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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Animal Visions
Posthumanist Dream Writing

Susan Mary Pyke

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an
‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human
exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt
the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary s­ tudies.
Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary ­questions.
How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from
other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with
other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of ­animals
in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the
implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language
is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other
species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of
communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy
this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by r­ ethinking
representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are
conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of
specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights
of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figura-
tion with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously
embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding
of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than
simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of ani-
mals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to
the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series
focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discus-
sion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film
to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera)
with which English studies now engages.

Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Susan Mary Pyke

Animal Visions
Posthumanist Dream Writing
Susan Mary Pyke
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-03876-2 ISBN 978-3-030-03877-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03877-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930401

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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 Acknowledgements

Gratitude beyond my skin is due to Djargurdwurrung Country, including

the Mullungkil Gundidj, present in the past that formed my childhood
and thus the understanding of my being. I also acknowledge Wurundjeri
Country, who grants me the habitations of my adult life.
In its doctoral phases of this project, the inspiration and care of Marion
May Campbell and Grace Moore allowed me to proceed freely in the
directions that intrigued me. I am indebted to the big-heartedness and wit
of these two exceptional women, who remain my highly treasured men-
tors. My work is marked by the late Greg Dening, whose encouragement
and storytelling marks the rhythms of my writing. I also owe much to my
two insightful anonymous readers, both brought to an earlier version of
this work by Palgrave Macmillan. Their generous responses have helped
shape my thinking into this current form.
I have received much wisdom and warmth from the staff and students
of the University of Melbourne, particularly in teaching Gothic Fictions,
Interdisciplinarity and the Environment, the Creative Writing Advanced
Workshop and Textual Revelations. I have been kept focused on the
political importance of this work by the intellectual support of members
of the SenseLab, the Knowing Animals Reading Group, Ecofeminist
Fridays and the Victorian Reading Group.
Funding through the University of Melbourne’s Amy Gaye Cowper
Tennent Memorial Scholarship, Felix Myer Scholarship, School of
Graduate Research and Faculty of Arts allowed me to add sights, sounds,

v
vi    Acknowledgements

taste and feel to my literary understanding of the Stanford Moor and

began my engagement with the coterie of literary scholars who share my
passions in creative writing, animal studies, ecocriticism and Victorian
studies.
I am also very grateful for the support of the editors who made room
for my work in their collections, as I found my way towards Animal
Visions. These publications and editors include: “The Feel of the East
Wind: Ghostly Crossings between the Known and Beyond,” in New
Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative
Writing edited by Graeme Harper (2011, 9:1); “Divine Wings: Literary
Flights between the Cyclic Avian in Emily Brontë’s Poems and Oblivia’s
Swan Song in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book,” in Otherness, edited by
Sune Borkfelt (2016, 5:2); “Citizen Snake: Uncoiling Human Bindings
for Life,” in The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural
Practice, edited by Anna Malinowska and Michael Gratzke (2017,
London: Routledge); “Cathy’s Whip and Heathcliff’s Snarl: Control,
Violence, Care and Rights in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” in Animals
in Victorian Literature and Culture: A Collection of Critical Essays,
edited by Larry Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison (London, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan); and “Creaturely Shifts: Contemporary Animal
Crossings through the Alluring Trace of the Romantic Sublime,” in
TEXT Special Issue: Romanticism and Contemporary Writing, edited
by Stephanie Green and Paul Hetherington (2017, 41:1). In addi-
tion, Chapter 5 includes some of the material originally published as
“Refractive Depths of Passion in Wuthering Heights: Brontë, Buñuel and
Beyond Humanism” in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses edited by
Juan Ignacio Oliva (2018, 77).
The everyday co-affectivity of my family and friends resonates in the
silent margins of this text. My respect for and trust in Marco, George
and Robbie sounds from every word. My parents, Mona and Robert,
have given me the space and faith I needed for this project and the added
nurture of Marco’s family helped bring it to fruition. I have been sus-
tained by the humour and interest of my three adored siblings, Don, Jan
and Lynne, their partners, and my niblings, together with the attentive-
ness of other beloved friends over the long life of this project. I thank
them all for their willingness to share my passion for Stonyford, books
and vegan tucker.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions 1

1.1 Dream Writing Beyond Anthropocentric Hierarchies 1
1.2 The Pulse of Disruptive Minor Gestures 11
1.3 Telling Visionary Dreams 25
1.4 Hystericised Hauntings 42
1.5 Revising Love into the Moor 53
1.6 Alluring Animal Responses 66
1.7 An Affective Coalition of Entangled Responses 72
1.8 Animal Visions 89
References 92

2 Artful Dream Writing into the Roots 105

2.1 The Call of Dream Writing 105
2.2 The Gift of Writing Dreams 118
2.3 Dreamy Responses 126
2.4 The Playful Work of Visioning 142
References 158

3 Ghosts: Of Writing, at Windows, in Mirrors, on Moors 161

3.1 The Afterlife of Emily Brontë 161
3.2 Spectral Revising as Serious Posthumanist Play 169
3.3 The Cathy Ghost at the Window 171
3.4 The Cathy Ghost in the Mirror 173

vii
viii    Contents

3.5 The Cathy Ghost on the Moor 187

3.6 The Haunted Moor 190
References 191

4 Moor Loving 195

4.1 Affective Cross-Species Communications 195
4.2 Inclusive and Entangled Topographies 197
4.3 The Weathering Wind 206
4.4 A Flowing Dialogue 221
4.5 Quiet Listening and Tumultuous Naming 224
References 232

5 Respecting and Trusting the Beast 235

5.1 The Immanence of Animal Drifts 235
5.2 The Animal Heathcliff 246
5.3 The Gaze of the Cinematic ‘I’ 253
5.4 A Healing Co-affectivity 262
References 264

6 Animal Grace 267

6.1 Suturing the Wounds of Humanism 267
6.2 Dream-Writing into the to-Come 279
References 284

Glossary 287

Cited Works 293

Index 309
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction:
Emplaced Readerly Devotions

1.1  Dream Writing Beyond

Anthropocentric Hierarchies
Ideas of human superiority are embedded in the cultural model of
dominion that patterns most human societies at this historical moment.
This limited anthropocentric thinking has been instrumental in bru-
tal injustices against animals of all species, humans included, especially
over the past two hundred and fifty years of global industrialisation, and
most concertedly in the last fifty years of intensifying animal agriculture.
Literature offers readers a way to respond to the ethical and environmen-
tal damage caused by this cruel privileging of some humans over most
other animals.
This socially fabricated conceit of privilege has grown largely from the
dominant rationalism of the Enlightenment period, after a strong wave
of scientific determinism did much to rid nonhuman animals of person-
hood. Many influential thinkers from this time followed René Descartes’
determination of animal bodies as machines. Descartes argues that the
particularities of sentience qualify only the human species for ensoul-
ment. All other species, he insists, are a homogenous group of living
beings dependent on instinctive bodily senses and associative memories.
As he infamously declares, ‘humans are the only thinking being’ ([1637]
1993, 19). Despite his surety, Descartes also acknowledges his position
is inherently problematic, for humans are of course, animals. His own,

© The Author(s) 2019 1

S. M. Pyke, Animal Visions,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03877-9_1
2 S. M. PYKE

and other contemporary critiques of this position, were strengthened

through a surge of Romantic thinking that reformulated the living world
as deeply interconnected and ensouled.
Cartesian ideas of human exceptionality contrast with the parallel
thinking of the controversial Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza. Spinoza
broadens ‘the perfection of things’ from anthropocentric limits of what is
‘of use to, or are incompatible with, human nature’ to a broader universe
of affect ([1677] 1985, 446). Spinoza argues that while humans most
often see the world in ways that suit them, there is more to the world
than this perspective. Much of Spinoza’s materialist thinking has been
applied in contemporary resistances to the doctrine of human excep-
tionality, an ethical direction that informs my work. Humans can never
have godlike knowledge, according to Spinoza, when ‘God’ is under-
stood as ‘a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each
one expresses an eternal and infinite essence’ (409). Humans, he writes,
are more limited than this ‘God’, but they can strive towards greater
godly reason. My effort is to understand the less hierarchical perspective
Spinoza makes visible, as far as I am humanly able.
Despite Spinoza’s long-standing protest, the Cartesian idea that
humans deserve more of the world than other species still dominates, as
does the assumption that humans have a right to benefit from the bodies
of other animals. Doctrinal disputes bristle over the question of ensoul-
ment, ethical disputes rage over which animals are appropriate to main
and kill in the name of experimental vivisection, yet meanwhile the use
of nonhuman animals for the physical and psychological sustenance of
humans remains the global norm. Now the ethics of assuming nonhu-
man animals as companions are under debate, as the human strings of
conditionality tied to such relations become increasingly problematic.
My critical engagement with literary texts explores resistances to spe-
ciesist assumptions of superiority, working with texts that offer, to var-
ying degrees, less hierarchical understandings of animal cognition and
sentience. My focus on literature that offers insights into cross-species
relations means I am not able to consider metamorphic shape-shifters
here, even while I find this trope fascinating. It is hard to resist the sug-
gestive possibilities of the slithery bat-lizard that is also Bram Stoker’s
Count Dracula, and I feel for Mary Shelley’s creature, made of body
parts gathered from the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter-house’
([1818] 1996, 32). I do not deal with anthropomorphism in detail
either, even while as a younger reader, I was deeply imprinted by the
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 3

