“Almost as a Person Would”: The Thinking Animal in Margaret Marshall Saunders's <i>Beautiful Joe</i> (1893)

Margaret Marshall Saunders's best-selling novel Beautiful Joe (1893) has long been indexed as anthropomorphic children's literature. This article examines the novel to illuminate the connection between nineteenth-century literature and animal-focused research, including studies of the science of the mind. My analysis seeks to coalesce what I see as neighboring discourses, both historical and contemporary, in literature and science about what it means to be a thinking, feeling “self.” In doing so, I reveal how Saunders's novel maps out the stakes of this impasse as consequential to literary criticism and the wider culture through its subject matter's entanglement with questions of consciousness, anthropomorphism, and representation.