Interspecies Limbic Love: Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven
Jane Smiley’s novel Horse Heaven (2000) has a complex relationship to contemporary popular brain science. Specifically, it engages with neurobiological theories of affect dysregulation and the possibility of non-conscious, brain-to-brain repair of such dysregulation, extending that possibility even to human-animal relationships. Yet it also, via characterization and figurative language, points to the need for skeptical, specifically feminist, critique of such theories.