Animals and Women Feminist The

by Carol J Adams

  Hurston shifts to the speaking animal of the folktale as the culminating literary development out of an African-American community ’ s mockery of that most sober of cultural conventions, the funeral. Le Guin ’ s alienation from humankind licenses the attribution of speech to an animal which, in a different context, would be a violation of the animal ’ s otherness. Lispector ’ s story and Gordimer ’ s predicate the identity upon the animal ’ s actual and metaphoric silence: animals do not “ speak ” to us literally; nor will they respond to the meanings we impose upon them. Their silence is articulate. It is also, as Stephanie T. Hoppe realizes, world-sustaining. Her self-reflexive story “ What the Cat Brought In ” (in With a Fly ’ s Eye ) builds consciously upon the idea of animal speech by treating the power of the writer ’ s cat to speak in coherent human language as a kind of thought experiment. Naturally, in this story, the cat ’ s power to speak proves unsettling to the writer — as it would should our own cats begin addressing us in actual human words. Hoppe understands, furthermore, the vastness of the disruption that would be caused by the talking animal. When silent, the writer ’ s cat had held the world in place; now that she speaks, the world begins to dissolve. The writer realizes that she has to write the very story that she is writing in order to keep the world from disappearing into a fog. “ What the Cat Brought In ” closes with words to the reader indicating that we will all have to write and talk without stopping, now that the animal speaks. Is this not what we do already: write and talk the animal into silence and the world into a construction that suits our sense of order?

  “ What the Cat Brought In ” corners us in the paradox that we must do obsessively what we think we do out of freedom and power: employ language to uphold the world-identity that we take to be reality. As with many women ’ s stories, Hoppe ’ s passes power over to the animal as an animal. The silence we think of as a defect in the animal is in fact the force that graciously permits us to maintain our beliefs about the nature of the world. Hoppe plays with our habit of founding animal and human identities upon language or the “ lack ” of language. Since the story is self-reflexive, it violates the distance between narrative and reader at the same time as it violates the presumed distance between animal and human. Its finest achievement is to politicize the abstraction of language. Something similar occurs in Ursula Le Guin ’ s “ She Unnames Them, ” discussed in the next section.

  The deconstruction of human identity by means of the animal is clearly a theme in the works discussed to this point. The reconstruction of human identity by means of the animal is a rare event, but one that Alice Walker accomplishes in The Temple of My Familiar . The characters in her novel work upon their own identities, strive to become complete people at peace with themselves and capable of loving well. Perhaps most pleasing to any woman reader is that Walker shows male characters learning how to love women as women want to be loved — and does so credibly. Animals come into the story in association with women. The animals do not speak:

  “ The animals can remember [says the character Miss Lissie]; for, like sight, memory is renewed at every birth. But our language they will never speak; not from lack of intelligence, but from the different construction of their speaking apparatus. In the world of man, someone must speak for them, and that is why, in a nutshell, . . . goddesses and witches exist. ” (199)

  The very existence of the most powerful cultural identities women can assume depends upon nonhuman animals. Indeed, since Walker ’ s character puts the question of animal speech in the context of “ the world of man, ” women are cast as others whose power comes from speaking for animals.

  Despite the mention of goddesses and witches, and despite the emphasis on memories of past lives, The Temple of My Familiar remains firmly grounded in accessible contemporary experience. In a way, although their presence is most potent in Miss Lissie ’ s paintings and stories of her past lives, the animals humanize the characters. The mother of one of the characters recalls an episode involving a dog, her own mother, and the woman from whom her mother learned how to live, Mama Shug. The period is just after World War II, the place the American South. The speaker remembers the “ ‘ casual, vicious, unfeeling ’ ” cruelty to animals practiced by the people around her. Her mother is particularly cruel to a dog named Creighton, going out of her way to insult, blame, beat, and kick the dog. The dog responds by cringing and fawning upon her, trying to lick her hands when she is most cruel. Miss Shug takes Creighton away for a summer and effectively restores his identity to him. When he returns he is “ ‘ no longer a slave; he [is] a dog ’ ” (312); and good dog that he is, he bites the speaker ’ s mother when she tries to beat him again. In turn, the speaker ’ s mother changes: “ ‘ She began to feel for everything: ant, bat, the hoppy toad flattened on the road ’ ” (312). Proud, free beings neither give nor accept abuse. Empathy for animals is a prerequisite for humanness.

