Just as the Great War is the context for Carpenter’s statement about the need for an androgynous vision to challenge war and animal slaughter, in the wake of World War I many modern women writers trace the causes of both war and meat eating to male dominance. Events of the Great War yoked the heretofore sporadically linked notions of pacifism and vegetarianism. The Great War quickened vegetarianism, propelling it as a movement into the twentieth century and as a subject into the novels of women writers.
As an attribute of fictional characters, few literary examples of vegetarianism antedate the Great War, with the notable exception of Frankenstein’s Creature. The modernization of vegetarianism occurred when it began to figure, as a theme or incidental element, in novels. The last chapter examined the significance of vegetarianism and its historical manifestations as it appears in one novel; this chapter applies that same approach to consider vegetarian themes that recur in a series of novels. As with Frankenstein, these novels, too, enact a narrative strategy that highlights vegetarian meaning.
In this chapter I will propose that the textual strategy of “interruption” allows modern women writers to introduce vegetarian incidents into their novels. Four themes arise when a vegetarian “interruption” occurs. These themes include rejection of male acts of violence, identification with animals, repudiation of men’s control of women, and the positing of an ideal world composed of vegetarianism, pacifism, and feminism as opposed to a fallen world composed in part of women’s oppression, war, and meat eating.
The novels to be considered in this chapter adhere to patterns previously discussed in chapter 5, “Dismembered Texts, Dismembered Animals.” They bear the vegetarian word through allusion to earlier vegetarian ideas, through language that clearly identifies the functioning of the structure of the absent referent, and through the assumption that people who read vegetarian writings become vegetarian. We will see that the idea of meat is used as a trope for women’s oppression; this trope identifies the overlap of the oppression of women and animals.
A feminist perspective in these novels links violence against people and violence against animals. It is this unique perspective that will be closely examined, for it demonstrates how vegetarian insights can be applied to analyses of other forms of political violence. The apparently unrelated critiques of women against war and vegetarians against meat eating become intimately related. From this perspective of the interrelationships of violence, vegetarianism can be seen as a challenge to war, pacifism as a challenge to meat eating. This interrelationship becomes visible when women articulate a connection with animals—beings who are also made absent referents by patriarchal society—thus correlating male acts of violence against people and animals. In deliberately bearing the vegetarian word, they challenge a world at war.
After briefly summarizing a feminist analysis of political violence and the ways by which the Great War effected the modernization of vegetarianism, we will consider the narrative strategies and thematic concerns of several illustrative works. This consideration will suggest the depths of the linkage between vegetarianism and pacifism in women’s writings of the twentieth century and extend our understanding of the sexual politics of meat.
The sexual politics of war
During the Great War some anti-war feminists argued, like Edward Carpenter, that women had unique traits that caused them to be more peace-loving than men. This emphasis on gender distinctions, called by one historian the “argument for ameliorative influence,” focused on women’s role as nurturers and mothers. As historian C. Roland March- and describes this viewpoint: “Women embodied the ‘gentler traits of tenderness and mercy’ and therefore had a special contribution to offer to government. . . . Destructive masculine ideas of physical force would only be overcome, militant suffragist Harriet Stanton Blatch argued, when the ‘mother viewpoint’ forced its way into international diplomacy.”3
In a chapter entitled “Woman and War,” from her 1911 book Woman and Labour, Olive Shreiner provides an illustrative example of this argument for ameliorative influence. She posits that women oppose war and the killing of animals for sport because of their child-bearing:
The relations of the female towards the production of human life influences undoubtedly even her relation towards animal and all life. “It is a fine day, let us go out and kill something!” cries the typical male of certain races, instinctively. “There is a living thing, it will die if it is not cared for,” says the average woman, almost equally instinctively.4
Other feminists decried political violence by arguing that it was male domination, not male traits, and the absence of female power that caused war. Women’s exclusion from powerful positions in patriarchal society provides Virginia Woolf with the opportunity to propose in her brilliant anti-war feminist essay, Three Guineas, the creation of an Outsider’s Society. As she develops her argument linking male power, the exclusion of women, and bellicose militarism, she, like Carpenter and Schreiner before her, connects the deaths of people and of animals: “Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us.”5
Agnes Ryan and her husband Henry Bailey Stevens, both editors of the Woman’s Journal and pacifists, became vegetarians during the Great War. They decided that the responsibility for both war and meat eating rested with men, and were influenced in their analysis by their friendship with Emarel Freshel. Ryan describes Freshel’s address on war and meat eating to a 1915 Fabian Society meeting: “Here was a new type of woman; here was a new spiritual force at work in the universe. . . . She clearly stressed the idea that wars will never be overcome until the belief that it is justifiable to take life, to kill—when expedient,—is eradicated from human consciousness.”6 In 1917, Freshel, author of the definitive vegetarian cookbook for that time, The Golden Rule Cookbook, resigned from the Christian Science Church when it supported the entry of the United States into World War I.
