Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900by Jennifer MasonReview by: Lara Langer CohenLegacy, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2006), pp. 209-210Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679582 .

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gin to be confused or collapsed into a differ

ent Easterner?a Northeastern" (152)?who,

thanks to the railroad, was seen as a similar

danger to local control. One such Easterner was

Miriam Frank Leslie, a New York editor and

women's rights advocate who documented her

rail journey to California in 1877. To the read ers of Western weeklies, which promoted strict

gender and racial codes, the audacious Leslie

and her travel narrative symbolized "the threat an independent white woman could pose to

white Western American identity" (168).

It is this concentration on regions and read ers that makes Never One Nation such a valu

able contribution to understanding America s

racial form(ul)ation. As Frost notes, the cor

respondence columns in these periodicals indicate "the powerful desire on the part of

nineteenth-century readers to read themselves

into any community available to them" (192). Such a process, however, demanded that cer

tain people?even Northerners?be excluded as "racialized others" in this territorial quest for whiteness.

Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature,

1850?1900. By Jennifer Mason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 240 pp. $55.00. Reviewed by Lara Langer Cohen, Yale University

Jennifer Mason begins Civilized Creatures:

Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and Ameri

can Literature, 1850-1900 with a series of bold

analyses of the disciplinary blind spots in

American Studies. Although "nonhuman na

ture" has been given a privileged place in the

field, she observes, American Studies has been

consistently located "beyond the periphery of

civilization" (3). This historic obsession with

the idea of wilderness bespeaks an underlying scorn for the mundane and the domestic as

not only uninteresting, but even un-American.

Moreover, the power of this narrative has led

critics to skip from Thoreau s wild creatures

and Melville's white whale to the conservation

efforts of the early twentieth century, while ig

noring the intense interest in domestic animals

that marked the fifty years between. By focus

ing on this missing window of time, Mason's

study aims to restore animals to their place in

the lived experiences and literary imaginations of Americans, arguing that "the most power ful influence on Americans' understanding of

their affinities with animals was not increasing

separation from the pastoral and the wilder

ness, but rather the population's feelings about

the ostensibly civilized creatures present in the

built environment" (1). In the book's four chapters, Mason brings

together a wide range of affective and politi cal investments in animals, reading equestrian manuals, evolutionary theory, and the lit erature of the animal protection movement

alongside works of fiction by Susan Warner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charles Chesnutt. These unexpected combinations often yield rewarding results.

Mason's chapter on Warner's novel The Wide, Wide World, for example, offers a compelling

challenge to accounts of the novel as a critique of domestic ideology. Mason argues that these

accounts, which rest on parallels between its

heroine's development from a spirited youth to a submissive wife and the riding lessons she takes under the direction of her future hus

band, who notoriously beats his horse, fail to

take into consideration the contemporary dis course of female equestrianism. Drawing on

Foucault's theories of internalized discipline and the changing class politics of equestrian ism, Mason shows that when Warner turns the

equine body into a trope for the female body, she does so in order to highlight a self-regula

Book Reviews 209

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tion that allows middle-class women, in turn, to

regulate others. Mason demonstrates her claim

that humans articulate their cultural author

ity by way of animals most successfully in the

study's brief but fascinating conclusion, which

reads Jack London's The Call of the Wild in re

lation to Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's paint

ings of drinking, smoking, poker-playing dogs.

Examining the images of undomesticated mas

culinity at work in each, she persuasively links

popular interest in canine "nature" with con

structions of turn-of-the-century manhood.

At times, however, Mason's efforts to put such a wide variety of animal-related texts into con

versation flatten out their multiple registers. In

the chapter on Stowe, for example, she attempts to rescue the author from debates over her ra

cial politics that cast her as either a homogeniz

ing environmentalist, terrified by difference, or

an inveterate essentialist. Yet if Stowe's many stories and essays about animals deploy "essen

tialism as a tool" that promotes women's and

African Americans' "efforts at self-determina

tion," (108) as Mason contends, one might well

question why she takes recourse to "the lan

guage of animality" (96) in order to make such

claims on behalf of these groups. The problems of reading animal analogies this transparently become even clearer in the book's final chap

ter, which argues that the success of the animal

welfare movement prompted Charles Chesnutt to "strategically (re)associate] black men and

dogs" in his fiction in order to advocate against racial violence and for African Americans'

civil rights (134). The chapter combines some

what flimsy evidence (the fact that the SPCA

held their 1895 convention in Chesnutt s home

town, for example) with acutely intentionalist

readings, which, as in the Stowe chapter, hinge on the author's strategic rhetorical techniques. The forced quality of these arguments under scores their oversights: in separating animal

discourse from discourses of race and gender, then mapping it back on, Mason misses the

disturbing implications of their interconnect -

edness. Animality is not a neutral language but an exceptionally marked one, making it a

troublesome endeavor to imagine social justice

through the lens of non-human behavior. Far

from obviating Mason s claim about the cen

trality of animals to "contests for power in the

human social order," however, such complexi

ties confirm or even augment it (1). The com

plex relays she discovers between human and

animal discourses during this period suggest that human relations are not only mediated

by animals but are inevitably transformed by these interactions.

Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class

Cultural Life, 1850?1920. By Melanie Dawson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

272 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by Lori Merish, Georgetown University

In her suggestive study, Melanie Dawson exam

ines various forms of "home entertainment"?

parlor games and theatricals, acting charades, tableaux vivants, and commemorative recita

tions?as vehicles of middle-class self-defini

tion. Building on the work of Karen Halttunen, William Gleason, and others, Dawson argues

that home entertainment constituted a produc tive cultural space in which participants could

"clarify, critique, and question the[ir] everyday activities" (1). A strength of Dawson's project is

her recovery of a diverse array of sources: di

dactic guides to home entertainment, magazine columns and series, and journal articles, all of

which "circulated images of entertainment for a large" audience (8-9). (Dawson largely omits

diaries and private letters from her study, ex

plaining that they rarely provide detailed ac

210 legacy: volume 23 no. 2, 2006

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