%0 Journal Article %A Duggan, Anne E. %T Madeleine de Scudéry’s animal sublime, or of chameleons %D 2016 %@ 2171-9594 %U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/25198 %X Drawing from Erica Harth’s work, animal studies, and ecofeminism, I explore the ways in which Scudéry engages in the important seventeenth-century debates over animal reason. Her engagement in these debates is significant: it foregrounds the fact that René Descartes’s conception of the animal-as-machine was immediately challenged by his contemporaries. In her “Story of Two Chameleons,” Scudéry challenges early modern moral and especially scientific representations of the chameleon, which limit our understanding of the chameleon to a figure for negative human qualities or to an object of scientific experimentation. Scudéry does so in ways that parallel her career-long vindication of women as elevated beings endowed with reason. Scudéry’s ethical stance towards the animal, attributing to it the capacity to reason and establishing a relation of friendship or amitié between the human and non-human animal, disrupts both negative metaphorical moral discourse, on the one hand; and the scientific domination and objectification of the animal exemplified by Claude Perrault’s Anatomical Description, on the other. Her “Story of Two Chameleons” suggests that these creatures are sublime, in the late seventeenth-century sense of “pure,” “refined,” and “elevated.” Through a process of sublimation that, for instance, transforms excrement into musk, an eyeball into a pearl, Scudéry metaphorically elevates the status of her chameleons. In effect, Scudéry suggests that, just like the human animal, the chameleon can (albeit problematically) dominate its “nature within.” %K Ecofeminism %K Chameleons %K Madeleine de Scudéry %K René Descartes %K Claude Perrault %K Ecofeminismo %K Camaleones %K Literatura %K Literature %K Medio ambiente %K Environmental science %~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala