RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Madeleine de Scudéry’s animal sublime, or of chameleons
T2 Lo sublime animal de Madeleine de Scudéry, o de los camaleones
A1 Duggan, Anne E.
K1 Ecofeminism
K1 Chameleons
K1 Madeleine de Scudéry
K1 René Descartes
K1 Claude Perrault
K1 Ecofeminismo
K1 Camaleones
K1 Literatura
K1 Literature
K1 Medio ambiente
K1 Environmental science
AB 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. Herengagement 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 TwoChameleons” 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.”
PB Universidad de Alcalá
SN 2171-9594
YR 2016
FD 2016-04
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/25198
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/25198
LA eng
DS MINDS@UW
RD 25-abr-2024