The Beast in the Boudoir : Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Resource Information

The work The Beast in the Boudoir : Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Bowdoin College Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The Beast in the Boudoir : Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Title remainder

Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Creator

• Kete, Kathleen

Author

• Kete, Kathleen

Subject

• France -- Social Life and Customs
• Pets

Language

eng

Summary

Annotation

Cataloging source

BIP US

Illustrations

illustrations

Intended audience

Scholarly & Professional

Intended audience source

University of California Press

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Summary expansion

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