viewpoint of Anne Sewell’s Black Beauty, an impression supported by

the time I spent with a horse who would only take a bridle’s bit if it
came with slices of apple. I can still imagine the pain of blinkers, fashion-
able reins and a ‘hard-tempered hard-handed man’ ([1877] 1978, 46).
The ‘sudden uprising’ of George Orwell’s politicised farm animals has
long been my favourite ‘Rebellion’ ([1945] 2000, 12). In my mind, the
seventh commandment in this text still applies without exception; every
animal ‘is equal’ whatever their differences and excellences (15). Orwell’s
utopian vision, albeit short-lived, is a brilliant comment on the potential
of animal politics.
The unabashedanthropomorphism in literary works such as those of
Sewell and Orwell, helps readers to deal, in positive ways, with unjust
cross-species relations. By strategically depicting nonhuman animals
speaking in human languages, or engaging in social relations specific to
humans, these texts make clear the harms done by the human species
to other creatures. Lori Gruen, a leading animal studies philosopher
and advocate, distinguishes between ‘arrogant anthropomorphism’,
which she glosses as ‘human chauvinism’, and the more ‘inevitable
anthropomorphism’ where human perceptions of other animals are
shaped by what are understood as shared capabilities between spe-
cies (2015, 24). Gruen’s equitable nuance allows Immanuel Kant’s
well-known claim to stand, in an extended form. It is true, as Kant
argues, that human ‘knowledge begins with experience’ ([1781]
2001, 19). Humans can only see what can humanly be seen, feel
what can humanly be felt. However, these sensations need not lead to
speciesism.
When Kant is read through Spinoza, his perspective seems reasona-
ble and helpful. As Omri Boehm shows, in his consideration of the
importance of Spinoza’s work on Kant’s thinking, there is a ‘regula-
tive Spinozism’ in the relations he draws between what can be known
and what is lived through (2014, n.p.). It is the practical focus of Kant,
Boehm argues, that differentiates these two thinkers. I suggest there is
nothing inherently practical in Kant’s claim that human capabilities offer
them a rightful means to use other animals as they will. Kant is right that
I can only describe agency, human or nonhuman, from where I am situ-
ated, but it does not follow that human agency has a greater validity than
that of other animal agencies.
While I understand that representing all animals as if they are
humans is, to a degree, unavoidable, and while recognising that
4 S. M. PYKE

anthropomorphic literature can improve cross-species relations, I am

attracted to an ethics of writing that works to move beyond this human-
ist paradigm. In Susan McHugh’s analysis of animal literary scholarship,
she tackles the ‘complex dynamics of reading literary animals as substi-
tutes for human subjects-in-the-making’ (2011, 7). As McHugh demon-
strates, the most effective way to change these power-ridden dynamics
is to develop a ‘narrative ethology’ that learns from life sciences (19).
This is sound advice, although there is, as McHugh notes, a pitfall.
Inevitably, it is humans who teach humans about the cognitions and
behaviours of nonhuman animals. However, this is no reason to shy
away from learning more about cross-species relations, particularly given
emerging collaborative learning frames. Marc Bekoff, both biologist and
animal behaviourist, gives full credit to Jethro, a rabbit-rescuing rescue
dog that shares his life, in the development of his work on the ‘active
and thoughtful minds’ of animals other than humans (2002, 22). Eben
Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich theorise this approach, as they seek more
equitable ways for humans to work together with other animals to ‘fuse,
refuse, and confuse’ pre-existing categories that operate in ethological
studies (2010, 553). Artistic shared agency is leading these multispe-
cies trans-disciplinary directions. These approaches are readily accessible
to scholars in the environmental humanities with an interest in animal
studies.
Ethical multispecies ethnography is possible, at least to an extent,
because human communications are animal communications. I am,
primarily, bound within my own species-specific communicative abili-
ties, but these may be read by individuals of other species in ways that
have meaning for them, just as I make my own sense of the movements
and sounds of creatures who are close to me. As McHugh goes on to
argue, narrative ethology that emphasises ‘embodied relations of agency
and form’ can broaden human experiences of what it is to be one ani-
mal amongst many others (217). It is best, such thinking suggests, for
me to read through and beyond textual signifiers, always informed by
my shared communications with animals of other species that I know
well. In this way, literature that pays attention to shared communica-
tions between species may well be limited to human understandings of
these relations, but these understandings need not be anthropocentric.
An engaged reading of literary works that grant personhood to all ani-
mals, no matter their excellences, can counter the violence of centralising
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 5

humans that are (most often) cis, white, male and in a position of
influence.
The marginalisation of most animals as a reduced category is so
entrenched, the assumption of dominion so ‘natural’, that innovative lit-
erary resistance is needed to depict animalities in ways that make room
for a specific creature’s personhood. I suggest that literary depictions
that seek post-anthropocentric ways of seeing the world can be enriched
through dream writing. Dreams offer unexpected and moving ways of
viewing the world that are not obvious in a conscious state. Depictions
of dreams are often accompanied by an intense form of writing.
Mesmerising and affective texts dream with their readers in surprising
ways that can unsettle the given, including the unconscious privileging
of one species over others. French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous
has brilliantly argued—and demonstrated through her own writing—that
when creative works give themselves over to the affect of words—when
they dream write—they can open new conceptual spaces for their read-
ers. Cixous characterises dream writing by drawing on her engagement
with the philosopher, Jacques Derrida, and by association, with psycho-
analytic thought. Sigmund Freud is the always-present ghost in the sensi-
tive thinking of these two theorists.
Dream writing is a practice, and Cixous is an exemplary dream writ-
ing practitioner. Thinking my species into less harmful relations with
other species, begins, for me, with dream writing nonhuman animals
with personhood, leaving space for cognitions beyond human under-
standing. Anthropomorphism must be faced critically in this process, as
writing and reading nonhuman animals as would-be-humans can erase
nonhuman agency. Being specific about animal similarities and differ-
ences helps, as does being tuned into the individual predilections of each
animal, no matter their species. This non-anthropocentric dream writing
invites readers to re-imagine themselves as the vulnerable animals they
are, co-dependent with other species in a shared and fragile world.
My emphasis on dream writing is not intended to take away from
foundational efforts to understand nonhuman species in and for them-
selves. Indeed, it is such work that allows literature to granulate and
change the ways animal subjects, animal people, are written and read.
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) achieves a great deal of
ground-breaking work towards this end, and his thinking is politically
enriched with the feminist perspective in Carol Joy Adams’s The Politics
6 S. M. PYKE

of Meat (1990). Cultural theorists Cary Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti add
distinct yet related modes of post-anthropocentric thinking to such dis-
courses of animal advocacy. Gruen’s work, grounded in a lifetime of
fighting animal exploitation, gathers her thinking under practically the-
orised terms, where empathy and sanctuary are couched in stories of the
rodents and primates that have shaped her life. Together, these thinkers
offer a strong argument that a shift towards a more socially just world
requires fundamental changes in cross-species relations.
Philosophical developments in animal justice are increasingly inform-
ing literary analysis. I was introduced to literary animal studies through
Grace Moore’s insightful reading of the triangulations between dogs
and humans in the work of Charles Dickens, in a prescient collection of
works, Victorian Animal Dreams (2007). This led to my first paper at
an animal studies conference, where I met the indefatigable political sci-
entist and animal advocate, Siobhan O’Sullivan. Not only did her pecan
love cake offer the final sweet push that turned me vegan, a brilliant
workshop she arranged, with Anat Pick, Robert McKay and Tom Tyler,
committed me to this area of study.
Like resetting a body’s habits of reading and eating, resetting lan-
guage for change is difficult and often contested. My investigation into
dream writing activates key conceptualisations that indicate the directions
of my research. I provisionally define these terms in their first use, and
in the glossary following my final chapter. Words can hold humans in
ontological stasis. Even the difficulties in using the term animal are clear,
as indicated by the fissures Descartes identifies in his own thinking. Peter
Harrison suggests Descartes’ position is not clear cut, detailing his read-
iness to include humans in the category animal, and making the point
that while he only granted ‘thought and self-consciousness’ to humans,
he had no doubt that other species could feel (1992, 220). Derrida com-
plicates these destructive divisions between humans and other animals
with the neologism ‘l’animot’, a difficult but helpful term, well summa-
rized by Mathew Calarco as an escape from the ‘metaphysically-laden
concept’ of animal (2009, n.p.). I await a word that allows for the mul-
tiplicity of animal people. Such terms are needed to improve the relation-
ships between humans and other animal species.
There are promising struggles towards a new vocabulary. Critical
theorist and feminist Donna Haraway offers a range of terms that blur
harmful distinctions between species. Her term ‘littermates’ is par-
ticularly appealing (2016, 31). Perhaps there is another like-term that
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 7

includes animals not born to a litter. Unable to source a word that

suits my purposes completely, trying to convey a sense of human ani-
mality rather than human exceptionality, where possible I use species-
specific terms, or speak of multispecies or cross-species animals. Yet to
emphasise the idea of species is ethically fraught because of the con-
straints that come with such typologies. At times I refer to the non-
human, to indicate not-understood, or not-assumed, but this word
can also connote a lack, a not-me. I write of the ‘more than human’,
or ‘other than human’ but there is judgement in these terms too, that
typify the all-too-human difficulties in projects that seek to undermine
anthropocentricism.
When I describe the linguistic structures that support power-laden
differentiations between animal species, words are still more obdurate.
Derrida, who increasingly writes away from the Judeo-Christian think-
ing that gives humans dominion over other animals, describes this cul-
tural propensity—ironically, tongue-twistingly—as ‘anthropo-­theological’
(2009, 14). This strong lexical gathering emphasises the historically
determined ways in which humans think themselves before other species.
The constraints embedded in this term are also immediately obvious.
Anthropo. Humans, front and centre. Theological. The cumbersome
masculinist weight of reason. Yet within this linguistic structure is
an alternative path that might lead, with a playful nudge, to zoo-thea-
illogical thinking. Words might resist change, but unframed they can
also become a dissident force.
My next terminological difficulty comes with the conceptual com-
plexity of the term posthumanist. Haraway claims she is a ‘compostist
not a posthumanist’, wittily refusing to employ a word that foregrounds
the human (2016, 71). I use this term according to Braidotti’s think-
ing that to be posthumanist is to be ‘post-anthropocentric’ (2013,
16). Importantly, Braidotti notes that there could be no posthumanist
perspectives without the work of early Enlightenment and Romantic
humanist writers, focused on creating a more equitable world through
their philosophical and creative works. While humanism is, by definition,
focused on individual human advancement, it is rooted in the social jus-
tice principles that apply to animal advocacy.
Stefan Herbrechter, following a similar trajectory to Braidotti, traces
the antecedents of the word posthumanism back to the fifteenth-century,
to put forward the idea of critical posthumanism. For Herbrechter, the
‘historical effect’ of the human species has evolved in tandem with the
8 S. M. PYKE

‘ideological affect’ of humanism (2013, n.p.). Critically thinking through

humanism, he argues, is the next step. From this perspective, the ver-
bal mark of post in the posthumanist is not so much an epistemological
break, as it is a description of thinkers who are working to move beyond
individualistic thinking and the teleological death-oriented focus that
drives ideas of human advancement. Wolfe also argues that posthuman-
ism is not about a ‘triumphal surpassing or unmaking’ (2010, 47). As he
explains, the acceptance of a universe populated with nonhuman people
comes with a need for humans to increase their ‘vigilance, responsibility,
and humility’ (47). A cross-species understanding of all creatures as equal
actors upon the stage of personhood radicalises what it is to be human.
My commitment to a post-anthropocentric approach is driven by
my adherence to a less contested term, that of ecofeminism. I was led
to this school of thinking by ecocritic Kate Rigby, who introduced me
to Val Plumwood’s ground-breaking work. Plumwood was one of the
first philosophers to link feminist agendas with other movements resist-
ing anthropo-theological oppressions. Critical ecofeminist posthumanist
thinking, with its common ethical ground of a social justice focus, shapes
my work here.
Ecofeminism is marked by a strong materialist heft, and in this mix,
I find Karen Barad’s pioneering approach to quantum physics and liter-
ary philosophy extremely helpful. Barad understands matter as ‘agentive’
rather than a ‘fixed property’, and allows for an ‘iterative production of
different differences’ that change what it is to interact with the world
(2007, 137). Once humans are established as ‘phenomena, not inde-
pendent entities with inherent properties’, the concept of humanity
changes (2008, 136). Creatures amongst other creatures, humans enact
‘their differential becoming’ through ‘shifting boundaries and p ­ roperties’
(136). These connective enactments, which Barad refers to as intra-
actions, are embedded in the past, yet open to the future. Barad notes,
along the lines argued by Spinoza, that these contingent determinations
show there is nothing exceptional about a human, or, more precisely, the
world is made up of always-becoming matter that creates transubjective
beings-in-formation, some of whom are human.
There are ethics involved in critical responses to the affect experienced
in the differential materialisations of humans in process. Barad’s think-
ing demonstrates to me the importance of being attentive to the ways in
which my body, in all its times and spaces, shapes my affective responses.
It takes careful critical attention to position my historicised human
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 9

responses in the context of ever-shifting patterns that involve all sorts of

emerging animal personhoods. Inclusive notions of affect are required.
I use the term affect in a neo-Spinozian sense, where human affect
happens in bodies that cannot be separated from the materially related
affects of the wider world. Critical theorist Brian Massumi refers to
this as the ‘vitality affect’ (2014, 25). Responding to the inspirational
neo-Spinozian spirals created by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Massumi carefully dissociates the vitality affect from cultur-
ally conditioned emotions, or ‘feeling limited to replaying itself’ (80).
My reading of literary animal texts is offered as part of such increments
towards a politic of affective response. I look for literary moments where
the human is responsive to and with the world in ways that do not belit-
tle the intra-active and entangled responses of other animals. My liter-
ary animal studies perspective, enriched by ecofeminist literary theory,
and held to account by critical posthumanist thinking, is deeply sympa-
thetic to the affective turn led by Deleuze and Guattari, as articulated
by Massumi. Dream writing comes to life through the affected read-
ing body. When dream writing resists human mastery, it assists bodies
to move in the political ways needed to nurture more attentive relations
between humans and other animals.
The works I define as dream writing might not be considered as such
by different readers. The act of reading is dependent on the experiences
held within each reading body. These life-given differences ensure that
a multiplicity of affect will always enliven the dialogue between literary
works and their readers. Indeed, it is these very dialogues that co-create
dream writing’s generative spaces. Encounters between text and reader
must be open and multiple, to allow for an escape from the human-­
centric ecological mastery that has placed all species, including humans,
at risk. I can only offer my view of what posthumanist dream writing
might be. Like other readers, I approach the bodies known as books,
shaped by my lifetime of complex connections with other animals, and
my readings are part of a larger substance of the world that communi-
cates with me. Readers are embodied with the bodies of others, includ-
ing the books that they read.
A crucial element to my approach to dream writing is that part
of human language known as metaphor. Metaphors are not lin-
guistically confined. Like touch and sight, metaphors are wired to
human neuropsychology, functioning to make connections between
humans and their experienced world in an embodied and material way.
10 S. M. PYKE

Metaphor helps humans make physical sense of their world. The central
text that drives my analysis, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published
in 1847, is brilliantly metaphorical. This wonderfully complex novel, still
being reprinted and downloaded as I write these words, offers an alter-
native to anthropo-theological thinking, even while—or sometimes
because—it describes its characters through all kinds of animals. A range of
textual responses to this canonical text echo Brontë’s non-anthropocentric
metaphorical inflections. Their readings create a body of works that
demonstrate the importance of Brontë’s text to literary animal studies.
These textual responses to Brontë’s canonical novel offer more than
superficial reflections of this work’s triangular love story. Unlike many
Wuthering Heights remakes, the texts I consider here lead their readers
and audiences deeper into the dark inchoate expanse of dream writing
that marks Brontë’s work. In taking this direction, they offer a radical
affect that may encourage less harmful human relations with other ani-
mals. The lyrical poetics in Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (1997),
is an especially generative response to Brontë’s novel. I also respond
strongly to Kathy Acker’s “Obsession” (1992). Like Carson’s work, this
is a long poem, but where Carson’s poem speaks to visions, Acker offers
her readers a nightmare. Carson and Acker, through their works, reveal
themselves as dream readers of Brontë’s text. Similarly, dream readings
are performed, again very differently, through the two novels I focus on
here; Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven (1989) and Stevie Davies’ Four
Dreamers and Emily ([1996] 2002). Plath’s dreamy modernist poem,
“Wuthering Heights” (1961), while brief, is also a fascinating textual
response to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
In addition, I focus on four audio-visual adaptations in my sur-
vey of dream readers. I begin with the unprecedented modulations of
Kate Bush’s pop-song “Wuthering Heights” (1978a), emphasising
the ‘red dress’ music video produced at the time of her single’s release
(1978b). The significant reference to this work in Christina Andreef’s
arthouse film Soft Fruit (1999) helps qualify this work for inclusion.
I read William Wyler’s early Hollywood Wuthering Heights (1939)
for one ghostly scene with Lockwood, and also consider the political
silence of Cathy in Peter Kosminsky’s mainstream Wuthering Heights
(1992). I spend considerable time with Luis Buñuel’s surreal Abismos de
Pasión (1954), focusing on this work’s allowance for animals other than
humans, and I also analyse the depictions of different species in Andrea
Arnold’s critically acclaimed Wuthering Heights (2011). As with other
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 11

texts, these last two works do not explicitly describe interconnections

between human and nonhuman characters, but they make room for the
personhood of all creatures.
Brontë’s novel offers a great deal to literary animal studies. Davies
argues that Brontë was a ‘post-humanist in an anthropocentric world’
because of her ‘reverence and respect for mortal creatures’ (1994, 111).
Literary scholar Ivan Kreilkamp makes important observations on ‘the
meanings of pethood, animality, and cruelty’ in his analysis of Brontë’s
Heathcliff, in relation to her dog Keeper, together with Derrida’s cat
(2005, 87). Building on Kreilkamp’s work, also with an eye on Keeper,
Deborah Denenholz Morse describes Brontë’s novel as a ‘touchstone
early Victorian text known to be written by an intense animal-lover’,
that connects readers ‘with the savage wildness of the Yorkshire moors’
(2007, 182). As such analyses suggest, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
deserves a solid place in the growing field of literary animal studies.
Brontë’s work reflects the evolution of the Romantic prescient dream
towards Victorian ideas of dreams as measures of the inner mind’s work-
ings. This concept was fundamental to emerging developments in the con-
cept of dream interpretation, and informed Freud’s introduction of the
idea of dream writing in his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams
([1900] 1985). Cixous and Derrida, who work together with, and apart
from Freud, gracefully extend his lightly theorised formulation of dream
writing into their critical thinking. Cixous, particularly, takes the idea of
dream writing and makes it her own, both in practice and in theory.
I am inspired by Cixous’ conceptualisations of the potential in dream
writing, including her brilliantly enacted and wonderfully titled Dream I
Tell You (2006a). The literary destabilisations she finds in dream writing
(and telling and reading) are significant. Such writing becomes posthu-
manist for me when it shifts my relations with other animals. Brontë’s
novel takes on this posthumanist momentum when dream-written ani-
mals have subjecthood. Such writing opens the possibility of attending to
the co-affectivity between beings sharing habitat, disrupting anthropo-
centric divisions between humans and other animals.

1.2  The Pulse of Disruptive Minor Gestures

Posthumanist dream writing has its roots in the Romantic literary
tropes of unsettled dreams and disturbing visions. Many of the literary
works from this period offer an ecological perspective, and some make
12 S. M. PYKE

space for less hierarchical cross-species relations. Brontë’s Wuthering

Heights displays traits of this resistance to oppressive conceptual hier-
archies that involve human assumptions of superiority over other crea-
tures. Her novel is also marked by Romanticism’s engagement with ideas
of a mystical imagination, characterized by Davies as a dreamy ‘yearn-
ing toward the remote and unattainable’ (1994, 219). Davies has spent
considerable time thinking about ‘the power to dream’ emphasized in
Wuthering Heights (1983, 87). To read Wuthering Heights, she sug-
gests, is to understand what it is to dream with Brontë. As well, Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights takes on Victorian concerns with fragmentation and
reflexivity, a focus that marks postmodern literature. These depictions of
human fragility, integral now to modern psychoanalytic thinking, offer
fertile ground for Brontë’s exemplary dream writing, I will now consider
this literary context in detail showing how, as the novel slips between
Victorian realism and the Victorian Gothic’s challenges to normalcy,
Brontë’s depiction of subjectivity for characters of all species emerges as
clearly a dream trace triggered through the day.
The Romantic Gothic gained great popularity during the revolution-
ary ferment of the late eighteenth century, positioning itself at odds with
sacrosanct systems, including the overbearing decision-making powers
of the patriarchal family, and the embroilment of a corruptible church
in matters of state and morality. The uncanny ghosts and dreams of
Brontë’s novel take up these concerns, gaining traction through three
of the Gothic’s conventions: temporal chaos, entrapment and character
doublings.
Brontë’s novel is well-recognised for its disorienting collapses and
expansions of time-periods. Literary critic Peter Otto characterises the
Gothic’s strategically unfixed temporality as a disordered doubling, where
in ‘sequential time’, apparently ‘disparate events’ strangely ‘seem to
repeat each other’ (2010, 95). The analepses and prolepses in Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights create this sense of disorder. As Otto explains, tem-
poral confusions create first and second order worlds that produc-
tively blur the boundaries between imaginative and physical worlds.
The Gothic thus anticipates the postmodernist ‘hyperreal’ simulacrum
described by Jean Baudrillard, that can only be escaped through an inci-
sive ‘third order’ of ‘theory and practice’ (2001, 121). Brontë’s structural
(dis)ordering of the novel requires readers to mediate twists and turns
of the plot back and forward through an already disordered time, free-
ing them to question the ways in which the world itself is structured.
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 13

The masterly hierarchies that mark anthropo-theological thinking are set

askew by the novel’s unsettling repetitions.
The enclosing walls of Thrushcross Grange that Brontë’s Cathy
escapes through death, and the window her ghost knocks on and (per-
haps) breaks, a generation later, are two significant images of entrapment
and release evoked in the novel. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
argue, ‘spatial imagery’, such as these transgressed walls and windows,
can disrupt the acceptance of women’s containment ([1979] 2000,
83). Kate Ferguson Ellis supports Gilbert and Gubar’s literary analysis
of this aspect of Brontë’s novel, arguing further that while depictions of
entrapment shape female identification and define male control, they also
open these shapings and definitions to potential violation (1989, 221).
As Victorianist scholar Diane Long Hoeveler so brilliantly puts it, the
Gothic heroine pushes aside all that contains her, seeking out ‘the secret
hidden from her by patriarchy’ (1998, 21, xxi). As they find the hidden
cracks in this ‘protection racket’, they also reframe positions of power
(xxi). The unresolved boundary crossings in Wuthering Heights enact
this ongoing quest.
Pushing against masculinist entrapment is also a key feature in the
works I deal with here. The ongoing threat of psychological and phys-
ical harm that women face inside and outside their homes ensures the
relevance of these Gothic nuances. Such threats are also faced by crea-
tures of other species. As Dinesh Wadiwel establishes in his cultural anal-
ysis of power dynamics in The War against Animals (2015), and as Sri
and Aph Ko also show, in their blistering political review of the harms of
colonialism in Aphro-ism (2017), patterns of human abuse intersect with
the assumption that those in power have a right to mistreat less powerful
creatures of other species.
The Gothic theme of carceration, that underpins Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights, is reworked in one of the very first literary responses to her
work. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ([1848] 1994) the
intersection between harms to women and harms to animals of other
species is very clear. Victorianist Laura Berry shows how the softer ide-
als of pedagogy and care associated with parental custody, hot embers in
Anne Brontë’s novel, flare into violence in Emily Brontë’s novel. Berry
writes; ‘the house itself keeps turning into a penal colony’ and those who
cross its threshold are transformed ‘into either prisoner or ward’ (1996,
39). This is as true for dogs and horses as it is for humans.
14 S. M. PYKE

It is not difficult to see the carceral implications of custody when it

comes to nonhuman creatures who are ‘looked after’ by humans. The
Gothic genre is highly suitable for critiquing these repeating patterns
of abuse because it is a political but not a polemical genre. As literary
scholar David Punter puts it, the Gothic has always paid close attention
to ‘foregrounding social issues’ of its time (2012, 4). Brontë employs
the dream-ridden force of Gothic conventions that lay bare patterns
of abuse, offering the possibility of moving away from violent controls
not only over women, but also over a working class that includes lamed
horses and fought-over dogs.
The theme of entrapment, important to Emily Brontë, and Anne
Brontë, is also foregrounded in the works of Charlotte Brontë.
Representations of imprisonment are constants in the Brontë juvenilia,
and these tropes repeat in the novels of these three sisters. For Phillip
Wion, this focus reflects the psychological state created by the fam-
ily’s circumstances. Applying commonly cited aspects of the Brontë
biography, Wion argues that because Emily Brontë’s mother died at a
‘crucial point in her development’, her novel can be read ‘in terms of
struggles, fantasies and fears’ that follow an unresolved ‘separation-
individuation process’ (1985, 146). Davies makes a similar point when
she links Brontë’s tender feelings for ‘kin’ and ‘earth’, with her ‘inter-
rupted relationship’ with her mother (1994, 172). In such readings,
walls, and other boundaries become signifiers for unresolved psycho-
logical processes that keep the self and the world separate. I appreciate
these insights and add that the formative psychic factors shaping Brontë’s
depictions of containment are also socially bound. These early separa-
tions that trouble the formation of a sturdy individual self, and create
fragilities best healed by writing through this loss, might, in this very
vulnerability, make space for more productive relations to emerge with
other people, be they human, or of another species.
Such openings for social dissent emerge strongly from the Gothic
doubling in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Not only are character vulner-
abilities exposed, but also, importantly, this trope undermines assump-
tions of an ordered world of rational logic, that privileges both the
individual and pre-existing class orders. This gives political consequence
to literary critic Lyn Pykett’s argument that the Romantic ‘unified sense
of the self’ is complicated by Brontë’s attention to that self’s ‘inevitable
diffusion and fragmentation’ (1989, 66). Like the dark Earnshaw eyes of
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 15

the first generation that repeat in the second, there is a dizzying confu-
sion of names that are continually switched in the appellations of other
characters. There is Nelly, Ellen and Mrs Dean, one person, known dif-
ferently by other characters. Then there is the interchangeability between
Cathy (Catherine) Linton née Earnshaw, and her daughter, Catherine
(Cathy) Heathcliff née Linton. While not wanting to obscure this impor-
tant confusion, for clarity’s sake here, I will refer to Catherine Linton née
Earnshaw as Cathy, and Catherine Heathcliff née Linton, as Catherine
and use Nelly, not Ellen or Mrs Dean.
This productive refusal to honour the myth of the rational indi-
vidual is at its most psychologically revealing in the descriptions that
fuse Cathy and Heathcliff. As Cathy (Catherine Linton née Earnshaw)
famously tells Nelly (the elderly Mrs Dean and the youthful Ellen),
‘I am Heathcliff ’ ([1847] 1997, 82). This is no empty boast. The
younger socially ambitious Cathy marries Heathcliff ’s rival, Edgar,
based on a perceived need for economic power. In a doubling motion,
the older Heathcliff seeks economic security that will give him agency
over his life. The older Heathcliff becomes unrestrainedly passion-
ate as the younger Cathy gives full vent to her emotions. The older
Cathy is as hypersensitive as the fragile younger Heathcliff. Vitally,
the sharing of subjectivities between Cathy and Heathcliff splits fur-
ther, to include the other creatures that join them in the moor. To
re-employ Steven Vine’s delightful terminology, Heathcliff and Cathy
shapeshift through the ‘wuther of the other’ (1994, 339). Cathy iden-
tifies with the lapwings of the moor, moving through her life in col-
laboration with the wind. Together, she and Heathcliff wing their
ways across the buffeting gusts of their life just as they run from ‘the
top of the Heights to the park, without stopping’ ([1847] 1997, 48).
They flock together, are cruelly tarred with the same feathers. There
is a fluidity of being that flows between Cathy, Heathcliff and other
creatures. Similarly, the coltish Heathcliff tosses his ‘mane’, herding
Cathy in his thoughts (59). Animal psychologist Gala Argent points
out that equine interactions are focused on working together; horses
are ‘inherently cooperative’ (2012, 113). Heathcliff and Cathy see the
other’s intent and move together with this equine synchrony. They
herd together, protect each other against a predatory world. The
vulnerable animality of Heathcliff and Cathy brings the dangers that
humans present to other animals into focus, and the compassion in
16 S. M. PYKE

Brontë’s ethologically sound metaphors offers a route for readers to

see the wrongs in such threats.
As I investigate the philosophical thinking that emerges from Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights, making connections to my concerns, and those of
the novel’s adaptations, my interest in alternatives to animal exploitation
will become evident. I am employing the mode of ‘strategic presentism’
outlined by Jesse Oak Taylor, where I read Brontë’s novel ‘with care and
attention’ to her ‘historical moment’ in ways that might ‘intervene in
contemporary environmentalist practice’ (2016, 879). I do so, mindful
of the caution suggested by Elaine Freedgood and Michael Sanders in
their response to emerging thinking around strategic presentism. That
is, I have no intention to ‘defeat neoliberalism with literary theory’,
but rather, I try to ‘draw inspiration’ from Brontë’s novel (2016, 118).
While I hope to be more diffractive than ‘self-reflexive’ in my work, I
am ‘situated’ in the way suggested by Freedgood and Sanders (119).
Reading is part of my effort to respond more appropriately to a world
where many species are struggling to survive. My literary passions invar-
iably come together with my political concerns in the works that move
me. Freedgood and Sanders go on to suggest that Victorianists are
most effectively strategically presentist when engaging with works from
this era that can help with human emancipation. I extend their claim to
my hope that nonhuman emancipation might be also found in the rich
ancestry of thought that includes Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Brontë’s characterisations of interconnected selves, able to meta-
phorically shapeshift into other animal species, have sympathies with
the principles of Romantic naturalism. This philosophy is most famously
encapsulated in Alexander von Humboldt’s analogy, the web of life,
that ‘rich luxuriance of living nature, and the mingled web of free and
restricted natural forces’ ([1845] 1997, n.p.). As German Romanticist
Elizabeth Millán points out, Humboldt, and the other leading naturalist
of the time, Johannes von Goethe, wrote in ‘close company’ (2011, 98).
The Romantic naturalists’ idea of an interconnected world is apparent in
the heather of Cathy’s dreams, in Cathy’s protection of lapwings from
Heathcliff’s early mistreatment and in Cathy’s bodily need for the moor
in all weathers.
Brontë was particularly interested in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling’s philosophies, which closely follow the work of Goethe.
Schelling’s thinking has been given a recent reemphasis by philosopher
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 17

Matthew McManus, not so much for the answers provided by his work,
but rather for the still-relevant questions Schelling raises. For McManus,
Schelling allows for ‘paradoxes of the infinite’ that shape human con-
sciousness (2017, 251). In this unknowable space, potentialities are cre-
ated that ‘unfurl’ as ‘material events’ (259). Schelling’s dynamic world of
contingent relations aligns with the neo-Spinozian interconnected reci-
procity I find in Brontë’s novel and portions of its afterlife. This line-
age is important. As Rigby explains, ‘contemporary ecological discourses’
are informed by Goethe’s view of the world as an interconnected whole,
where the human is just another thread in the web (2004, 28). Brontë’s
novel, and the textual responses I discuss here, resonate with such under-
standings of the world.
Some readings of Romantic naturalism, particularly of Goethe, tend
towards a universalism that is at odds with Brontë’s more dynamic
view of the world. Pioneering ecocritic, James McKusick, suggests
Goethe’s thinking involves a ‘holistic paradigm’ (2000, 11). There is a
risk that this perspective can lead to anthropocentric hubris, reflected in
McKusick’s well-meaning suggestion that such thinking provides a ‘con-
ceptual and ideological basis for understanding the potential of salvaging
our damaged world’ (11). As eco-theological philosopher Bruce Foltz
argues, ecological concerns with ‘salvaging’ the world can be utilitar-
ian and humanly limited (1995, 17). The world might prefer to ‘remain
what it is’, with human intervention given up for more open relations
that allow other beings to dynamically move towards their ‘own possi-
bilities’ (17). There are ethical flaws in metaphors of organized unity,
activated to ideologically position humans as the mastermind of control.
This is a thread of anthropo-theological spin.
Holistic interpretations of Romantic naturalism justify the power that
humans willfully exercise over other species. Such human-centred view-
points often appropriate Charles Darwin’s work to describe nature as a
battle of teeth and claws, won or lost wars. His metaphor of the ‘tangled
bank’, in part conceptualised through his engagement with the thinking
of Goethe and Humboldt, need not be read in this way ([1859] 1968,
459). I interpret this entanglement through a neo-Spinozian account of
intensities, where as part of that bank, I give and take, as do the beings
around me. This reading of Darwinian entanglement suggests sets of
relations much closer to Rigby’s response to Goethe. As Rigby describes
it, Goethe saw humans as playing only one part in a far greater music,
18 S. M. PYKE

unlimited by a human score. Scaled down in this way, humans act as ‘a

tone, a shade in a harmony’ (2004, 29). Humans, as bit-players, have no
more right to rule than other creatures.
The doctrinal analogy of humans as beneficent gardeners is reframed
by Brontë, as it is by Goethe, to an understanding much closer to the
symbiotic diversity described by Haraway. Haraway’s evocative concept
of humans forming a part of all kinds of ‘oddkin’ resists the colonial mas-
ter story, with its antecedents in ideas of God-given stewardship (2016,
2). While some kin may feel odder than others, there is no denying the
ancestral and practical relations that bring human beingness together
with other ways of being. To denote other creatures as a separate species
is to deny the relations Darwin made evident. For Deborah Bird Rose,
who learns much from Australia’s first peoples, humans ignore this ‘con-
nectivity in ecology’ at their own peril (2017, 494). Humans are wired
for kinship with other animals. As Rose puts it, human bodies are built
as open systems that require and provide intergenerational and inter-spe-
cies care that is ‘expressed in bonds of mutual life-giving’ (496). Turning
away from the relational and interdependent ties of kinship creates a
chronicle of wrong-doing. Rose’s stories of extinction show the heart-
break written into such narratives.
Master narratives that represent the dominion of one species over oth-
ers as a given law continue to this day, but this is a complicated contin-
uum. As ecocritic Linda Williams wryly reminds her readers, the ‘Great
Chain of Being’, that had been developing since the earliest stages of
Romanticism, did not ‘suddenly snap at some point in the nineteenth
century…when Darwin published The Origin of Species’ (2017, 128).
While much contemporary thought draws on these major turns, other
narratives tell a different story. Philosopher Erin Manning, following
the work of Deleuze and Guattari, theorises the importance of small but
important shifts in her critical explorations of art as encounter. It is the
‘minor gestures’, she argues, that ‘recast the field’, in ways that create
‘a change in direction, a change in quality’ (2016, 23). Brontë’s novel
offers such a gesture in its refusals of exclusionary humanist thinking.
Minor gestures make a difference, and they do so in ways that do not
involve mastery. This gloriously insidious strength means master narra-
tives tend to dismiss or ignore the changes wrought by the canny and
insistent interferences of minor gestures.
My suggestion that Wuthering Heights adds to a growing refusal
of anthropocentric thinking, through minor gestures that interfere
 1 INTRODUCTION: EMPLACED READERLY DEVOTIONS 19

with anthropo-theological thinking, does not mean that I understand

Brontë’s work as critically posthumanist, as defined by Herbrechter. I do
suggest, however, that Brontë’s novel was influenced by the Romantics,
including Schelling, who in turn was influenced by Goethe. She may also
have been aware of another genealogy, more materialist than biologi-
cal, closely related to natural philosophy, that threads back to Spinoza.
However, as literary critic John Hewish puts it, this ‘apparent affinity’
with Spinozian thought in Wuthering Heights ‘does not imply’ that
Brontë had read his work (1969, 34). There is, however, as Hewish goes
on to argue, a ‘line of descent’ from Spinoza’s thinking that shapes her
novel (88). Brontë read widely and her family and visitors were com-
fortable with theological debate. George Eliot, born a year after Emily,
translated Spinoza’s work only six years after Wuthering Heights was pub-
lished. Thinking, like the human body, is not as contained as it might
appear.
The relationships that join the family trees of Spinoza and Goethe, in
ways that influence my thinking, are evidenced through William James’
radical empiricism. In Robert Richardson’s biography of James, he notes
how this process philosopher responded viscerally to Goethe’s ‘respect
for the world’, seeing his surroundings as a ‘teacher’ in flux, who was
all the better for acts of kindness (2006, 92). In turn, James’ apprecia-
tion of a world shaped by attentive interactions influenced Alfred North
Whitehead’s analysis of the interdependent encounters that form the
ongoing composition of the world. This lineage of thought leads directly
to Manning, and her efforts to show the significance of the minor ges-
ture theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. Manning’s work, together with
Massumi’s affect theory, responds to Whitehead’s analyses of subver-
sive diversities that complicate the notion of the world as a harmonious
symphony. In their collaboration, Thought in the Act (2014), Manning
and Massumi point to polyrhythms to explain how diversity gives the
impression of unity. A symphony is commonly defined as a harmonious
arrangement, but each musician’s rhythm works to the side of harmony,
and each audience member hears these polyrhythms slightly differently.
From this perspective, music is a process, created by an event involv-
ing composers, players and auditors. Multiplicity in encounters offers a
helpful way to understand the specificity of the Romanticism that shapes
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The novel’s allowance for less hierarchical
multispecies thinking makes its own rhythm to the side that reverberates
back past the German Romantics to Spinoza’s response to Descartes,
20 S. M. PYKE

and forward to my own time. Humans are the central species in Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights, but her depiction of other animals as interacting
subjects is a minor gesture that changes the novel’s performance. In
this disruptive minor gesture, that allows for complex psychic realities
for all creatures, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights contributes to an ongoing
and multitudinous dissidence that undoes dualistic tendencies to divide
humans from other animals. By depicting a shared non-hierarchical ani-
mality between species, Brontë contributes to what Williams calls the
‘historical flaws and fissures’ that challenge the powerful ‘narrative of the
Enlightenment’ (2008, 9). Such disturbances to presumed boundaries
between rationality and response correspond with the non-anthropocen-
tric aspects of the Romantic project of the imagination. These minor ges-
tures coalesce towards change.
Brontë’s attentive relationship to the world around her speaks to this
literary and philosophical inheritance. In particular, her poetry and novel
are, like Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s poems, deeply emplaced.
However, her writing operates to the side of his humanist gestures. Her
family’s admiration of Wordsworth is illustrated by Judith Barker, the
preeminent biographer of the Brontë family, in her report that Emily’s
brother Branwell wrote to Wordsworth seeking mentorship, a significant
act. No less significant is that fact that Wordsworth ‘did not deign to
reply’ to his ardent admirer (1994, 264). The Brontës’ social and phys-
ical writing context differed from that of Wordsworth, as a moor differs
from a lake, and as a parson differs from the lawyer of a corrupt Earl. It
is true, however, that like Wordsworth’s poetry, Brontë’s work reflects
a specific response to her social circle, her range of reading and her sus-
tained relationship with the physical surroundings in which she lived and
wrote. As literary critic Scott Hess argues, Wordsworth’s response to
place did not reinforce a Romantic ‘universal ecological ideal of holism
and harmony with nature’, but rather, spoke from a ‘specific social and
cultural position’ (2012, 7). This position reflected ‘historically specific
constellations of social, discursive and material practices’ (2). McKusick’s
thinking is in accord, insofar as he describes Wordsworth’s ‘ecolect’ as a
‘uniquely ecological idiom’ that evolves through his ‘distinctive way of
perceiving and responding to the natural world’ (2000, 44). The imag-
inative ecolects of Wordsworth and Brontë can be read together as cel-
ebrating specific human meanings created through their relations with
their nonhuman worlds, including the books that they read and the
places they inhabited.
Another random document with
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 ⁷But be ye strong, and let not your hands be
slack: for your work shall be rewarded.
7. be ye strong, etc.] The prophet’s warning is continued in this
verse.

⁸And when Asa heard these words, and ¹ the

prophecy of Oded the prophet, he took
courage, and put away the abominations out
of all the land of Judah and Benjamin, and out
of the cities which he had taken from the hill
country of Ephraim; and he renewed the altar
of the Lord, that was before the porch of the
Lord.
¹ Or, even.

8. and the prophecy of Oded the prophet] Some words have

fallen out of the text. Read, even the prophecy which Azariah the
son of Oded prophesied.

the abominations] compare 1 Kings xiv. 23, 24, xv. 12, 13.

the cities which he had taken) A loose reference to those said to

have been captured by Abijah (xiii. 19). There is no record of any
taken by Asa himself.

the hill country of Ephraim] The term describes the hilly country
between the plain of Esdraelon and the territory of Benjamin.

that was before the porch] Compare vii. 7, viii. 12.

 ⁹And he gathered all Judah and Benjamin, and
them that sojourned with them out of Ephraim
and Manasseh, and out of Simeon: for they
fell to him out of Israel in abundance, when
they saw that the Lord his God was with him.
9. them that sojourned with them] Compare x. 17, xi. 16, 17, xvi.
1.

out of Ephraim and Manasseh, and out of Simeon] In view of the

evidence of Kings and the special character of Chronicles this
statement cannot be regarded as having historical value for the time
of Asa. Taking it in connection with similar notices in 1 Chronicles ix.
3 (Ephraim and Manasseh), xii. 8, 19 (Gad and Manasseh), 2
Chronicles xxx. 1, 10, 11, 18, xxxiv. 9 (Ephraim and Manasseh; also
Zebulun, Issachar, and perhaps Asher) we may infer that these
references have significance for the time of the Chronicler (or his
source) and were inserted either (a) to gratify the wishes of certain
orthodox families in Jerusalem who counted themselves
descendants of North Israelite families, especially of Ephraim and
Manasseh, and were eager to think that their ancestors had
associated themselves with the fortunes of the true Israel at an early
date after the separation of the kingdoms or at least in pre-exilic
days. Or (b)—an interesting suggestion first advanced by Stade and
recently developed by Hölscher (Palästina in der persischen und
hellenistischen Zeit, 1903, pp. 30‒37)—we may suppose that the
reference is not to families resident in Jerusalem but to persons
living in the territories once occupied by Ephraim, Manasseh, etc.,
and loyal to the faith of the orthodox community in Jerusalem. The
former view seems favoured by 1 Chronicles ix. 3, the latter by 2
Chronicles xxx. 25 (despite the last words); and on general grounds
the latter view seems preferable to the present writer. If so, we have
in Chronicles the first traces of the extension of Judaism northwards
from Judea into Samaria and Galilee. Hölscher thinks that the
evidence of Chronicles can be supported from the late chapters
Zechariah ix.‒xiv., and from passages in Judith.
 Simeon] The territory of this tribe lay in the South (1 Chronicles
iv. 28‒43; Joshua xix. 1‒9), and it is natural to think that at the
disruption Simeon followed Judah in allegiance to the house of
David. Here, however, and in xxxiv. 6 it is reckoned as one of the ten
tribes forming the Northern Kingdom, for what reason it is hard to
say. The traditions relating to the tribe are far from clear (see
Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. Simeon).

¹⁰So they gathered themselves together at

Jerusalem in the third month, in the fifteenth
year of the reign of Asa.
10. in the third month] In this month the Feast of Weeks (i.e. of
wheat harvest) was held; Deuteronomy xvi. 9.

¹¹And they sacrificed unto the Lord in that

day, of the spoil which they had brought,
seven hundred oxen and seven thousand
sheep.
11. the spoil] Compare xiv. 13‒15.

¹²And they entered into the covenant to seek

the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all
their heart and with all their soul;
12. they entered into the covenant] Compare xxix. 10; 2 Kings
xxiii. 3.

¹³and that whosoever would not seek the

Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to
death, whether small or great, whether man or
woman.
 13. should be put to death] According to the Law; Deuteronomy
xvii. 2‒7.

¹⁴And they sware unto the Lord with a loud

voice, and with shouting, and with trumpets,
and with cornets.
14. shouting] The word (terū‘āh) is used to denote a blast with the
festal trumpets; see next note.

trumpets] The word (hăṣōṣĕrāh) means a special kind of trumpet

used only for religious purposes; Numbers x. 1‒10; 1 Chronicles xv.
24 (note). Driver, Amos, pp. 144‒6, gives an illustration derived from
the Arch of Titus.

¹⁵And all Judah rejoiced at the oath: for they

had sworn with all their heart, and sought him
with their whole desire; and he was found of
them: and the Lord gave them rest round
about.
15. he was found of them] A fulfilment of the promise given in
verse 2.

16‒19 (1 Kings xv. 13‒15).

Other Religious Measures of Asa.

¹⁶And also Maacah the mother of Asa the king,

he removed her from being queen ¹, because
she had made an abominable image for an
Asherah ²; and Asa cut down her image, and
made dust of it, and burnt it at the brook
Kidron.
 ¹ Or, queen mother. ² Or, for Asherah.

16. And also Maacah] “Maacah the daughter of Abishalom” is

described as the mother of Abijam (Abijah) in 1 Kings xv. 2 and as
the mother of Asa in 1 Kings xv. 10, although Asa is described as the
son of Abijam (Abijah) in 1 Kings xv. 8. Most probably Maacah was
the grandmother of Asa but retained her position as queen mother
during two reigns, i.e. until removed by Asa.

from being queen] Or, as margin, from being queen mother.

an abominable image] Exactly what is meant by this phrase is

uncertain. The image was one of peculiarly repulsive appearance, or
perhaps of specially degrading significance.

for an Asherah] Revised Version margin (rightly, as representing

the meaning of the Chronicler) for Asherah, since Asherah here and
in a few other passages (1 Kings xviii. 19; 2 Kings xxi. 7, xxiii. 4, 7) is
to be translated as the name of a goddess, about whom however
very little is known. Excavations at Ta‘anach have revealed that a
goddess named Ashirat (= Asherah) was worshipped in Palestine
from an early period. The references here and in the passages cited
above would therefore seem to be to this goddess. That conclusion,
if sound, disposes of the opinion that the Chronicler was mistaken in
imagining that “Ashērah” was anything more than a common noun
denoting the wooden symbol of a deity. We must of course translate
according to the meaning of the Chronicler whether he has fallen into
an error or not. See also the note on xiv. 3, p. 224.

the brook Kidron] On the east of Jerusalem, an unclean place;

compare 2 Kings xxiii. 4, “in the fields of Kidron.” Bädeker,
Palestine⁵, p. 80.

¹⁷But the high places were not taken away out

of Israel: nevertheless the heart of Asa was
perfect all his days.
 17. the high places] Hebrew bāmōth. These were not necessarily
places of idolatrous worship, but they were sanctuaries rigorously
forbidden by the Law from the Deuteronomic period onwards, which
in the opinion of the Chronicler of course meant from the time of
Moses. Failure to “remove” the high places was therefore reckoned
by him as a sin in any of the kings, no matter how early in the period
of the monarchy.

were not taken away ... days] So also 1 Kings xv. 14, but a direct
contradiction of the Chronicler’s statement in xiv. 3! Two
explanations seem possible; either, “Israel” (contrary to the frequent
usage of the word in Chronicles, see xi. 3) here denotes the
Northern Kingdom as distinct from Judah, in which case xiv. 3 is to
be taken as referring only to Judah, or perhaps these verses 16‒19
are an addition to Chronicles inserted by someone who thought the
Chronicler had wrongfully neglected 1 Kings xv. 13‒15.

perfect] i.e. “whole, undivided in its allegiance.”

¹⁸And he brought into the house of God the

things that his father had dedicated, and that
he himself had dedicated, silver, and gold, and
vessels.
18. the things that his father had dedicated] Probably spoils of
war; compare 1 Chronicles xviii. 11. It is implied that Abijah had
vowed a portion of his spoils, but that Asa first actually presented
them in the Temple. The verse is quoted verbatim from 1 Kings xv.
15, and is most obscure, so that there is probability in the view that it
is only a misplaced repetition of 1 Kings vii. 51b. No stress can
therefore be laid on the suggestion that we may see in this statement
an indirect confirmation of Abijah’s victory recorded in 2 Chronicles
xiii.