If feminist vegetarians argued that killing animals becomes a justification for killing human beings, some who adhere to the dominant viewpoint persuade children to eat meat by justifying the necessity, at times, to kill even human beings. Lawrence Kohlberg, well-known scholar on the moral development of children, reports that his four-year-old son “joined the pacifist and vegetarian movement and refused to eat meat because, he said, it is bad to kill animals.” Kohlberg’s response was an attempt to “dissuade him by arguing about the difference between justified and unjustified killing,”7 thus establishing a morality that recognizes some forms of killing as legitimate. It is as though the way to create a child’s acceptance of animals’ deaths is by convincing him or her that sometimes humans must be killed, too. “Just” wars then justify meat eating. This phenomenon is figured in Walter de la Mare’s “Dry August Burned”: a small girl is weeping at the sight of the absent referent, a dead hare that lies lifeless on the kitchen table. A team of field artillery “thudding by” interrupts her mourning. She watches the wonderment and tumult of it all, returns to the kitchen and with flushed cheeks asks to watch the rabbit be skinned.8 The soldiers have intervened; in their presence, the dead rabbit has now become an accepted fact, no longer mourned.
“Dry August Burned” figures a transition in an attitude toward an animal killed for food, a transition caused by the reminder of war. This response enforces a relationship between eating animals and killing humans. If the wartime killing of human beings is used to establish the legitimacy of meat eating, then challenging meat eating challenges a world at war.
Individual women took the insights of the connected brutalities of war and of meat eating to heart. For instance Mary Alden Hopkins remarked: “I reacted violently at that time against all established institutions, like marriage, spanking, meat diet, prisons, war, public schools, and our form of government.”9 Many feminist-vegetarian pacifists can be found during World War I. During the Great War, feminist, pacifist, and vegetarian Charlotte Despard provided v
egetarian meals at the cheap meals service she offered on her property.10 At least four American vegetarian feminists traveled on the Ford Peace Ship in 1915.11
In the wake of the war, the position that the absence of female power caused war intersected with the view that meat-eating cultures were war cultures (even though not all meat-eating cultures were then at war). As feminists and vegetarians acknowledged their shared critical positions, they discovered that the destructive values of patriarchal culture were not limited to the battlefront.
The Great War: Modernizing vegetarianism
When times are normal people and governments are inclined to pursue lines of least resistance; that is, to continue practices and customs not because they are best but because of habit, but it is during abnormal periods that we do our best thinking. . . . I have long had in mind a book on “Wheatless and Meatless Menus,” but the time to bring it out was not ripe until now.
—Eugene Christian, Meatless and Wheatless Menus, 191712
Just as antiwar feminists believed that empowering women would end war, so vegetarians believed that eliminating meat eating moved the world closer to pacifism. Indeed, they would say, the Vedic word for war “means ‘desire for cows.’ ”13 Anna Kingsford, when discussing Women’s Peace Conventions of the nineteenth century bemoaned that “These poor deluded creatures cannot see that universal peace is absolutely impossible to a carnivorous race.”14 Percy Shelley thundered that “the butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related alto’ purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men.”15 In 1918 the Federation of Humano-Vegetarians in America wrote to President Woodrow Wilson seeking equivalent treatment for “adherents of the Vegetarian Cult” as for conscientious objectors because “we vegetarians, reaffirming our faith in the Universal Kinship of the ‘Animal Kingdom’ and the ‘Brotherhood of Man,’ adhere in our allegiance to the elementary human commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’ ”16 Douglas Goldring, in discussing the conscientious objectors who joined the 1917 Club, remarks that they “were certainly the oddest lot of people ever temporarily united under one banner. Some of them carried their dislike of killing so far that they existed only on vegetables.”17 Notably, after the Great War, insights into the possible connections between war and meat eating can be found in writers other than ethical vegetarians.
One reason that insights into these connections are now found in other writers is because of the revelations of the war itself. During the war, soldiers’ imaginations became alerted to what Bernard Shaw and other vegetarians had claimed for decades: corpses are corpses. How could the soldier avoid thinking of his commonality with animals as he sat in the trenches watching large black rats consume soldier and horse? The horrors of this war were also found in the slaughterhouse. The editor’s introduction to L. F. Easterbrook’s article on “Alcohol and Meat” explains, “In 1918 the spectacle of a herd of scared and suffering cattle hustled together in a van, and being conveyed to a slaughter yard, struck the writer of this note as being at least as abominable, and as degrading to our civilisation, as anything he had recently witnessed on several hard fighting fronts in France and Italy.”18
Philosopher Mary Midgley views the Great War as a turning point in attitudes toward animals, suggesting that after the war there was an upsurge of interest in and scientific proof of the continuities between the other animals and human beings. After citing examples of good-hearted tolerance of egregious acts of hunting, she writes, “For most of us, however, the light seems somehow to have changed—indeed, it probably did so during the First World War.”19
The Great War also provided a positive, though transitory, vegetarian environment for civilians, especially women, through the rationing of food.20 Civilians could turn to books such as Meatless and Wheatless Menus or The Golden Rule Cookbook. This rationing provided one researcher the largest survey population attainable, the entire nation of Denmark. Dr. Mikkel Hindhede describes it as “a low protein experiment on a large scale, about 3,000,000 subjects being available.” After directing the rationing program necessitated by the war—“a milk and vegetable diet” along with bran bread, barley, porridge, potatoes, and greens—Hindhede, who had been conducting experiments on low protein, mostly vegetarian, diets since 1895, found that it had improved the Danish people’s mortality rates.21 As a result of vegetarianism’s increased attractiveness, the time between the Great War and World War II has been called the “Golden Era of Vegetarianism.”22
Whereas civilians encountered government encouragement for meatless diets, the epitome of the masculine men, soldiers, received meat, as I discussed in chapter 1. The late Marty Feldman reported that during World War II when his father “was in the Army, [he] could not eat meat because he was an Orthodox Jew. He practically starved to death and was treated with great contempt by the other soldiers because a soldier should eat steak.”23 This emphasis on meat for the male population at the war front may have clarified connections between feminism, vegetarianism, and pacifism at home.
