The Beast in the Boudoir – Pet Keeping in Nineteenth–Century Paris - Hardcover

Kete, Kathleen

3.33

15 ratings by Goodreads

9780520071018: The Beast in the Boudoir – Pet Keeping in Nineteenth–Century Paris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520071018 ISBN 13: 9780520071018

Publisher: University of California Press, 1994

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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 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 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.

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Review:

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

About the Author:

Kathleen Kete is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College, Hartford.

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