The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris [Paperback]

Kathleen Kete (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 1995

Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie.
Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding--all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world--it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to the isolation of individualism and lack of community in urban life. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and even the irascible, autonomous cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and affection.
Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Over the intense research and archival riches of what was a clever dissertation, Kete (History/Trinity College) raises some lofty theories about modernism, culture, gender, and class that displace and obscure an inherently interesting social history of pets, especially dogs, among 19th-century middle-class Parisians. In spite of the cozy title, Kete's concern is with ``paradigms,'' ``hegemonies,'' ``counter-icons,'' and ``constructions.'' After considering the way humans treat dogs--their abuse by the working class and by scientists, their need for protection in refuges created by women and in pounds invented by men--Kete explains their identification with fidelity as a substitute for human infidelity and their reputed heroism as a comment on the unheroic in 19th-century society. A chapter follows on the taxing of dogs and their classification into luxuries or working beasts, and then another on aquariums and dog-breeding, the controlled, ``denatured'' world of pets, the domestic panorama, the ``corrigible universes of little worlds'' they inhabited. The theme of interiorization, of domesticity, continues with a chapter on dog-care books, discipline, hygiene, and control followed by a chapter on rabies, a disease believed in the 19th century to be caused by sexual frustration in overdomesticated animals and thought to produce sexual excess in the human beings they infected. There is a final chapter on cats, the anti-pets, their reputation for sexuality, perfidy, and manipulation, and their association with marginal human types such as intellectuals. During this period the cat was ``rehabilitated'' to display loyalty. In the tradition of Foucault, Kete uses ordinary, obscure, and private experience to illuminate the public and official world. Ironically, her philosophical jargon excludes the very people and class she is studying. Insightful, though selective and structurally fragmented, the technique overwhelms the subject. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"As Ms. Kete entertainingly recounts, the second half of the 19th century, especially its last decades, witnessed a proliferation of petcare books, dog shows, kennels, pet photographers and dog stores selling collars, coats, bathing outfits and dog food to replace vulgar table scraps." -- Eugen Weber, New York Times Book Review

"Fine history. . . . The Beast in the Boudoir is grounded in impeccable scholarship." -- Elizabeth Abbott, Toronto Star

"Kete draws on an array of 20th-century cultural critics, from Benjamin to Barthes, to support her thesis that pets served as an index of modernity." -- Michael Burns, London Review of Books --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (November 24, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520203399
• ISBN-13: 978-0520203396
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #856,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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