Critical Entanglements: Animals in Victorian Fiction draws on ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial methodologies in four canonical Victorian texts, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883), Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books (1894), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), to explore what Victorian authors may mean when they make environmental actors or more-than-human bodies speak, or more acutely, when they render them silent. Conventionally, such silence is often interpreted and misconstrued with more feminine, vulnerable, inferior, inanimate, and helpless characteristics, eliding these characters into mere metonyms or a praxis for humanity. Instead of reading these characters as more palatable metaphors for anthropocentric concerns, I propose to read them as, in fact, more-than-human beings. By centering their alterity and radical identity, I argue their presence invites new narratives to emerge that challenge the hegemony of humanistic models which burgeoned from Enlightenment legacies in the Victorian era. As mute, combative, and/or hostile challenges to the anthropomorphic assumptions of both writers and readers, these Victorian characters, I contend, combat the era's sympathetic, humanist, androcentric, and liberal rhetoric, sometimes against what seems to be the explicit intentions of the authors. My research thus contributes to current scholarship on how Enlightenment theories of the human helped shaped the political and philosophical discourse that characterized nineteenth-century European society, especially within a masculine and Eurocentric context. Moreover, by applying an ecofeminist, posthumanist, and postcolonial lens to Victorian texts, I reveal the delimitations of liberalism and political thought, offer critiques to the incipient proto-posthumanist philosophies that were deployed to disguise the systemic oppression of Enlightenment legacies, and explore the andro- and anthropo- centric rhetoric that simultaneously perpetuated and challenged the definition of what makes one "human." Finally, my intervention firmly stakes "posthumanist" resistance well within the Victorian era, thereby demonstrating how Victorians were already pushing back against heteronormative and humanist constructs as empire expanded into more foreign, ecocritical, intra-, and interspecies entanglements.
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