Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines
How do animal agents appear in literature, and with what material effects on the worlds around them?
This quote is a nice summary of a lot of the questions we've been asking so far, especially as far as animals fit into literary studies. Note that McHugh uses the term "animal agents"—she's talking not just about animals, but animals that have agency—that do things. Almost all contemporary cultural animal theorists would agree to some version of this idea that animals do in fact have agency.
Let's break this quote down a little more. It's simple, but not simplistic. Animals "appear" in literature in certain ways, and one productive way to begin reading texts for their animal traces (let's say animal tracks) is by asking questions about their way of appearing—are they part of the setting? Do they play lead roles (i.e. Black Beauty)? Are they in the background like supporting actors (i.e., the horses in a Jane Austen novel)? The answers to these questions matter both to how we read literature and to how we conceive of animals' place in the world.
So we can imagine asking questions about how they appear in texts, and then as McHugh points out, about what effects they have on the worlds around them. In H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, for instance, the hybrid animal-human critters that the evil doctor creates have a profound effect on the ecology of the island and on their (doomed) human companions. That's a huge effect.
In Wuthering Heights, the effect the animals have on the world around them is much less pronounced, but nonetheless still present.
Animals don't have to have a massive, front-and-center, roll-out-the-red-carpet role in a text for us to be interested in what they do, and what importance their actions have on the plot.