Reviewed by:

• Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil
• Mary Sanders Pollock (bio)

“Horses,” Weil offers in the preface to this volume, give “one perspective into the massive changes in gender relations, but also class and race relations” in France during the nineteenth century. Weil might have added that, though specific to that time and place, many of her insights apply to a longer sweep of history and a broader geographical range.

I offer the briefest of summaries here. The perspective suggested by horses is especially rich because horses have been powerful symbols in literature, pictorial art, and what is now generally understood as popular culture. Horses have also occupied a central place in material culture, especially horse breeding and hippophagy. Weil maps changes along the timeline of the long nineteenth century, from the French Revolution through an era of rapid mechanization and to World War I.

The author’s strongest arguments are based in art history, beginning with Buffon’s graphic diagram of the open abdomen of a horse—in this case, a representation of Enlightenment science. Although her treatment of the horse in painting is broad, Weil finds the careers of Théodore Gericault and Rosa Bonheur exemplary. Gericault’s horse images (and those of his French contemporaries) evolved from representing virile, human heroism at the end of the Napoleonic era into horse-centered representations, with horses as both subjects and objects of human activity and the human gaze. Many of these same images of humans with horses also reinforce attitudes about class, race, and empire. Bonheur’s career began almost three decades after Gericault’s ended. Her [End Page 500] Saint Simonian background alerted her to ethical issues; her images focus on horses’ domestic labors and their treatment at the hands of human handlers. Weil shows that, as the domestic labor of horses diminished amid the wave of mechanization after mid century, the significance of horses became bifurcated: horses remained important as status symbols and overdetermined symbols of both accepted and transgressive gender values. Popular horse-centered entertainments revealed these values. Ironically, at the same time the French practice of eating horse meat, especially for the working class, operated as a supposedly health-based practical solution to a new surplus of horses, as well as an indicator of national identity.

In Thinking Animals (2012), a more loosely organized group of essays about the importance of animal studies in the twenty-first century, Weil argued for the centrality of the human-animal bond in history and against hegemonic anthropocentrism. Weil’s theoretical rigor in this earlier volume has contributed to the strengthening of animal studies since then—and now it has clearly enabled her to create an even stronger focus on representations of the human-horse bond in one particular time and place.

Tantalizing, brief references to Bentham’s ethics, Sewell’s Black Beauty, and Stubbs’s portraits raise questions. How is Sue’s Godolphin Arabian, a fiction that contributed to anti-cruelty legislation in France, related to animal welfare/rights propaganda in other parts of the world? How is the “horse-riding” described in Dickens’s Hard Times different from French horse-centered entertainments? Did the popular American Wild West shows prescribe gender roles in the same ways? How do the horse paintings of the Anglophone world (Remington, Landseer, and others) differ from or compare to those of their French counterparts? Why did other Western nations not eat horses? Are race and gender stereotypes triangulated with horses in other Western societies in the same ways?

The powerful scholarship of this volume can be attributed in part to its narrow but fascinating focus. The next stage for this author might be an expansion of that focus to reinforce the relevance of her insights within other cultural contexts. [End Page 501]

Mary Sanders Pollock, professor of English at Stetson University, teaches British literature, environmental studies, and gender studies. She is the editor of two scholarly anthologies and three monographs, including Storytelling Apes: Primatology Narratives Past and Present (Penn...

审核人：

• 岌岌可危的伙伴：十九世纪法国的马和他们的人 作者：Kari Weil
• 玛丽·桑德斯·波洛克（生物）

韦尔在本书序言中提出的“马匹”为 19 世纪法国的“性别关系以及阶级和种族关系的巨大变化提供了一个视角”。Weil 可能会补充说，尽管她的许多见解是针对那个时间和地点的，但她的许多见解适用于更长的历史范围和更广泛的地理范围。

我在这里提供最简短的总结。马所暗示的观点特别丰富，因为马一直是文学、绘画艺术以及现在普遍理解为流行文化的强大象征。马在物质文化中也占有中心地位，尤其是马的繁殖和食马。Weil 描绘了漫长的 19 世纪时间线的变化，从法国大革命到快速机械化时代，再到第一次世界大战。

作者最有力的论据是基于艺术史的，从布冯的马开腹图解开始——在这种情况下，是启蒙科学的代表。尽管她在绘画中对马的处理范围很广，但 Weil 认为 Théodore Gericault 和 Rosa Bonheur 的职业生涯堪称典范。Gericault 的马形象（以及他同时代的法国人的形象）从代表拿破仑时代末期的男子气概、人类英雄主义演变为以马为中心的表现形式，马既是人类活动的主体和客体，也是人类注视的对象。许多同样的人类与马的形象也强化了对阶级、种族和帝国的态度。Bonheur 的职业生涯是在 Gericault 结束后将近 30 年开始的。她的[完第 500 页]圣西蒙尼安背景提醒她注意道德问题；她的图像集中在马的家务劳动和它们在人类处理者手中的待遇。Weil 表明，在本世纪中叶之后的机械化浪潮中，随着马的家务劳动减少，马的重要性出现了分歧：马仍然是重要的地位象征，是公认的和越界的性别价值观的过度确定的象征。流行的以马为中心的娱乐活动揭示了这些价值观。具有讽刺意味的是，与此同时，法国人吃马肉的做法，尤其是对工人阶级来说，却被认为是一种以健康为基础的实用解决方案，以解决新的马匹过剩问题，同时也是国家认同的一个指标。

在Thinking Animals (2012) 中，这是一组关于 21 世纪动物研究重要性的更松散组织的论文，Weil 主张人类与动物纽带在历史上的中心地位，并反对霸权的人类中心主义。从那时起，威尔在这本早期著作中的严谨理论有助于加强动物研究——现在，这显然使她能够更加专注于在特定时间和地点对人马关系的表征。

对边沁的道德观、休厄尔的黑美人和斯塔布斯的肖像的引人入胜的简短引用提出了问题。Sue 的Godolphin Arabic是一部促成法国反虐待立法的小说，与世界其他地区的动物福利/权利宣传有何关系？狄更斯的艰难时期所描述的“骑马”与法国以马为中心的娱乐有什么不同？流行的美国狂野西部节目是否以同样的方式规定了性别角色？英语世界（Remington、Landseer 等）的马画与法国同行的马画有何不同或比较？为什么其他西方国家没有吃马？在其他西方社会中，种族和性别刻板印象是否以同样的方式与马相提并论？

这本书的强大学术研究可以部分归因于其狭窄但引人入胜的焦点。这位作者的下一个阶段可能是扩展这一重点，以加强她的见解在其他文化背景下的相关性。[结束页 501]

斯泰森大学英语教授玛丽·桑德斯·波洛克教授英国文学、环境研究和性别研究。她是两部学术选集和三部专着的编辑，其中包括讲故事的猿：灵长类动物学叙事的过去和现在（宾夕法尼亚...