Research Catalog

Title

The beast in the boudoir : petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris / Kathleen Kete.

Author

Kete, Kathleen.

Publication

Berkeley : University of California Press, [1994], ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 200 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

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

Alternative Title

Petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris.

Subjects

• Pets > Social aspects > France > Paris > History > 19th century
• Paris (France) > Social life and customs
• Pet owners > France > Paris > History > 19th century

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-188) and index.

Contents

1. Animal Protection in Nineteenth-Century Paris: The Case of Pets -- 2. The Notion of Fidelity in a Bourgeois World -- 3. The Embourgeoisement of the Beast -- 4. Dreamworlds of the Bourgeois Interior (1): Pets and Private Life -- 5. Dreamworlds of the Bourgeois Interior (2): Domesticity and the Dog-Care Book -- 6. La Rage and the Bourgeoisie -- 7. Cats and Categorization.

ISBN

0520071018 (alk. paper)

LCCN

93032265

OCLC

ocm28800711

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries