, published by the University of Chicago Press last November, is exclusively devoted to the 19th century. In Minor Creatures, Kreilkamp considers the way that eminent Victorians—Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, among others—treat animals in their novels. Essentially, the book asks: Can an animal be the main character in a Victorian novel? The title gives away the answer.
In Minor Creatures, Kreilkamp considers the way that eminent Victorians—Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, among others—treat animals in their novels.
Kreilkamp’s students were one source of inspiration for Minor Creatures: “I had been teaching Wuthering Heights, and the students were always very interested in the scenes with animals. And that got me thinking,” he says. “The question of how to treat animals was very important to people in the Victorian period. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was founded in 1824 and the Cruelty to Animals Act was passed in 1876. I’d read a few historians on the subject, but what was in fact a significant reform movement hadn’t really been much considered as an influence on the art and literature of the period.”
Kreilkamp believes there’s an explanation for the paucity of literary inquiry: “It’s almost as if whenever people thought about animals in Victorian culture, they went immediately to Charles Darwin. Even though there is good reason to do so, that approach foregrounds topics like biology and evolution, and wild animals, at the expense of philosophical and ethical topics having to do with animal rights and domestic animals or pets.
He was also aware that in writing about this topic, he would be susceptible to the “Crazy Cat Lady” stereotype. “I had to reassure myself that this wasn’t a slightly trivial project about pets,” he says. “Part of my take in this book is that, starting in the 19th century, questions about animality and the border between humans and animals became central. But critics hadn’t taken them seriously, partly because the animal rights movement had developed a reputation as eccentric and socially marginalized.”
He was also aware that in writing about this topic, he would be susceptible to the “Crazy Cat Lady” stereotype.
Although Kreilkamp does indeed have cats (Pot Luck and Daisy) at home—as well as a dog—his book eludes the claws of the Crazy Cat Lady stereotype. In writing about canonical Victorian novels like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Kreilkamp emphasizes that the form of the realist novel is inherently anthropocentric. Novels with animal protagonists slip into the realm of fantasy or children’s literature.
Nonetheless, Kreilkamp notes that the Victorian novel “always contains a creaturely, trans-species presence and potential.” It was during the Victorian era, after all, that domesticated pets became cherished family members. And so, Victorian novelists were forced to ponder the distinction between animal and human, in part to determine which animals are worthy of a seat at the hearth. It was during the Victorian period that the capacity to feel compassion for animals became one of the marks of humanity, education, and gentility.
Kreilkamp concludes his book by showing how late Victorians like Thomas Hardy and South African writer Olive Schreiner granted animals even more agency and consciousness. In fact, he speculates that Hardy, a great animal lover, may have given up novels for poetry in his later years precisely because Hardy wanted to escape the novel’s anthropocentricism.
Today, though, Kreilkamp has flipped back to the A side and 21st-century humans. He’s writing a book-length essay that reconsiders A Visit from the Goon Squad. The project allows his literary and rock critic sides full play, since Jennifer Egan’s 2010 novel, one of his favorites, is about the recording business. His book, an inaugural title in Columbia University Press’s new Rereadings series, should be published by 2020.
