Plantlike Animals: American Naturalism and the Narratives of Domestication

Vicky Googasian considers two novels of domestication that star disturbingly plantlike animals: London’s White Fang and Norris’s Vandover and the Brute. At the end of the 19th-century advances in botany and zoology... [ view full abstract ]

Vicky Googasian considers two novels of domestication that star disturbingly plantlike animals: London’s White Fang and Norris’s Vandover and the Brute. At the end of the 19^th-century advances in botany and zoology destabilized the distinction between weeds and pests and troubled attempts to narrate domestication. While Darwin’s controversial botany granted plants an unruly animal-like sensitivity that made them resistant to domestication, comparative psychology imagined all animal behavior as produced by domesticating mechanisms. Together, these novels offer different approaches to disturbing new intimations of plant agency: the former reinforcing the hierarchical division between plant and animal, the latter figuring the plantlike character as the victim of dehumanizing modernization.