Horse-Human Entanglements in the English Novel of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Within the scholarly debate regarding the “rise of the novel,” one of the commonly agreed views is that from around the mid-1740s onward the English novel leapt forward in its evolution. In the century that followed, that is until the late 1840s, the canonical English novel rapidly grew into maturity. This historical period almost perfectly coincided with the historical core of the Industrial Revolution, which is considered as the beginning of the Anthropocene by many scholars. Almost in the middle of this century-long period, which may be called the ‘Early Anthropocene Age,’ stood James Watt’s invention of a working steam locomotive (1784). Watt’s invention started a process in which horses that were the nonhuman animals with the greatest agential power in the signification, production-consumption, and exchange systems of the human society in Britain began to be replaced with “horse power” and “iron horses” by the end of the Victorian period. However, during this century the horse continued not only to perform actual labor in England in the cities and in the countryside, but also to do narrative work in English fiction. With the Darwinian Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, yet another shift occured, but this time in the perception of the ontological dimensions of human-horse relationships. The Darwinian understanding of the ontological continuity between humans and animals also found its reflections in English fiction. On this background, this paper first puts the Anthropocene context in dialog with the “rise of the novel” debate. Then, from a posthumanist critical position, discusses and illustrates the “narrative agency” of living horses with reference to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848), and that of dead horses in George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).