Animals and Women Feminist The

by Carol J Adams

  What a wonderful diversity exists among the women! What feathers, scales and furs! What sounds! Laughs and shrieks that reach the highest C. Seeing them, one might wish also for banana women, apple women, pine-tree women, but one can ’ t have everything and this suffices to all but the greediest seekers after life. (11)

  Emshwiller ’ s playfulness with costume (very much akin to Walker ’ s) and with sounds reinforces the idea that the introduction of the animal into such a scene represents an elevation in the life-quotient. 11 The height of culture, the opera, is revivified by the presence of animals.

  In Carmen Dog, the leader of the rebel group of women-animals is a lumpy, elderly woman who is changing into the abominable snow-woman: “ savage, silvery white and abominable, but abominable in all the best ways ” (82). The motto she establishes for them, and which she delivers in cryptic, growling speech, is “ ‘ not win, or lose all. ’ ” Fortunately, there is little need for the women-animals to fight for supremacy. The masculine opposition to the changing shape of existence is stupid rather than vicious; the men seek to preserve order through scientific institutions, which prove wholly ineffectual. The metamorphoses are global, inexorable, and systemic. The women-animals are not obliged to “ win. ” The whole system finally succumbs to the joyous freedom of the carnival. Emshwiller simply overwhelms the systems of dominance that victimize women and animals. She enshrines a holiday atmosphere. In her vision, animal vitality infuses culture and in effect “ rehumanizes ” it — much along the same lines as Walker ’ s achievement with identity.

  With Le Guin ’ s “ She Unnames Them, ” we are closer to home. As is the case with Grahn and Emshwiller ’ s communities, aggression has no place in Le Guin ’ s vision, despite the fact that her story hinges upon the overthrow of language as the agent of reality. Le Guin capitalizes upon the too-familiar experience of masculine deafness to women ’ s voices. The animals and the woman in “ She Unnames Them ” achieve a victimless insurrection. An unnamed woman and all the animals decide to give back to “ the donor ” their names and classifications. The woman, it turns out, is Eve, but she gives her name back to Adam before it is ever written into the story. Far from being angered by Eve ’ s quiet mutiny, Adam is too preoccupied to listen to what she is saying. The now truly unnamed woman simply leaves him to his little enterprises and withdraws with all the rest of the unnamed beings. Male indifference to the passive opposition of women and animals is a cultural truth; Le Guin renders Adam ’ s assumptions about what is true and worthy in life simply absurd. The first woman — at least of Judeo-Christian myth — stands for all women. That she is able to renounce her identity and join the community of animals holds promise for all women, even if that means leaving men behind. Le Guin takes the ingrained cultural negation of the animal, most firmly authorized in language and naming, and turns it to her own account. She uses that negation as the means of withdrawal from culture itself. She reverses the hierarchical arrangement that sees us stooping to liberate animals. In “ She Unnames Them, ” animal indifference to language shows a woman the way out of the stories culture tells about women and animals. What kind of community the woman and the animals will establish remains a mystery, but the step over the edge into unobstructed communion suggests possibilities both blissful and frightening.

  Mundane ’ s World, Carmen Dog, and “ She Unnames Them ” are fantasies. By definition, fantasy has little authority among modes of thought. Yet if only within its protected realm of literature, fantasy can shake the realities of dominant culture. Indeed, one might entertain the paradox — particularly with respect to the defiance of power structures — that fantasy ’ s very lack of authority challenges authoritarian culture. There is truth in Rosemary Jackson ’ s comment in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion:

  [F]antastic literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems. The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made absent. (4)

  Jackson ’ s comment puts into focus the human-assumed silence and lawlessness of animals and the efforts of women writers to assert other, entire value systems against anthropocentrism. Grahn, Emshwiller, and Le Guin inform us that the obstacles to community with animals are in us and not in them. Ironically, “ others ” vastly outnumber the beings who have claimed control over reality. If animals will not rise up and destroy us, as du Maurier envisions them doing, then the least we can do is recognize that the realities we take to be all-consuming are in fact fatally abbreviated. Perhaps it is only in the abstract that “ otherness ” has the power to subvert dominant culture ’ s confidence. Mundane ’ s World, Carmen Dog, and “ She Unnames Them ” substantiate otherness out of the realization that real, experiencing “ others ” possess this property. Seeking community with animals, these stories create whole worlds in defiance of obdurate conceptions of reality.

