This project examines how Victorians imagined animals as subjects, reading not only constructions of animal subjectivity, but also the ways animals were subjected to humans in Victorian culture and society. This project uncovers a crucial moment in the history of human-animal relationships, claiming that the Victorian era is a key moment in the conceptualization of animals as subjects: as more than objects, as subjects entitled to rights and protection, as subjects with subjectivities. I argue that constructions of animal subjectivity functioned within forms of pastoral power, as within mainstream Victorian culture animals were constructed as desiring to be subject to humankind, thus exhibiting proper "conduct." What we find in novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, however, is a resistance to common conceptions of animal subjects, and at times a recognition of animal alterity. Such alterity functions as a site of resistance to constructions of animal subjectivity that keep animals in positions of subjection. My project intervenes at a crucial moment in Victorian animal studies and animal studies more broadly. While current work in theoretical animal studies encourages us to read animals as animals and destabilize anthropocentric conceptualizations of the subject, analyses of Victorian animals frequently read animals metaphorically, examining representations of animals as sites of human-human conflict and interaction, rather than reading them for an understanding of how Victorians conceptualized animals and their inner lives. I instead read these representations for the insight they give us into how Victorians imagined animals as subjects. My project thus contributes to work in Victorian studies as an addition to and revision of cultural, historical, and literary analyses of human-animal relationships. Due to my focus on constructions of subjectivity as a form of power, my project adds to the growing body of theoretical animal studies work a recognition that how we imagine the inner lives of animals is always a form of power. In chapter one I examine the early animal protection movement through legislative discourse and discourses disseminated by the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals), to argue that both discourses construct animal subjects in relation to their subjection to humankind, often suggesting that animals desire such subjection. In chapter two I argue that Dickens removes animals from discourses of pastoral power and envisions animal subjects within a larger political field. Reading Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, and Hard Times, I argue that Dickens constructs animal subjects who exceed their social and cultural position as subject to humankind. In chapter three I argue that George Henry Lewes and George Eliot's fascination with sea animals inspired Eliot's realism and her theories of sympathy. In Adam Bede Eliot not only demonstrates the problems faced when attempting to truthfully represent animal subjectivity, but she also suggests that recognizing difference and our limitations in knowing the other engender sympathy. Chapter four examines a burgeoning ecological discourse and its influence on wild bird protection. Demonstrating how an ecological ethic moves into the novel, I argue that in The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy posits a multi-species world that encourages the recognition of animals as autonomous subjects. I conclude with a brief analysis of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, as I gesture toward a destabilization of pastoral power as it merges with burgeoning forms of biopower.
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