“The lesson of the past six years is this,” Henry Salt observed in 1921, “As long as man kills the lower races for food or sport, he will be ready to kill his own race for enmity. It is not this bloodshed, or that bloodshed, that must cease, but all needless bloodshed—all wanton infliction of pain or death upon our fellow-beings.”24 In this observation, Salt expands the notion of the “front” at which deplorable killing occurs. Vegetarians are not alone in postulating an expanded front that includes animal victims. Some twentieth-century British and American women writers strategically expand the terrain of war while exploring the issue of male dominance. The front, they suggest, exists not only in traditionally viewed warfare, but also in what they view as the war against nonhuman animals, typified in hunting and meat eating. Thus they apply insights about wars to the sexual politics of meat.
Women’s fiction and the expanded front
Wars will never cease while men still kill other animals for food, since to turn any living creature into a roast, a steak, a chop, or any other form of “meat” takes the same kind of violence, the same kind of bloodshed and the same kind of mental processes required to change a living man into a dead soldier.
—Agnes Ryan, “For the Church Door,” March 194325
I expect after you have many times seen a deer or woodchuck blown to bits, the thought of a human being blown to bits is that much less impossible to conceive.
—Medieval scholar Grace Knole in The James Joyce Murders 26
Does a man revisit the Great War by recalling his days as a fox hunter? Yes, according to Siegfried Sassoon, whose The Memoirs of George Sherston, which culminates in 1918, begins with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.27 Is sport a training for war, as Henry Salt argued in 1914?28 How else should Robert Graves begin his farcical, satirical, humorous memoir—his book that turned the war and everything else on its end—but by introducing us to a vegetarian?29 Can there be A Case for the Vegetarian Conscientious Objector, as Max Davis and Scott Nearing believed in 1945? Where else should a novel anticipating the Great War begin but with a male-only shooting party? All of these works suggest a connection between eating meat (and/or hunting) and war. This sense of connection was both verified and intensified once examined through a feminist lens. For then one saw that it was Man the Hunter and Man the Soldier—the phrases are Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s from a poem that opens her penultimate book, His Religion and Hers, written after, and influenced by, World War I.30
Man the hunter, man the soldier: this refrain not only links disparate acts of violence—the killing of people and the killing of animals—but also focuses on the sex of the killer. The tradition of vegetarian feminist novels by women writers that I explore in this chapter recalls this approach. This tradition originates with the recognition of an expanded front that exists wherever animals are killed. A constellation of feminist insights seems to follow this recognition, which I have isola
ted into four distinct themes. (1) The theme of rejection of male acts of violence: While their complicity in meat eating locates women at the front, a heightened sensitivity to the consumption of animal flesh also generates a comprehensive antiwar critique from the front. (2) The theme of identification with animals: Women are allied with animals because they too are objects of use and possession. Women’s oppression is expressed through the trope of meat eating. (3) The theme of vegetarianism as rejection of male control and violence: Through the adoption of vegetarianism women simultaneously reject a warring world and dependence on men. This dependence not only manifests itself in the need to be protected by men, but also the need to project on men tasks that women prefer not to think of themselves as doing, such as functioning as killers. (4) The theme of linked oppressions and linked ideal states: Human male dominance is seen to cause women’s oppression, war, and meat eating; conversely, in discussions of that perfect world before the Fall, vegetarianism and pacifism become linked with women’s equality. While the works in this tradition are unified by their inclusion of animals, none of them attempts to include all four themes in any one text, nor is there any chronological order to the development of these themes. In essence, while the texts are united by a recognition of an enlarged war front, they vary according to the distinct themes evolving from the particular configuration they choose to explore.
Isabel Colegate’s Great War novel The Shooting Party anchors the texts securely within the antiwar tradition. By exploring the connection between hunting and war from a woman’s perspective, Colegate demonstrates, like Sassoon, that hunting is the perfect prelude and pattern for judging a warring world. Colegate provides a female twist, however, by including women in the expanded front. If hunting is the appropriate mirror against which to judge war, then women can gain a voice in judging what they do not share—the battlefront—by judging what they do share as spectators—the experience of the hunt.
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 18