¹⁹And there was no more war unto the five and

thirtieth year of the reign of Asa.
 19. there was no more war] This statement can be reconciled
with 1 Kings xv. 16, 32 only by interpreting it broadly to mean that
nothing serious occurred until the war with Baasha had been going
on for several years: a forced interpretation. Perhaps the Chronicler
deliberately contradicts Kings “there was war between Asa and
Baasha all their days,” assigning to Asa’s reign a time of peace
which seemed appropriate to his piety.

Chapter XVI.
1‒6 (= 1 Kings xv. 17‒22).
Asa asks help of Ben-hadad.

¹In the six and thirtieth year of the reign of

Asa, Baasha king of Israel went up against
Judah, and built Ramah, that he might not
suffer any to go out or come in to Asa king of
Judah.
1. the six and thirtieth year] According to 1 Kings xvi. 8 Baasha
was succeeded by his son Elah in the six-and-twentieth year of Asa.
The number thirty-six may therefore be wrong. It should be noticed
however that the thirty-sixth year of the separate kingdom of Judah
corresponds with the sixteenth year of Asa, so that possibly two
different reckonings are here confused and we should read, In the
six and thirtieth year, that is, in the sixteenth year of Asa. So in
xv. 19 we should read, in the five and thirtieth, that is, in the
fifteenth year of the reign of Asa. This scheme of Asa’s reign,
however, agrees badly with the dominant ideas of the Chronicler, for
the religious reform and covenant in the fifteenth year (verse 10)
ought not to have been immediately followed by war in the sixteenth
year, but rather by a period of peace and prosperity. Hence thirty-six
may after all be the original text, and we must suppose that the
Chronicler either ignored or overlooked 1 Kings xvi. 8; or perhaps
that he quoted from a midrashic source, having a different system of
chronology from that in Kings.

Ramah] The modern er-Rām, situated on a commanding hill

about two hours north of Jerusalem. Bädeker, Palestine⁵, p. 216.

²Then Asa brought out silver and gold out of

the treasures of the house of the Lord and of
the king’s house, and sent to Ben-hadad king
of Syria, that dwelt at Damascus ¹, saying,
³There is ² a league between me and thee, as
there was between my father and thy father:
behold, I have sent thee silver and gold; go,
break thy league with Baasha king of Israel,
that he may depart from me.
¹ Hebrew Darmesek. ² Or, Let there be.

2. silver and gold] In 1 Kings, “all the silver and the gold that were
left.”

Ben-hadad] At least three kings of Syria bore this name, the two
others being severally (1) a contemporary of Ahab (1 Kings xx. 1 ff.),
(2) a contemporary of Jehoash the grandson of Jehu, 2 Kings xiii.
25.

that dwelt at Damascus] The epithet distinguishes the king of

Damascus from other kings of Syria, e.g. from the king of Hamath.

Damascus] Hebrew “Darmesek”; see note on 1 Chronicles xviii.

5.
 ⁴And Ben-hadad hearkened unto king Asa,
and sent the captains of his armies against the
cities of Israel; and they smote Ijon, and Dan,
and Abel-maim, and all the store cities ¹ of
Naphtali.
¹ Hebrew storehouses of the cities.

4. and they smote] The places smitten were all in the extreme
north of Israel.

Ijon] The city cannot be identified, but the name is preserved in

Merj ‘Iyūn, a table-land north of the Jordan valley. Bädeker,
Palestine⁵, p. 291.

Abel-maim] In 1 Kings, “Abel-beth-maacah”; compare 2 Samuel

xx. 14, 15. No doubt the two names designate one place.

all the store cities] In 1 Kings, “all Chinneroth ” (i.e. the district
west of the Sea of Galilee). As this was a very fruitful district, the
“store cities” of the Chronicler may be only another name for it.

⁵And it came to pass, when Baasha heard

thereof, that he left off building of Ramah, and
let his work cease.
5. and let his work cease] In 1 Kings and dwelt in Tirzah
(Hebrew), and returned to Tirzah (LXX.). Baasha (like Jeroboam; 1
Kings xiv. 17) fixed his seat of government at Tirzah in the centre of
the Northern Kingdom in order to be able to watch Syria as well as
Judah. The Chronicler takes no interest in the home of Baasha.

⁶Then Asa the king took all Judah; and they

carried away the stones of Ramah, and the
 timber thereof, wherewith Baasha had builded;
and he built therewith Geba and Mizpah.
6. took all Judah] In 1 Kings summoned all Judah (so translate);
none was exempted.

Geba and Mizpah] The names signify, “the hill and the watch-
tower.” Geba is mentioned in 2 Kings xxiii. 8, evidently as being on
the northern boundary of Judah. Yet, be it noted, it was only 7 miles
north of Jerusalem, whilst Mizpah was about 5 miles north-west of
the capital. For Mizpah see Jeremiah xli. 1‒9. See also note on xiv.
6‒8.

7‒10 (not in 1 Kings).

The Intervention of Hanani.

The Chronicler stands alone both in recording the condemnation

of Asa in this passage and in himself condemning him in verse 12. In
1 Kings no blame is passed on Asa.

⁷And at that time Hanani the seer came to Asa

king of Judah, and said unto him, Because
thou hast relied on the king of Syria, and hast
not relied on the Lord thy God, therefore is
the host of the king of Syria escaped out of
thine hand.
7. Hanani the seer] Hanani as a seer is known to us from this
passage only; but in xix. 2 and xx. 34 (also 1 Kings xvi. 1) Jehu the
prophet is called son of Hanani.

the seer] an ancient title, elsewhere applied only to Samuel.

Compare 1 Samuel ix. 9 “he that is now called a Prophet was
beforetime called a Seer.” In consequence of this phrase it has been
supposed that the story of Hanani is a genuinely old tradition. This is
possible, but the evidence of this one phrase is not sufficient to be
convincing. The term may be a deliberate archaism of the Chronicler.

therefore is the host of the king of Syria escaped] The prophet

declares that if Asa had not detached Syria by his presents, he might
have smitten Israel and Syria combined.

⁸Were not the Ethiopians and the Lubim a

huge host, with chariots and horsemen
exceeding many? yet, because thou didst rely
on the Lord, he delivered them into thine
hand.
8. and the Lubim] The Lubim are not mentioned in xiv. 9‒13, but
as they were auxiliaries of the Egyptians (xii. 3) it is quite possible
that they represent the help given by Egypt to the Arabian Cushites
as they passed the Egyptian border on their way to invade Judah.
Compare note on xiv. 9 (three hundred chariots).

⁹For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro

throughout the whole earth, to shew himself
strong in the behalf of them whose heart is
perfect toward him. Herein thou hast done
foolishly; for from henceforth thou shalt have
wars.
9. run to and fro] i.e. no event escapes the Divine vigilance,
compare Zechariah iv. 10.

¹⁰Then Asa was wroth with the seer, and put

him in the prison house ¹; for he was in a rage
with him because of this thing. And Asa
oppressed some of the people the same time.
 ¹ Hebrew house of the stocks.

10. in the prison house] Render, in the stocks (literally in the

house of the stocks). Compare xviii. 26; Jeremiah xx. 2.

oppressed] literally brake in pieces, an expression which when

applied to things would mean made spoil of, when applied to
persons treated outrageously, tortured, ἐλυμήνατο LXX.

11‒14 (= 1 Kings xv. 23, 24).

The Epilogue of Asa’s Reign.

¹¹And, behold, the acts of Asa, first and last,

lo, they are written in the book of the kings of
Judah and Israel. ¹²And in the thirty and ninth
year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet;
his disease was exceeding great: yet in his
disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the
physicians.
11. the book of the kings of Judah and Israel] In 1 Kings the
appeal is to “the book of chronicles of the kings of Judah.” See
Introduction § 5.

he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians] Physicians

(Hebrew rōph’īm) are condemned by implication here, perhaps as
using incantations and adjurations. Contrast Ecclesiasticus (Ben
Sira) xxxviii. 9‒15, especially verse 15 (Hebrew text), He that sinneth
against his Maker will behave himself proudly against a physician.
Curtis notes the connection of the art of healing with the prophets;
compare 1 Kings xvii. 17 ff. (Elijah); 2 Kings iv. 19 ff. (Elisha); 2 Kings
xx. 7 (Isaiah).
 ¹³And Asa slept with his fathers, and died in
the one and fortieth year of his reign.
13. in the one and fortieth year] Compare 1 Kings xv. 10.

¹⁴And they buried him in his own sepulchres,

which he had hewn out for himself in the city
of David, and laid him in the bed which was
filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of
spices prepared by the apothecaries’ art: and
they made a very great burning for him.
14. in his own sepulchres] In 1 Kings with his fathers.

which he had hewn out for himself] This clause is absent from 1
Kings.

divers kinds of spices] Mark xvi. 1; John xii. 3, 7, xix. 39, 40.

a very great burning] Compare xxi. 19. What is here meant is not
cremation of the body, but only a burning of spices; Jeremiah xxxiv.
5.

Chapters XVII.‒XX.
The Reign of Jehoshaphat.

Chapter XVII.
 1‒6.
The character of the reign.

The reign of Jehoshaphat is one of the most interesting sections

of Chronicles If these chapters, xvii.‒xx., be compared with the
references to Jehoshaphat in Kings (viz. 1 Kings xxii. 1‒35, 41‒50),
it will be seen that much new material appears in Chronicles (chapter
xvii., and xix. 1‒xx. 30), with the result that the prosperity and piety
of this king are greatly enhanced. As to the historical value of the
Chronicler’s account, see the head-notes to the various sections
below.