  What human beings consume, what we put into ourselves, is also a theme in this novel. Diet is a key element in the creation of identity. Here and there throughout the novel, characters recommend fresh foods to other characters: fruits, whole grains, and green leafy vegetables. In context, the advice takes on greater significance than the standard prescriptions of books on health food and vegetarianism. Body and psyche are allied in the matter of diet. Indeed, Walker goes as far as to integrate diet and feminist politics (as Carol Adams has done in her sphere). Among several excursions into the history of cultural origins is the story told by an old South American woman to her daughter about the earliest of times in her tribe when women created men; when men and women lived apart and men worshipped women; when the woman, who “ was entirely used to herself, ” would cover her body in brightly coloured muds and decorations made of feathers, shells, and flowers; and when women “ lived quite well on foods other than meat ” (48 – 50). Similarly, and reaching even further back in time, Miss Lissie relates a dream memory of living as a pygmy among nonhuman primates: her people hunt animals, but she prefers hunting for plants to eat as her primate “ cousins ” do. Among her people, men and women live in separate communities, but she prefers to live with her mate in imitation of her animal cousins who “ seemed nearly unable to comprehend separateness. ” Our nearest animal relatives are held up as examples of good conduct. A later part of this dream memory finds “ fathers and uncles, ” larger versions of the pygmies, killing the animal cousins with spears and eating them (84 – 86). In these stories about origins, Walker attributes the loss of an attachment to animals and the practice of killing and eating them to male aggression. She grounds modern confusion over human and personal identity upon the literally essential issues of diet, gender, and original history.

  The whole matter of gender and human/animal relations is securely attached to identity in Miss Lissie ’ s final revelations. To the character Suwelo, she has said that throughout her past lives she has always been a black woman (53). A tape that she leaves for him to listen to after she has died reveals that she was once a white boy and once a lion. As a white boy, she seems to have been a genetic mutation, a source of discomfort to the women who protect him from his disfigurement by darkening him with juices mixed with nut fat. The girl who is his first lover reveals his deformity to him. The sight of his penis rubbed clean of dye fills him with shame. The girl ’ s expressions of natural grief only cause him anger, and in his rage he kills her familiar, a strange little serpent with wings (361 – 62). The compression in this story is remarkable. Here, in effect, we have the source and long history of the white male ’ s crimes and misery summed up in one revelation. The fact that the speaker is a proud black woman who cherishes animals emphasizes the depth of shame associated with the identity she once possessed.

  As a lion, Miss Lissie lives through the radical change in relations between men and women, and the consequent change in human relations with animals. The crucial turning point comes with the merging of the men ’ s camp with the women ’ s. Women lose “ their wildness, that qua
lity of homey ease on the earth that they shared with the animals ” and men assert “ themselves, alone, as the familiars of women ” (367). The lions and other animals back away from the strife resulting from this merging of camps. Of course, “ not even the most cynical animal ” could have predicted the aggression men would practice upon animals to preserve their status as the familiars of women. The whole human race loses their knowledge of animals. The shock in this story of a past life comes from the denaturalization of male relations with women. What could be more natural, one undoubtedly thinks, than that the boon companion of a woman should be a man? What could be less natural than a woman choosing an animal for company over a man? Men and women are a pair; they compose each other ’ s identities. Nonhuman animals do not figure in the creation of human identity at all. Obviously, Walker defies these deep-seated “ givens. ” She subverts current relations by composing a contrary history of origins, a history, that is, of otherness.

  Adroitly combining gender and animal identity, Walker ends her novel with an animal image: a painting of a lion done by Miss Lissie shortly before her death. The lion is Miss Lissie, Lissie with “ dare-to-be-everything lion eyes. ” “ Dare to be everything ” is right, for the woman ’ s love of finery is incorporated into the painting: on her/his (for he is a “ great maned lion ” ) left back paw, the lion wears a “ very gay, elegant, and shiny red high-heeled slipper. ” The animal has absorbed the woman; the lion is not a tag-along familiar but the very essence of the woman ’ s identity. The inner lion, the inner animal, in Miss Lissie, and in all women, surfaces, to explain and render powerful that correspondence between women and animals when they exist in separateness. The “ temple ” of my familiar is myself. The slipper is the token of female constructedness, recognition of difference, acknowledgement of accord.

  Although this section begins with the animal ’ s assault upon human identity, it ends (as did the section on victimization) with the overwhelming power of the animal to remake the world. The animal ’ s refusal to assist in personal conflicts is clear enough: animal defiance of humanization bears decided relevance to feminism and the powerful effects of preserving self-identity-in-otherness against the tyranny of culture. Animal identity cannot be shaped and reshaped at the whim of culture or personal need. As Hurston ’ s, Le Guin ’ s, and Hoppe ’ s stories reveal, animal otherness can take hold of the narrative process and bend it out of shape. Walker goes farther, inventing new stories to counteract the old ones. She rescues the human image from the misery produced by male and human dominance over matters of identity. Indeed, Walker reverses the order of analysis to achieve her end; instead of projecting her novel toward an allegiance of feminist and animalist politics, she works from the premise that the two politics are one and derives a new image of humankind from that allegiance. As we find in the next section, men are simply obliged to lag behind or come up to standard in the kind of feminist/animalist utopia that Walker locates in the individual in The Temple of My Familiar .

  Community

  Communion is a constant in human relations with animals. For all that the human species practices unrelenting assault upon animals, the individual animal remains a reliable source of solace in the face of unhappiness. When no one else in the world understands us, when we are hurt and lose our way, we turn to animals for comfort and reconfirmation. Harriet E. Wilson describes this experience in Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). In Wilson ’ s novel, the mulatto girl Frado makes a confidant of her dog Fido: she “ told him her griefs as if he were human; and he sat so still and listened so attentively, she really believed he knew her sorrows ” (41 – 42). Frado is utterly different from the white people who have power over her, and her difference draws contempt and physical abuse from some of these people. There is a certain utility in her appeal to Fido, for “ the only time she forgot her hardships . . . was in his company ” (42). Despite the simplicity and familiarity of this experience, considerable existential complexity stands behind the communion Frado shares with her dog. Frado herself is “ other, ” at least as far as the power system is concerned. She does not identify with Fido in his more obvious otherness, but gains in his company the freedom of her own otherness. The simple comfort obtained from the kind of communion Wilson describes has broad implications: those humans who are outcast from established power structures find strength and freedom in the absolute otherness of the animal. By means of the liberation of otherness in the abstract (i.e., as a principle), communion with animals can be translated into community.

  In view of the radical, ontological separation of humans and animals in contemporary life, the mere thought of a community of animals and humans demands full-scale revisioning of the ways of the world. Arbitrary anthropomorphism subsumes animals and fails to recognize their real-life autonomy from culture. It reenacts the dominance that allows us to victimize them; their own beings are a matter of indifference to us. At the same time as ethical philosophers strive to extend the human community to include animals, 10 women are employing fiction to envision world communities not predicated on the assimilation of animals.

  In Judy Grahn ’ s Mundane ’ s World (1988), Carol Emshwiller ’ s Carmen Dog (1990), and Ursula Le Guin ’ s “ She Unnames Them ” (in Buffalo Gals, 1988), the establishment of communities that honor the animal does not entail the humanization of animals but the infusion of the world with otherness. I hesitate to say “ with animality ” here, because the phrase presupposes specific qualities predefined by humans. Grahn, Emshwillier, and Le Guin create strange worlds that defy human normalcy. The pertinence to feminism of the whole-world revision for the sake of the other is obvious. The worlds these writers imagine, however, are givens; that is to say, the stories do not strain to make concessions to the bothersome animal but are simply informed by irregularity. One real-world place to seek for community in defiance is, of course, among women. Within these stories, women are the founders of the social state that achieves accord with animals.

  Men are barely in evidence in the clan system Grahn imagines for the human community in Mundane ’ s World . Women sustain a loose communal life by means of clan divisions in labor and ritual; daily life is purposeful yet informal. The resolution to the plot in Mundane ’ s World is the discovery of a “ human-designed magnetic disturbance ” (184) within the grid that holds human and animal communities in harmony. Plans to build a temple at a certain site disrupt natural fields of force and cause a death. An adolescent girl solves the mystery as she dreams herself flying over the site in the shape of an owl. The overarching “ grid ” system is open and organic, not rigid and controlling. The macrocosmic consciousness Grahn engages in order to invent a world-myth of this sort relies, however, upon an intense appreciation of the microcosmic subjectivity of animals and plants.

  Grahn employs a “ camera-eye ” technique to draw the reader into the mazy world of animals. It is fitting to the point of the argument that I am making here that beetles, ants, and a fly are significant among those subjects Grahn chooses for the exercise of this technique. She gets down among the roots of an oak tree, for example, to explore the activities beetles and ants perform simultaneously as human activities go on up above (36, and passim). In the middle of the story, the perceptions of a newborn fly suddenly become important and temporarily steer the course of the narrative (88 – 94). The fly is not a player in the human narrative, just a subject whose own story, Grahn indicates, merits the author ’ s and the reader ’ s attention. The openness of Grahn ’ s story itself subverts the literary systems that exploit animals. The imagined coexistence of human and animal realms in Mundane ’ s World is achieved out of Grahn ’ s willingness to shift between those realms anarchically, in violation of conventional narrative logic.

  Envisioning a human/animal community does appear to entail a kind of happy anarchy. Where Grahn imagines coexistence in difference, Emshwiller imagines a fusion of human and animal, with the animal providing the corrective to the oppressive o
rderliness of human-dominated, but specifically, male-dominated society. Women, in Carmen Dog, are metamorphosing into animals, while female animals are at the same time metamorphosing into women. Culture is a central element in Emshwiller ’ s novel, since Pooch, the dog-becoming-woman whose story this is, has aspirations to sing at the opera. Early in the novel, Emshwiller uses the anarchy of the metamorphoses to increase the traditional excitement of attendance at the opera. The scene is Lincoln Center; the animal element in the women creates the thrill that should always exist on such occasions but seldom does, as human operagoers strive to remain discreet and sophisticated: