The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Carol J Adams

  Colegate’s tightly constructed novel depicts the evening of the second day and the third day of a traditional shooting party. It is a stunning evocation of prewar innocence and a dark foreshadowing of a bloody war. But the shooting party—with its army of uniformed beaters following campaign plans, moving from the bivouac of lunch to the front line of the shooting, with the loaders scurrying in a no-man’s-land retrieving the thickly strewn corpses—is not a mere intimation of things to come, but a depiction of a war itself. “War might be like this,” thinks Olivia, “casual, friendly and frightening.”31 Indeed, male competition, culminating in the accidental death of a beater, who propelled the frightened pheasants forth to their slaughter at the guns of the upper-class shooters, represents the eternal cause of war. A hunter eager for the most animals “bagged” mistakenly shoots the beater.

  Colegate places more spectators at the “front” than shooters. We find there the beaters, the upper-class women, an activist vegetarian, a young child worried about his pet duck, a maid. Their thoughts about the shooting act as counterpoints to the escalating competition of the male shooters.

  By positioning her women at the shooting party, Colegate establishes their right to voice criticisms such as Olivia’s: “And I am often aware at shooting parties how differently I feel from a man and how, more than that, I really would like to rebel against the world men have made, if I knew how to.” Olivia articulates Colegate’s theme of rejection of male violence. In Colegate’s novel, women’s presence in, but opposition to, the violent world men have made is constantly reiterated.

  Through the analogy of the shooting party as war, Colegate expands the front to where women are, empowering their articulations. When the war is referred to as “a bigger shooting party [which] had begun, in Flanders,” empowerment to speak of this front implicitly exists. Thus, The Shooting Party becomes one answer to the recurring twentieth-century question posed to women writers: how does a woman condemn war if she cannot be a soldier?32 This issue is dissolved if she criticizes war by criticizing its equivalent, of which she is a part, as witness as well as subsequent consumer: the shooting party.

  During the Great War the chasm between the soldier at war and the woman spectator was intentionally widened by soldier-writers who condescendingly dismissed—for lack of experience at the front—any writings by noncombatants. This legacy of condescension and dismissal carried into World War II as well. By showing that women, prior to the Great War, had a right to voice their perspective on war through the corollary experience of participating in, and responding to, a shooting party, Colegate brilliantly restores a right of articulation. The suggestion her novel leaves, therefore, is not that one must be at the war front to have the right to speak, but that one may speak by linking one’s own experience to war, through making the connection between hunting and/or meat eating and war. So, one can claim one’s voice. Wilfred Owen and other writers of World War I erred not by restricting authentic experiences to the front alone, but by their too-limited definition of where the front can be found.

  At the expanded front, the theme of identification with animals arises: With whom do the women located there align themselves, the hunter or the hunted? Identification with animals is a pivotal moment for two novels in this tradition of women writers. For Margaret Atwood’s and Marge Piercy’s characters, meat eating becomes a trope of their own oppression. Women come to see themselves as being consumed by marital oppression at the domestic front; they realize that their bodies are battlegrounds and view animals with the new awareness of a common experience. The third theme, related to their identification with animals, expresses their sense of shared violation. Linking sexual oppression to meat eating, Atwood’s and Piercy’s women forego the traditional romantic ending by giving up marriage and associating male dominance in personal relationships with meat eating.33 Thus, they give up meat as well.

  The character who most successfully rejects both meat and marriage is Beth, in Marge Piercy’s Small Changes. Newly married, she finds herself one night eating meat loaf at the kitchen table. Though shaken by a vehement argument during which her husband, angered by her apparent independence, had flushed her birth control pills down the toilet, she sits and contemplates her situation. As she chews the meat loaf she realizes her status as simultaneously victim and victimizer: “A trapped animal eating a dead animal.”34 She restores the absent referent: “Remember the cold meat loaf. From the refrigerator she got the ketchup and doused it liberally. Then it was less obnoxious. Meat, a dead animal that had been alive. She felt as if her life were something slippery she was trying to grab in running water.” Grasping her life, she flees her domestic front, becoming a conscientious objector to the war against women and animals.35 Beth undergoes numerous “small changes” on which Marge Piercy centers her novel. Beth’s first and abiding change is her rejection of meat: “The revulsion toward eating flesh from the night of the meat loaf remained. It was part superstition and part morality: she had escaped to her freedom and did not want to steal the life of other warm-blooded creatures.” (Her refusal of meat did not include fish.) Her insights of an expanded front catalyze her education into feminism, her evolution into lesbianism, and, finally, her important enactment of antiwar activism through a Traveling Women’s Theater. Inevitably she denounces all war fronts.

  Though Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman takes place far from war it is in the midst of a war zone. Atwood’s character, Marian, discovers there are no civilians there, only hunter or hunted, consumer or consumed. Marian’s job is to assess the impact of a Moose beer ad that features hunting: “That was so the average beer-drinker, the slope-shouldered pot-bellied kind, would be able to feel a mystical identity with the plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net.”36 But Marian identifies with the victim and cries after hearing her fiancé describe his experience at the “front” as a hunter killing and eviscerating a rabbit.

  An emotional argument over dinner propels Marian to realize that not only is she at the front, she is the front: She watches her fiancé skillfully cut his meat, and remembers the Moose beer ads, the hunter poised with a deer, which reminds her of the morning newspaper’s report of a young boy who killed nine people after going berserk. Again she ponders her fiancé carving his steak and recalls her cookbook’s diagram of a “cow with lines on it and labels to show you from which part of the cow all the different cuts were taken. What they were eating now was from some part of the back, she thought: cut on the dotted line.” Then she casts her eyes at her own food.

  She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed, knocked on the head as it [sic] stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it.

  After this, Marian’s unconscious attitude toward food changes: her body rejects certain foods and she realizes to her surprise that she is becoming a vegetarian, that her body has taken an ethical stand: “It simply refused to eat anything that had once been, or (like oysters on the half-shell) might still be living.” Both meat eating and first-person narration are suspended once Marian intuits her link to other animals, suggesting that a challenge to meat eating is linked to an attack on the sovereign individual subject. The fluid, merged subjectively of the middle part of the book finds mystical identity with things, especially animals, that are consumed.

  Only when she can deal with her own sexual subjugation is Marian released from her body’s refusal to eat. She confronts her fiancé with a truly edible woman, a cake she has made, and accuses: “You’ve been trying to destroy me, haven’t you. . . . You’ve been trying to assimilate me.”37 Domestic dynamics, a sexual war, led to vegetarianism. But so profound a challenge to the status quo seems too much to sustain. After breaking her engagement and freeing herself from subjugation to her fiancé, Marian reclaims both first-perso
n narration and regains control over her body’s selection of foods. Freed from domestic oppression, she has difficulty sustaining insights in opposition to the dominant world-view, and the pleasure of her own autonomy renders her less sensitive to others’ oppression. Her consciousness of being (at) the front subsides. She begins to eat meat and to date men again.

  If male dominance catalyzes the feminist insight of an expanded front and resultant vegetarianism, feminist vegetarianism offers men a way to reject war by rejecting meat eating. As opposed to Piercy’s and Atwood’s controlling, masculine men, whose relationships with women catalyze the ineluctable insight that meat eating and sexual oppression are linked, Agnes Ryan’s unpublished novel, “Who Can Fear Too Many Stars?” figures a romance of vegetarian conversion for a liberated man. Writing in the 1930s, Ryan introduced an unusual motivation for vegetarianism: love of a New Woman. Vegetarianism is the standard against which the new man is measured. As Ryan described her work in a letter to the author of The Golden Rule Cookbook, “I would like to make it a ripping love story, hinging on meat-eating.”38

  Ruth, an independent, professional woman, is opposed to marriage yet finds herself in love with John Heather. Fearing that it will make their love “go asunder,” Ruth withholds from John one vital piece of information. She will not “take anybody into [her] inner circle who can think and know—and still eat flesh.” Unfortunately, John is a meat eater. He struggles to become a vegetarian for the woman he loves, but, at Christmas, all romance collapses when he sends Ruth fox furs. Horrified by the gift and the lack of comprehension it reveals—John has not really understood her complete rejection of animal exploitation—Ruth sends them back and flees. Deeply in love, John resolves to learn as much as possible about vegetarianism by reading, among others, nineteenth-century vegetarian Anna Kingsford and Bernard Shaw. The journal he keeps during this time reveals to Ruth that he is now fully a vegetarian, and as a result they can be married.

  Vegetarianism and feminism act as antiphonal voices in this novel, not as a unified vision, except to demonstrate Ryan’s theme “that there are many modern thinking women who mean to stiffen the case for men—or not marry.”39 While John reads vegetarian writings, Ruth receives a tract against marriage that warns “To be a bride is to become a slave, body and soul.”40 Ryan introduces vegetarian and feminist arguments into the novel through references to books, diaries, pamphlets; for her, texts mediate the conversion to vegetarianism and feminism. This adheres to the tradition of bearing the vegetarian word, believing that reading will bring about revelation and change. Whatever John and Ruth read, we must read as readers of Ryan’s novel, thus we encounter both the literal and literary arguments for vegetarianism and feminism. But in this an imbalance exists. Whereas John reads his way into vegetarianism, Ruth avoids confronting the implication of romantic love. His fate as a male in love with a “modern thinking woman” is redemption. The word becomes flesh as he becomes a vegetarian. Ruth’s fate as a modern thinking married woman will be to live in oppression. Ryan thus acknowledges there are some things that vegetarianism cannot redeem and that reading cannot accomplish. The text fails at this point. What can be the fate of a woman in a ripping love story hinging on meat eating? As a vegetarianism redeemed through romantic love is written into the text, she is written out of it. The novel collapses into itself and becomes a tract such as the ones that John and Ruth encounter.

  Ryan’s novel presents a variant formulation of vegetarianism as rejection of male control and violence. Rather than portray a woman who simultaneously rejects violence and dependence on a man, like Piercy’s and Atwood’s heroines, it figures a man who, through his love for a woman, discovers the ability to reject a warring world. John represents Ryan’s husband, Henry Bailey Stevens, who held that humanity was initially vegetarian, goddess worshiping, and pacifist. These characteristics embody the fourth theme of the expanded front, the Golden Age of vegetarianism.

  The Golden Age of vegetarianism and women’s fiction

  Rynn Berry, Jr.: Do you think if more and more people become vegetarians, it will usher in a new Golden Age?

  Brigid Brophy: No, not of itself. Bernard Shaw pointed out that human vegetarians were often very fierce people, and vegetarian animals also are often quite fierce. No, there is no direct connection. If, however, human beings work it out and decide to renounce violence then, obviously, if you renounce violence against chickens, cows, lambs, etcetera, you likewise renounce it against human beings. And then, yes—if we could all manage it—straight into the Golden Age.41

  In The Recovery of Culture, Henry Bailey Stevens proposes that a plant culture—which he considers anthropologically and horticulturally verified—was replaced with a “blood culture.” In a section entitled “The Rape of the Matriarchate” he writes: “The truth is that animal husbandry and war are institutions in which man has shown himself most proficient. He has been the butcher and the soldier; and when the Blood Culture took control of religion, the priestesses were shoved aside.”42 Novelists and short story writers join Stevens in locating the cause of meat eating and war in male dominance; some twentieth-century women writers imagine a Golden Age before the fall that was feminist, pacifist, and vegetarian.

  In the short story “An Anecdote of the Golden Age [Homage to Back to Methuselah]” Brigid Brophy suggests that men’s behavioral change is at the root of war, women’s oppression, and the killing of animals. Brophy’s Golden Age is one in which immortals consume bounteous food from the garden. Naked women menstruate openly and their blood is admired by everyone for its rare beauty. However, men discover that they too bleed when two men engage in a blood-letting fist fight, and paradise is lost. Menstruation is tabooed and fruit, moments ago cherished food, is now disdained by one of the men, Strephon. He bombs another man’s pagoda and offers this justification: “ ‘Corydon was a murderer,’ Strephon said sulkily. ‘He was fair game. Which reminds me: I shall kill the animals next.’ ”43 Strephon confines his menstruating woman to the house, “and preferably the kitchen, in which unglamorous setting she would be least attractive to other men.” Brophy concludes her cautionary tale: “Strephon, the only one of the group to be truly immortal, is in power to this day.”

  Though obviously having a romp in this piece, Brophy’s viewpoint is consistent with her other writings on the subject of the oppression of woman and animals.44 Brophy suggests that as long as men are in power, patriarchal violence and its attendant oppressions of women and animals will continue. This theme of the male overthrow of a prepatriarchal vegetarian era also appears in June Brindel’s Ariadne: A Novel of Ancient Crete. Blood sacrifice here is associated with male control. Ariadne, called by her author “the last Matriarch of Crete,” attempts to introduce the ancient worshipful rituals featuring milk and honey but no blood. Brindel’s feminist-vegetarian-pacifist mythopoesis figures a vegetarian time of powerful priestesses worshiping goddesses. The triumph of patriarchal control simultaneously introduces the slaughter of animals and the worship of male gods: “Daedulus would ask a question about the ritual, cautiously. ‘The invocation to Zeus, when was that introduced into the ceremony? I do not find it in the oldest texts.’ Or, ‘The earliest records of offerings to the Goddess list only grains and fruit. When was the slaughter of animals added?’ ”45 Brindel’s dependence on early twentieth-century scholar Jane Harrison is evident in her description of the rituals followed by Ariadne. As women’s power is displaced, Ariadne escapes to the mountains and pronounces that the labyrinth of Theseus is patriarchal thought that has killed the center, the Mother Goddess. Brindel continues this theme in Phaedra: A Novel of Ancient Athens, in which Phaedra, despite living in a hostile atmosphere, attempts to live a peaceful, vegetarian, goddess-worshiping life.46 Brindel, like Brophy, evokes a female-oriented Golden Age where there are no fronts and no wars.

  Through diets for a peaceful vegetarian life, feminist utopias enact the critique of the expanded front, imagining a world without violence. This aspe
ct of the fourth theme is initially depicted in the first feminist, vegetarian, pacifist utopia written by a woman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published during the Great War.47 In Herland, we find menus recalling The Golden Rule Cookbook: “The breakfast was not profuse, but . . . this repast with its new but delicious fruit, its dish of large rich-flavored nuts, and its highly satisfactory little cakes was most agreeable.”48 Fruit- and nut-bearing trees, grains and berries, citrus fruits, olives and figs are carefully cultivated by the women inhabitants. Gilman’s narrator, the American intellectual male of 1915, at once notices the absence of meat in Herland and queries: “Have you no cattle—sheep— horses?” In a novel that demonstrates the need for a feminist loving kindness, what Gilman called Maternal Pantheism, we might expect that their vegetarianism is one expression of mother love and the corollary belief that meat eating causes aggressive behavior such as male dominance and war. But it is not. Instead, it is a politically astute and ecologically sound conclusion: wars can be avoided if meat eating is eliminated. They did not have any cattle, sheep, or horses because they did “not want them anymore. They took up too much room—we need all our land to feed our people. It is such a little country, you know.” What wartime had required of Denmark, the potential causation of war required of Herland.

  Gilman’s Herland is a feminist gloss on the ecological position enunciated in Plato’s Republic.49 Gilman’s subtext about land use resulting in war is in opposition to the overt text, which suggests that motivations arising from Mother Love determine Herland’s policies. Through her use of the classical ecological argument of preventing wars through controlling diet, Gilman acknowledges that women living on their own would still have a potential for violence against each other if they left their diet uncontrolled. Thus women are not exempted from future wars, as Maternal Pantheism would imply. By extension, the Great War could not be the war that ends all wars if meat eating continued. The issue of vegetarianism is an inevitable part of Herland because Gilman, while emphasizing women’s strengths and abilities, deconstructs the essentials of patriarchal culture at its many fronts.