  Conclusion

  Having begun with Le Guin ’ s playful image of a host of “ others ” rushing about the cricket pitch and bringing the game to a halt, this essay ends appropriately with the touch of sadness implicit in fantasy. Where animals are concerned, victimization is systemic, too deeply ingrained in human institutions for optimism over the immediate effects of reconceptualization. Perhaps, however, there is reason for some slight hope, not in the creation of new conceptualization of animals, but in the changes to institutionalized ways of thinking that literary works are able to exemplify. Women ’ s stories do not arbitrarily assert different images of animals against conventional ones. They root through fundamental aspects of human and animal relations; they activate those critical and imaginative faculties that tend to remain inert with respect to animals.

  Many of the writers discussed here consciously employ feminist analyses of dominance to invoke animal resistance. At the same time, they use appreciation of animal resistance to advance the politics of feminism beyond the realm in which some minor tinkering does the work of correction. Wholesale disruption of orthodox ideas of normalcy has to occur before culture and society can understand the fullness of the “ other ’ s ” being. Excluded, women are in a good position to comprehend otherness and to use otherness to subvert the self-designated “ realities ” of authorized culture. Indeed, warning marks belong on “ reality ” and not on otherness. Otherness in the abstract bridges feminist and animal causes. Literature gives material reality to otherness, and women ’ s narratives empower otherness by locating it securely in bodies, identities, and worlds. It is not the “ otherness ” embraced by reason that challenges dominant culture, but all of the “ others ” who live alongside the culture that denies them.

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  Notes

  I wish to express my gratitude to the reviewers who offered comments on the draft version of this essay; to Josephine Donovan, Susanne Kappeler, and Carol Adams for both general and specific criticisms; and to Michael Bresalier for assistance with the initial research.

  1. The isolation of women ’ s stories is itself a political act. In her article "Animals in Folklore: A Cross-Cultural Study of Their Relation to the Status of Women" (1986), Mary A. Johnson cites C. R. Farrar ’ s observation that in the late nineteenth century, when collectors of folktales had a choice between a man ’ s version of a story and a woman ’ s, the man ’ s version was given preference (Johnson 1986, 180). The existence of three anthologies of women ’ s writings about animals, two of which are cited here (the third is Through Other Eyes: Animal Stories by Women, edited by Irene Zahava), also provides a rationale for seeking special qualities in women ’ s stories about animals. In a similar fashion, an anthology of men ’ s stories about animals might be put together, and gender tendencies sought therein. In "Animal Rights and Feminist Theory" (1990), Josephine Donovan uses a footnote to sketch out some of the distinctive features of women ’ s fiction cont
aining animals (371 – 72). All of these diverse pieces of evidence suggest the importance of bringing together the widely dispersed writing of women in order to construct an alternative view of human/animal relations.

  2. In the current postmodern climate, I feel the need to defend the use of fiction as a means of tapping a condition — otherness — which, I insist, is real and has political import precisely because it is real. Postmodern theory tends to treat the idea of fiction as an analogue for the constructedness, and hence artificiality, of beliefs about life which we take to be true; see, for example, Donna Haraway ’ s references to narrative in Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989) and Jim Cheney ’ s "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989). Taken as a concept, "fiction" is certainly useful for loosening the stranglehold of ideational constructs such as anthropocentrism. In general, however, fiction qua fiction is subversive. Encounters with "otherness" are the virtual raison d ’ ê tre of all literature. Literature has the capacity to embrace the unknown minus the need to "know" it. The uncertainty that is built into the production of literary works informs and empowers the representation of the "other." The representation of the "other," furthermore, becomes particularly dynamic, and gains special political force, in stories written by "others" whose words have been discounted by dominant culture. Fiction does compel us to confront realities, regardless of the quite powerful "fictions" on which dominant culture relies.

  3. Simone de Beauvoir ’ s The Second Sex is seminal among these works. Her observations on the inferior status presupposed by the association of women and nature have been challenged by ecofeminists. Among others who outline, question, and revise the import of connections between women and nature are the following: Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and The Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990; originally published 1980); Karen J. Warren, "The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics 12 (Summer 1990); and Val Plumwood, "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism," Hypatia 6 (Spring 1991).

  4. My primary research into stories about animals has been performed without regard to the gender of the author. The tripartite structure of this essay emerges out of the isolation of women ’ s stories about animals from an ungendered survey of the field. In fiction, men and women alike engage in reconceptualization of animals and, in the process, do well by animals. Of course, the reverse is also true: one finds men and women alike simply reproducing pernicious conventions in thought about animals. My effort to this point has been to establish the theoretical principles on which we as readers and critics can separate good work on animals from that which degrades animals and runs contrary to the cause of animal rights.

  Looking over the field again, with a feminist politic in mind, I find that many women writers are doing interesting and distinctive work on animals, many more, indeed, than could be included here. With this essay, I have tried to organize that work into a feminist scale of values, a scale of values that, in its own way, covers the history of modern feminist thought as it has moved from recognition of oppression (victimization), to the assertion of holistic selfhood (identity), and on toward the larger vision of new societies (community). Stories have been chosen to illustrate key principles in each of these matters of concern. As with my other work, I have tried to bring out specific principles that can be applied to the interpretation of stories not discussed here.

  What about men who write about animals within a feminist politic? I am not aware of many of these. One exception might be Timothy Findley, whose novel Not Wanted on the Voyage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) is a scathing attack upon Judeo-Christian patriarchy. Findley ’ s is an extraordinary novel, although an event occurs at its heart which, I would guess, would never happen in a woman ’ s story about animals. The ugliest event in the novel is what can only be described as the rape of an eleven-year-old girl with the horn of a unicorn (the unicorn dies from having his horn nearly torn from his head). Granted, the episode reveals the full depth of violence in patriarchy, for it is the chief patriarch who has performed this act. Yet as valuable as revelations like Findley ’ s are, it appears that the sympathy for animals one finds in stories such as those described in the section on victimization simply disallows the presentation of gross violence. Findley does not accord power to "others"; in one concentrated image he articulates instead the full horror of treating the animal and the woman as victims and nothing but victims.

  The principles that seem to divide men ’ s work on animals from women ’ s where identity is concerned is the naturalness of the animal and the sense of the person as a person. I have found little tendency in women ’ s writing to convert the animal into a symbol or an abstraction. Granted, it would be difficult to surpass Franz Kafka, for example, on the score of destabilizing identity by means of the animal. In my own reading of Kafka, I find he has that strength of literalness that is more consistently evident in women ’ s writing. Others, of course, find his work allegorical and busily translate his animals and his people into figurative entities. Women ’ s writing about animals and identity is not, I would suggest, as amenable to such translation as are Kafka ’ s animal stories.

  It is on the third count, the matter of community, that women writers stand far ahead of men. I know of no male writer whose utopia gives full status to both animals and humans. Indeed, William Kotzwinkle ’ s Doctor Rat (New York: Knopf, 1976) is informative: Kotzwinkle imagines a world in which all the animals come together in peace, but men come along with their tanks and bombs and simply wipe them all out. Again, as with the violence in Findley ’ s work, this degree of aggression and pessimism might be very true to male-dominated society. But it is to be hoped, as women ’ s stories hope, that male domination will not last forever.

  I should also observe that women are foremost, in several fields, among those who are examining and challenging our relations with nonhuman animals. Among historical analyses, Coral Lansbury ’ s The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) is a major study, as is Harriet Ritvo ’ s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Barbara Noske employs sociological methods to critique human uses of animals in Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology (London: Pluto Press, 1989). In the field of cultural anthropology, Donna Haraway ’ s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) is an extraordinarily detailed, groundbreaking study. In literary criticism, Margot Norris ’ s Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1985) adapts postmodern theory to suggest that artists and thinkers can " write with their animality speaking" (1). In ethics, one cannot ignore the contributions of Mary Midgley (e.g., Animals and Why They Matter [Penguin, 1983]) nor of a slim and courageous volume, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (London: Heretic Books, 1988) by Marjorie Spiegel, which does draw the "dreaded comparison" between the treatment of human slaves and the treatment of animals in bold and striking images and text. Carol Adams ’ s The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990) and "Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals," Hypatia 6 (Spring 1991) show how we can opt out of one form of institutionalized aggression against animals. Marti Kheel has pointed to the interrelationship of feminism and animal rights in "Animal Liberation is a Feminist Issue," The New Catalyst 10 (Winter 1987/88) and "Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference," in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1990).

  All in all, I believe that the title and theme of this essay sums up the distinctiveness of women ’ s stories about animals. As a rule, women recognize the redemptive power of otherness in animal. When they are working well with animals, men (again, as a rule) expose the evils of human society by pointing to the abuse of the "other" or, as with Plutarch and Swift, shaming humankind with animal superiority.

  5. I have examined representations of animal victims at length in Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice (Scholtmeijer 1993).

  6. For an extensive treatment of Webb ’ s novel and that strange phenomenon of yoking libido with the lust to kill animals, see chapter 5 of my book Animal Victims (1993).

  7. This analysis draws upon the literal surface of "Attack at Dawn." A figurative reading of the story (observed and astutely examined by members of a class I conducted on animals in fiction), which would work with phallic, vaginal, and rape imagery, yields a fascinating interpretation but fails to address, and in fact runs contrary to, the reality of hostility between humans and animals vividly invoked in this story. I do not claim that the literal reading is the correct one, only that it works just as well as the figurative reading, which might receive greater favor with literary critics.