Pets and their Couples

Baroque novels focus on the psychology of love, while love in the context of nature is the subject of the pastoral genre. Introducing animals to such texts proves unexpectedly challenging. The inclusion of pets in the artistic representation involves a reversal of scale and various modes of comedy, including socio-political satire. At a time when some writers fantasize that children can be born of a human-animal couple, or question the degree of free will and physiological determinism influencing human or animal actions, scientific and philosophical enquiries threaten to reduce the whole animated world to a physiology akin to one of automatons. It is a criticism levied by the sentimentaires against the libertines. Eventually, the study must be initiated with the monitoring of the modulated and variable conceptions of the persons constituting a «couple» and the status of the «pet».

Auteur

Dr. Servanne Woodward teaches eighteenth-century literature at the University of Western Ontario after obtaining her degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has published on Chardin, Vigée-Lebrun, Marivaux, Rousseau, Diderot, and women educators. She studied history of arts at the Université d'Aix-en-Provence.

Contenu

Contents: «The Bird-Organ» («La Serinette») 1751-1753, by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) - «It's not the cat!» The subject of Mr. and Mistress Henley's fight - «Caress Fidele for me» Paul et Virginie by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814) - «Are you a person?»: libertines and sentimentaires according to Pierre Carlet Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763).