¹And Jehoshaphat his son reigned in his

stead, and strengthened himself against
Israel.
1. And Jehoshaphat his son reigned in his stead] These words
are from 1 Kings xv. 24. All the rest of this chapter is without any
parallel in Kings.

²And he placed forces in all the fenced cities

of Judah, and set garrisons in the land of
Judah, and in the cities of Ephraim, which Asa
his father had taken.
2. the cities of Ephraim] Compare xv. 8.

³And the Lord was with Jehoshaphat,

because he walked in the first ways of his
father David, and sought not unto the Baalim;
3. in the first ways of his father David] Omit David (so LXX.), the
person referred to being Asa (1 Kings xxii. 43). Asa’s first ways
(chapters xiv., xv.) were good, his latter ways (chapter xvi.),
according to the Chronicler, were evil.
 unto the Baalim] Baal is not a proper name, but a title meaning
“Lord,” which was given to false gods generally. Israel might not call
Jehovah, “My Baal” (Baali), Hosea ii. 16, 17. See the note on 1
Chronicles viii. 33.

⁴but sought to the God of his father, and

walked in his commandments, and not after
the doings of Israel.
4. after the doings of Israel] Compare xiii. 8, 9.

⁵Therefore the Lord stablished the kingdom in

his hand; and all Judah brought to
Jehoshaphat presents; and he had riches and
honour in abundance.
5. brought ... presents] Probably congratulatory gifts at his
accession; compare 1 Samuel x. 27.

riches and honour] Compare xviii. 1.

⁶And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the

Lord: and furthermore he took away the high
places and the Asherim out of Judah.
6. furthermore he took away] But in xx. 33 = 1 Kings xxii. 43 it is
said that the high places were not taken away. It is remarkable that
the contradiction finds an exact parallel in what is said of Asa (see
xiv. 3 and xv. 17 = 1 Kings xv. 14). How can the presence of these
curious contradictions be explained? It is held by some that the
Chronicler in both cases has incorporated contradictory traditions,
and that “such discrepancies did not trouble the Hebrew historian.”
To the present writer it seems more probable to suppose that only
xiv. 3 and xvii. 6 (the statements that the high places were removed),
are from the Chronicler himself; the passages which assert the
contrary, viz. xv. 17 (= 1 Kings xv. 14) and xx. 33 (= 1 Kings xxii. 43)
being later additions. They were added by someone who, troubled
by the divergence between Kings and Chronicles, judged it desirable
to supplement or correct the Chronicler’s words by adding a more or
less exact transcription of the summaries of the reigns of Asa and
Jehoshaphat as recorded in Kings. If xv. 17 and xx. 33 are later
additions, it is evident that the Chronicler asserts the same reform to
have been made in two successive reigns. But this is not a serious
difficulty. He may easily have supposed that the removal of the high
places (i.e. the discontinuance of worship at these local sanctuaries)
was but a partial success, an official rather than an actual reform;
and one suspects also that the phrase for the Chronicler was largely
conventional: a reform with which all “good” kings should presumably
be credited.

the Asherim] See note on xiv. 3.

7‒9 (no parallel in 1 Kings).

Jehoshaphat’s Provision for Teaching the Law.

⁷Also in the third year of his reign he sent his

princes, even Benhail, and Obadiah, and
Zechariah, and Nethanel, and Micaiah, to
teach in the cities of Judah; ⁸and with them the
Levites, even Shemaiah, and Nethaniah, and
Zebadiah, and Asahel, and Shemiramoth, and
Jehonathan, and Adonijah, and Tobijah, and
Tobadonijah, the Levites; and with them
Elishama and Jehoram, the priests. ⁹And they
taught in Judah, having the book of the law of
the Lord with them; and they went about
throughout all the cities of Judah, and taught
among the people.
 7‒9. These verses state that Jehoshaphat was not content with
the usual reforming measures of a pious king (verse 6) but
proceeded to confirm his people in loyalty to Jehovah by sending
leading laymen, Levites, and priests, to teach the Law throughout the
land. If verses 7‒9 be compared with xix. 4‒11 the two passages will
at once be seen to be so closely similar that they may well be
variations of the same tradition. Still the description in xix. 4‒11 is
fuller and suggests arrangements of a permanent character; and,
whilst xvii. 7‒9 deals with teachers of the Law, xix. 4‒11 deals with
administrators of it (judges). It is argued with force that this single or
dual tradition is entirely unhistorical (so Wellhausen and Torrey).
Certainly the arrangements for the judiciary and for instruction in the
Law correspond with conditions circa 100 b.c. (see Schürer,
Geschichte³, II. 176‒179), conditions which probably in the
Chronicler’s day were partly existent and which he may have hoped
to see more fully realised. That he should wish to ascribe the
institution of such a system of instruction and justice to an early date
is also agreeable to his habit of thought; and for such a purpose
Jehoshaphat was obviously most suitable: a good king, whose name
denoted “Jehovah is judge.” Mark further the similarity of the
conclusion of each reform: “And the fear of the Lord was on all the
kingdoms of the lands ...” (xvii. 10 and xx. 29) and the remarkable
prosperity which properly rewarded such pious action (xvii. 11 ff. and
xx. 1‒28). Yet the possibility that the Chronicler in these passages
has incorporated a really old tradition associating Jehoshaphat with
some reform or development of judicial affairs in Judah remains
open. Some see an old trait in the conjunction of laymen (princes,
xvii. 7) with the priests and Levites. Again the judicial system
indicated in xix. 4‒11 has no little resemblance to that set forth in
Deuteronomy xvi. 18‒20, xvii. 8, “and might have been derived from
that source.” On this theory, xvii. 7‒9 and xix. 4‒11 would in all
likelihood be derived by the Chronicler from some “source” or rather
perhaps from two “sources” giving slightly different accounts of
Jehoshaphat’s procedure; and this is the view of some
commentators (so Kittel and Benzinger). But close examination of
the language of both passages reveals strong characteristics of the
Chronicler’s style and spirit; and it seems safer to conclude that,
while there may possibly have been some tradition connecting
Jehoshaphat with such reforms, this account in Chronicles is
essentially due to the Chronicler and reflects the situation of his own
times.

9. the book of the law of the Lord] The Chronicler of course

meant by this the Pentateuch as we have it. If, however, these
verses are drawn from an old source (see the previous note) then
the reference in the original may have been to one of the earlier
codes embedded in the present Pentateuch.

10‒13 (no parallel in 1 Kings).

The Greatness of Jehoshaphat.

¹⁰And the fear of the Lord ¹ fell upon all the

kingdoms of the lands that were round about
Judah, so that they made no war against
Jehoshaphat.
¹ Or, a terror from the Lord.

10. the fear of the Lord] Compare xx. 29; Genesis xxxxv. 5.

¹¹And some of the Philistines brought

Jehoshaphat presents, and silver for tribute;
the Arabians also brought him flocks, seven
thousand and seven hundred rams, and seven
thousand and seven hundred he-goats.
11. some of the Philistines] See the following note, and also xxvi.
6 (note).

the Arabians] compare xxi. 16. The term is here used to signify
the desert tribes, in particular those on the south and south-west of
Judah. It would be specially impressive to the contemporaries of the
Chronicler, because by that period an Arabian people, the
Nabateans, had established a powerful state to the south of Judah.
On the other hand the Philistines would of course be familiar from
the references to them in Samuel and Kings. The tradition that
tribute was received from them and from some desert tribes may
possibly be correct, especially if Zerah’s army was Arabian (xiv. 8,
note) and if Asa’s victory over him is historical.

flocks] compare 2 Kings iii. 4.

¹²And Jehoshaphat waxed great exceedingly;

and he built in Judah castles and cities of
store. ¹³And he had many works in the cities of
Judah; and men of war, mighty men of valour,
in Jerusalem.
12. castles] Hebrew bīrāniyyōth; compare xxvii. 4 (same word);
and xxvi. 10 (“towers”). Such small castles or towers lie scattered
along the pilgrim-road from Damascus to Mecca at the present day
to make the way safe. See Introduction § 7, p. xlviii.

cities of store] compare xi. 11, 12.

14‒19 (no parallel in 1 Kings).

The Number of Jehoshaphat’s Army.

In these verses Jehoshaphat is credited with an army of

1,160,000 men; and the passage may be noted as the most extreme
instance of the midrashic exaggeration of numbers which is a well-
marked feature of the Chronicler’s writing. If the possible proportions
between the total numbers of a population and the men capable of
military service at a given time be considered, it is easy to realise
how monstrous an exaggeration are the figures here stated. They
serve two purposes: (1) compared with the somewhat smaller
numbers assigned to Abijah (xiii. 3) and to Asa (xiv. 8), they indicate
that Jehoshaphat’s reign was even more prosperous; and
(2) generally, they suggested to the men of the Chronicler’s own
generation that in the eyes of all right-thinking men Jerusalem of old
in its prosperous hours was not one whit less important and glorious
than any huge and much-vaunted city of their own days.

For further examples of midrashic exaggeration, besides the

passages named above, compare xi. 1; 1 Chronicles xii. 23, 24; and
(as regards sums of money) 1 Chronicles xxii. 14; 2 Chronicles ix.
13.

¹⁴And this was the numbering of them

according to their fathers’ houses: of Judah,
the captains of thousands; Adnah the captain,
and with him mighty men of valour three
hundred thousand: ¹⁵and next to him
Jehohanan the captain, and with him two
hundred and fourscore thousand:
15. next to him] Literally at his hand; the same phrase is used in
Nehemiah iii. 2, 4, 5, etc.

Jehohanan] Sometimes spelt Johanan.

¹⁶and next to him Amasiah the son of Zichri,

who willingly offered himself unto the Lord;
and with him two hundred thousand mighty
men of valour:
16. who willingly offered himself] Compare Judges v. 9.

¹⁷and of Benjamin; Eliada a mighty man of

valour, and with him two hundred thousand