Animals and Women Feminist The

by Carol J Adams

  8. For discussion of "The Birds" in a different context, see my article "The Animal at the Door: Modern Works of Horror and the Natural Animal," in State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of the Fantastic in Literature and Film, ed. Nicholas Ruddick (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992).

  9. For further discussion of Mansfield ’ s "The Fly," see Animal Victims (Scholtmeijer 1993).

  10. Several philosophers of animal rights could be cited here: Tom Regan, Peter Singer, Mary Midgley, Gary Francione, Michael Allen Fox — the names are probably familiar to readers. One of the most recent books to argue for the moral extension of human status to animals is The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, ed. Paolo Cavalieri and Peter Singer (London: Fourth Estate, 1993). In this anthology, writers take a truly bold step and argue seriously that the great apes should be treated as persons.

  11. A similar image, with similar import, occurs in the popular book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Est é s 1993). In a highly effective description, Est é s appeals directly to the wolf to articulate mischievous defiance of sober institutions:

  Like my kith and kin before me, I swagger-staggered on high-heels, and I wore a dress and hat to church. But my fabulous tail often fell below my hemline, and my ears twitched until my hat pitched, at the very least, down over both my eyes, and sometimes clear across the room. (5 – 6)

  While Emshwiller is working in the domain of fantasy and Est é s is speaking figuratively, both fuse woman and animal to give physical shape to the literal power of otherness in women. In a more accessible image, Mary Webb brings Foxy and Hazel ’ s other animal companions into church to witness Hazel ’ s wedding in Gone to Earth . All three writers correct the oppressive dullness of the institution by means of animals.

  References

  Corrigan, Theresa, and Stephanie Hoppe, eds. 1989. With a Fly ’ s Eye, Whale ’ s Wit, and Woman ’ s Heart: Animals and Women . San Francisco: Cleis Press.

  — — — . 1990. And a Deer ’ s Ear, Eagle ’ s Song, and Bear ’ s Grace: Animals and Women . San Francisco: Cleis Press.

  Donovan, Josephine. 1990. Animal Rights and Feminist Theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (Winter):350 – 75.

  Du Maurier, Daphne. 1976. The Birds. In Echoes of the Macabre: Selected Stories . London: Victor Gollancz. Story originally published 1952.

  Emshwiller, Carol. 1990. Carmen Dog . San Francisco: Mercury House.

  Est é s, Clarissa Pinkola. 1993. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype . New York: Ballantine Books.

  Gordimer, Nadine. 1952. The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories . New York: Simon and Schuster.

  Grahn, Judy. 1988. Mundane ’ s World . Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press.

  Hurston, Zora Neale. 1991. Their Eyes Were Watching God . Foreword by Ruby Dee, introduction by Sherley Anne Williams, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Originally published 1937.

  Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion . London: Methuen.

  Johnson, Mary A. 1986. Animals in Folklore: A Cross-Cultural Study of Their Relation to the Status of Women. Michigan Academician 18 (Spring): 175 – 83.

  Lansbury, Coral. 1985. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

  Le Guin, Ursula. 1988. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences . New York: New American Library.

  Lessing, Doris. 1974. The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories . New York: Bantam.

  Lispector, Clarice. 1985. Family Ties . Translated and with an afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet. Originally published 1960.

  — — — . 1986. The Foreign Legion: Stories and Chronicles . Translated and with an afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. New York: New Directions. Originally published 1964.

  — — — . 1989. Soulstorm . Translated and with an afterword by Alexis Levitin, introduction by Grace Paley. New York: New Directions. Originally published 1974.

  Mansfield, Katherine. 1967. The Fly. In Selected Stories, chosen and introduced by D. M. Davin. London: Oxford University Press.

  Moises, Massaud. 1971. Clarice Lispector: Fiction and Cosmic Vision. Studies in Short Fiction 8 (Winter):268 – 81.

  Munro, Alice. 1968. Dance of the Happy Shades . Foreword by Hugh Garner. Toronto: Ryerson Press.

  Pitts, Deirdre Dwen. 1974. Discovering the Animal of a Thousand Faces. In Children ’ s Literature, ed. F. Butler, vol. 3. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

  Scholtmeijer, Marian. 1993. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice . Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

  Walker, Alice. 1989. The Temple of My Familiar . New York: Pocket Books.

