Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Bront?’s Agnes Grey .

摘要

The significance of animal-human relations in literature by the Bront?s has been well established by scholars of Victorian literary studies. While Anne Bront? has received less critical attention than her better-known sisters, critics have nevertheless acknowledged her masterful depictions of human and nonhuman animals in Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). In Christie Harner’s article, “Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Bront?’s Agnes Grey,” she argues that Bront?’s novel proposes a reading ofspecies relations that are entangled and “weblike.” Harner draws on scientific discourse to demonstrate the ways in which reading the novel through an ecological lens “offers a more valuable framework to analyze its complexities of human-animal interactions and economic structures” (578). Crucially, she reads species relations as ambiguous and unstable, inviting new ways of understanding animal-human agency and relationality that subvert and challenge hierarchal structures of being.