Feral Familiars and Cat Tales: Deconstructing Domesticity in Wilkie Collins' Heart and Science

Abstract

Through an examination of Victorian artifacts, including contemporary paintings and literature, this thesis explores the ways in which the concept of the feral cat challenges the image of not only the Victorian family and its domestic sphere, but how the animal functioned within this space. In a period so forcefully defined by domestication and the taming of the beast, cats during the Victorian era walked against the path of human domination marking a defiant power. I look to the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida, Eve Sedgwick (and her term “feline pedagogue”) and Teresa Magnum to illustrate how the cat’s challenge to humanistic ideology opens up a feral pedagogue. Feral Pedagogy requires that the critic risks rhetorical, ideological and narratological certainty in the name of evoking fear, shame and uncertainty. It requires a reorientation of space as no longer ordered by the lines of domestic/wild boundaries in and beyond Victorian literary fields. I extend this methodology to the works of Wilkie Collins, in particular, his use of the sensation novel in Heart and Science. Through the animal’s escape beyond domestic structures, Collins’ work presents a feral reading of the Victorian family. By reading representations of ferality, as inspired by the cat’s power, I hope to reimagine the bounds of Victorian animal studies. As a field of study which is so heavily inspired by the Victorian ideas surrounding the animal, the prospect of recognizing feral familiars in Victorian cat tales opens up a new analytical field: cat studies. I hope to incite further revisits to and reexaminations of the way feline potential rewrites the discourse on animals, especially discourses rooted in the Victorian conceptions of human domination. Reading “ferally” requires an opening of space, taken up by many kinds of relationships that are no longer ordered by human domination and nonhuman subjugation.