  Webb, Mary. 1982. Gone to Earth . Introduction by Erika Duncan. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys. Originally published 1917.

  Wilson, Harriet E. 1984. Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black . Introduction by Henry Louis Gates. London: Allen & Busby. Originally published 1859.

  11

  Reginald Abbott

  Birds Don ’ t Sing in Greek: Virginia Woolf and “ The Plumage Bill ”

  MY DEAR GODPAPA HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE ADIRONDACKS AND HAVE YOU SEEN LOTS OF WILD BEASTS AND A LOT OF BIRDS IN THEIR NESTS YOU ARE A NAUGHTY MAN NOT TO COME HERE GOOD BYE

  YOUR AFFECT e

  VIRGINIA

  From Virginia Stephen, age six, to her “ godfather ” James Russell Lowell, 20 August 1888 — Woolf ’ s first surviving letter ( Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1:2)

  [Virginia] heard voices urging her to acts of folly; she believed that they came from overeating and that she must starve herself. . . . [Violet Dickinson] took Virginia to her house at Burnham Wood and it was there that she made her first attempt to commit suicide. She threw herself from a window, which, however, was not high enough from the ground to cause her serious harm. It was here too that she lay in bed, listening to the birds singing in Greek.

  (from Quentin Bell ’ s Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 1:89 – 90)

  On 10 July 1920, H. W. Massingham (1860 – 1924), 1 writing under the nom de plume of “ Wayfarer, ” made the following comments concerning the failure of the 1920 Plumage Bill in the House of Commons:

  Now that the Plumage Bill has been smothered the massacre of the innocents will continue. Nature puts an end to birds and the trade together. Her veto will be final, and as science declares that six years without birds means the end of her animate system, the end of the Plumage Trade may possibly coincide with the end of us. . . . What does one expect? They have to be shot in parenthood for child-bearing women to flaunt the symbols of it, and, as Mr. [William H.] Hudson 2 says, one bird shot for its plumage means ten other deadly wounds and the starvation of the young. But what do women care? Look at Regent Street this morning! (quoted in “ The Plumage Bill, ” Woolf, Essays, 3:243 – 44, n.2; 241)

  A maturing writer took Massingham at his word. Virginia Woolf, the thirty-eight-year-old author of two novels — The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) — and several dozen essays and book reviews, did look out onto Regent Street (at least figuratively) and decided in her own signed essay on the Plumage Bill of 1920 (originally published in Rachel [Ray] Strachey ’ s [1887 – 1940] The Woman ’ s Leader, 23 July 1920) that, given time and money, she would wear a plume, an egret plume to be exact. 3 As a rhetorical device, Woolf ’ s declaration expressed both a sincere anger at a gender-biased anti-plumage argument and absolved a sincere anti-plumage writer (Woolf herself) of the “ plumage guilt ” that a real purchase would have incurred. Unfortunately, the rhetoric backfired on Woolf, as it was used by Massingham and others in their critical attacks on Woolf ’ s essay. In a written response to these attacks, Woolf — in a gesture that can be characterized as ambivalent, ironic, and curiously apropos — promised to turn her fee for the article over to the anti-plumag
e Plumage Bill Group [ Essays, 3:245, n.4). Thus, the story of Woolf ’ s “ earliest feminist polemic ” ends just as her last feminist polemic, Three Guineas (1938), begins: with questions about the economic status of women, money, and a charitable cause.

  Woolf ’ s ‘ The Plumage Bill ” (see appendix) finds its small place — it hardly fills two full pages — in the third volume (1919 – 1924) of Woolf ’ s collected essays (241 – 43). The length of the essay, about 1,000 words, belies its importance. In his introduction to this volume, Andrew McNeillie refers first to the “ polemical panache ” of the essay (xii) and later in the introduction states that “ The Plumage Bill ” stands as Woolf ’ s “ earliest feminist polemic ” (xviii). That the essay has “ punch ” as well as “ polemical panache ” can hardly escape the reader of Woolf ’ s collected essays. Throughout the first two volumes of Woolf ’ s reviews and essays, one is presented with page after page of insightful and engaging commentary on books, people, things, and life. At no time in these calm essays, however, does Woolf become enthusiastic to the point of fever-pitch praise, or outraged to the point of condemnation. 4 Then the reader comes to “ The Plumage Bill, ” Woolf ’ s first exclamation as an essayist. This “ panache ” or unmistakable polemical tone alone would make “ The Plumage Bill ” an important essay for the Woolf scholar. McNeillie, however, points to an even more important feature of the essay: its place as the first public, controversial, feminist statement by the writer who was destined to become the author of A Room of One ’ s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) — arguably the two most important feminist polemics in English literature.

