The Fictionality of the Human-Animal Distinction in Victorian Literature

Abstract

This thesis examines the porous boundaries between humans and domesticated animals in Victorian literature, arguing that the depiction of nonhuman animals in literature both upends and reaffirms human-animal hierarchies. Specifically, I focus on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862) to understand the mid-nineteenth-century preoccupation with rethinking the status of the nonhuman animal in light of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). I contend that Eliot and Rossetti blur the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals and raise questions about the role and significance of animals as characters, agents, and literary tropes.

By juxtaposing a realist novel and a fable-like poem, this thesis reveals the points of overlap between narrative and poetic strategies when language is used to convey what it is like to be a nonhuman animal. Ultimately, I argue that the complex representation of nonhuman animals in The Mill on the Floss and “Goblin Market” challenges Darwinian ideas about progress and shows that the lives of animal-others matter.