  It [feather mania and a contemporary entomological mania] seems to have been a case of loving the animal world to death. Dr. C. Willett Cunnington, costume authority and Freudian, associated the craze for zoological decoration with the sublimation of sexual desire among women doomed to late marriage in a time of economic slump. Redirected affections are also credited with the philanthropic and conservationist movements which were also a feature of the age. The conservationist American Audubon Society was founded in 1886 and the English Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds in 1889. (92)

  It would be impossible to provide a brief summary of the organizations, legislative proposals, and trade proposals involved in the plumage trade controversy of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. 5 Some mention must be made, however, of the men and women, especially the women, involved in anti-plumage activities. In “ The Plumage Bill, ” Woolf mentions “ a vow taken in childhood and hitherto religiously observed ” concerning not wearing the plumage of wild, endangered birds (241). 6 Such a vow was part of membership in organizations like the Society for the Protection of Birds, founded by Mrs. Robert W. Williamson (Royal Society after 1904), and other groups led by Mrs. Edward Phillips and Mrs. Frank E. Lemon, as well as the Plumage League founded in 1885 (Doughty, 96; Haynes, 26). Other important women in the anti-plumage campaign included Baroness Burdett-Coutts, an intense advocate of the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Winifred, Duchess of Portland, who was president of the Society of the Protection of Birds for sixty-three years and who encouraged Queen Alexandra to ban “ osprey ” feathers at court in 1906 (Doughty, 96, 116). As for the anti-plumage men, Lord Robert Cecil (1864 – 1958) introduced the first comprehensive plumage bill in the House of Commons in 1908. His wife, Lady Robert Cecil (1868 – 1956), was a close friend of Virginia Woolf.

  All this anti-plumage activity cannot, however, be credited with the abandonment of feather fashions by the early 1920s. Although attention must be given to the effects of World War I in disrupting international trade in general, there was an unquestionable decline in the consumption of exotic feathers after 1910. Between 1911 and 1920, feather imports (excluding ostrich after 1912) were 7,397,000 pounds, roughly half of the amount for 1901 – 1910 (Doughty 26). Allan Haynes in his article “ Murderous Millinery ” also notes the decline and characterizes it as a “ collapse ” from 1,275,413 pounds of exotic feathers in 1913 to 35,877 pounds in 1920 (30). Imports from France fell from a high of “ 2.2. million pounds in 1913 to less than one-tenth that amount in 1920 ” (Doughty, 25). Doughty quotes a contemporary source who attributes the decline in feather fashions to the rise of the automobile and the need for simpler clothes capable of being defended from automotive dirt and dust (23, n.19). Aileen Ribeiro in Dress and Morality credits the decline of fashionable plumage to fashion itself:

  The campaign against fur coats is of fairly recent origin, but it follows in the footsteps of the Edwardian attacks on the “ immorality ” of using birds ’ plumage to decorate the vast hats which were in vogue; such “ murderous millinery ” was preached against in pulpits and derided in newspapers, but it was due more to a change in fashion than to a change of heart that women stopped wearing such styles in the second decade of this century. (14, emphasis added)

  This change in fashion was almost a complete renunciation of plumage: “ The opulent curves of the Edwardian lady, with her stately piled-high hair in art-nouveau curves and her huge hat covered in birds ’ plumage, were no longer required ” (Ribeiro, 149).

  Indeed, I would suggest that this short essay is not just Woolf ’ s “ earliest feminist polemic ” but the direct prototype of the longer, more developed works, not only in tone but also in the issues that it raises. But it is also important to note how Woolf frames her first public statement on the “ woman question. ” Though Woolf has been labeled a “ socialist, pacifist, feminist, and anti-fascist ” (Marcus, “ Introduction, ” xv), no one has to date taken Carol Adams ’ s statements concerning an “ historic alliance of feminism and vegetarianism in . . . suffrage movements and twentieth century pacifism ” ( The Sexual Politics of Meat, 167) and applied them to Woolf and her writings. Such an approach to Woolf appears ideal from the standpoint of the ostensible subject of “ The Plumage Bill. ”

  However, while “ The Plumage Bill ” does raise both the “ woman question ” and what might be called the “ bird question, ” Woolf ’ s answer clearly distinguishes the two concerns as separate, with the woman question the more important of the two. Woolf cannot be said to fit Adams ’ s feminist-vegetarian (or feminist-animal rights) theory as a “ major figure in women ’ s literature ” who “ conjoined feminism and vegetarianism in ways announcing continuity, not discontinuity ” (166). Still, it is undeniable that Woolf in ‘ The Plumage Bill ” put herself right in the middle of the controversy surrounding the bird preservation movement and conservationist concerns as they had developed throughout the nineteenth century and as they existed in 1920. In doing so, Woolf also hit upon other controversial issues — dress, gender distribution of wealth and political power, and the roles of women in society and art as producers and consumers — that she consistently addressed throughout her career.

  Woolf ’ s essay appeared just as a well-organized anti-plumage campaign was about to succeed in banning the importation of exotic feathers (Plumage Act of 1921) and, ironically, just as the huge demand for exotic plumage was about to end. That plumage was an essential part of Victorian and Edwardian fashion cannot be doubted. Robin W. Doughty in Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation presents a highly detailed chart of the feather fashions recorded in Harper ’ s Bazaar for 1875 – 1900 (20 – 21). The uses were seemingly endless: turbans, neck ruches, boas, bonnets, bandeaus, capes, aigrettes, and innumerable styles of hats. The variety of plumage was also seemingly endless: herons, egrets, ostriches, grebes, pheasants, cocks, owls, parrots, ibis, marabou, peafowl, etc. Both domestic and wild fowl contributed to the trade. Technology developed to clean and dye feathers for extended use and retrimming as well as for the manufacture of artificial feathers — an ironic development as these processes would eventually enable domestic fowl feathers to imitate endangered wild species (Ginsburg, 92; Doughty, 67). Wings, bodies, heads, as well as tail plumage were all used; occasionally, different species were merged on one hat (Doughty, 22). A demand for th
e heads of South American hummingbirds for jewelry even flourished for a time (Bury, 619). Ostrich farming was established (in the Cape Colony in the mid-1860s) as a result of the demand for those sumptuous feathers (Doughty, 18; Ginsburg, 92), and, as the demand for egret plumes — the specific example used by both Massingham and Woolf in their respective essays — reached ever greater heights, egret farming was successfully achieved, albeit too late to benefit the plumage trade (Doughty, 75 – 79).

  Thus, the voluptuous Edwardian lady in plumes gave way to couturier Paul Poiret ’ s (1879 – 1944) “ Grecian ” silhouette, aigretted turbans, and hobble skirts, all of which in turn gave way to the unmistakable look of the 1920s: short skirts, “ boyish figures, ” and the unplumed, unaigretted cloche hat. 7 Of course, the genius of Poiret and Paris fashions were worlds away from the Victorian household of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832 – 1904), Woolf ’ s father, and the geniuses and would-be geniuses of what would be called Bloomsbury. The Stephen family has come to represent for many the quintessential patriarchal Victorian household. It should not be surprising, therefore, to find that Woolf was fully inculcated in the Victorian concept of an ordered animal world governed by man — a concept described by Harriet Ritvo as the “ animal estate ” :

  Obviously, feather fashions prompted an immense and highly profitable trade in the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras. At the height of feather fashions in this century, 1901 – 1910, 14,362,000 pounds of feathers were imported into the United Kingdom at a total valuation of £ 19,923,000 (Doughty, 26). What was the impetus or fashion motive behind this intense trade? Doughty is no fashion writer, but does suggest some of the utility and beauty of feather fashions: “ Feathers upon enlarged hats and bonnets lent height to upper features and provided dignity and elegance. They were also necessary to soften and fill out body and dress contours and to highlight the face. Through an infinite variety of color and shape, plumage conveyed a novel attractiveness and individuality to head wear ” (17). The traditional Freudian interpretation of the feather fashions of the nineteenth century is offered by Madeleine Ginsburg in her study of the hat: