Whereas Herland is the initial text in which a modern woman writer posits the configuration of feminism, vegetarianism, and pacifism, Dorothy Bryant’s more recent The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You extends Gilman’s treatment by situating animals within the moral order. The Kin of Ata depicts an egalitarian Utopian society in which men and women share child care, gardening, and cleaning. Dried fruits and nuts, grains and legumes, root vegetables and herbs provide great variety to the diet. And the reason for the diet is Bryant’s 1970s equivalent to Maternal Pantheism: “I knew better than to suggest that we eat birds or animals, or even fish. They would have reacted the same way as if I had told them we should eat the children. . . . No one would have thought of killing any of them.”50
Because Gilman, Bryant, Ryan, and other women writers perceived connections between male dominance, war, and meat eating, they figure men who demonstrate the ability to change. We find in their novels men who are adaptable, who forswear certain masculine and human-centered privileges, including meat consumption. In addition, sensitive male writers such as Shelley, Shaw, Salt, and Stevens explored the issues of animals’ and women’s otherness. Indeed, the conclusion to be drawn from their writings and their lives is that men as well as women can enact lifestyles sensitive to issues of feminism, pacifism, and vegetarianism.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis comments that the “erasure of the dualism of public and private spheres is one part of the critique of ideology in women’s writings.”51 Together the four themes arising from the insight of the expanded front exemplify this erasure. The meaning of the public front invades the private sphere, prompting a redefinition of the location of the front. Additionally, taken together these themes challenge the dualism separating the consequences of violence for animals and human beings. These works argue that domestic oppression and meat eating, usually considered private occurrences, are vitally connected to waging war, while vegetarianism, an apparently private act, constitutes the public rejection of war as a method of conflict resolution. At the front, the connections between male dominance, the killing of animals, and the killing of human beings become clear.
The narrative strategy of interruption
Central to all [Woolf’s] thinking is the revelation of interruption, heralding change, and the growing expectation that society is on the verge of radical transformation.
—Lucio Ruotolo, The Interrupted Moment52
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.
—Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter53
We have examined novels in which feminist insights catalyze connections between vegetarianism and political violence. Each of these novels appears to employ the same literary technique for summoning these connections—a technique I call interruption. Interruption provides the gestalt shift by which vegetarianism can be heard. Technically, it occurs when the movement of the novel is suddenly arrested, and attention is given to the issue of vegetarianism in an enclosed section of the novel. The author provides signs that an interruption has occurred. Dots or dashes; the use of the word “interruption”; stammering, pauses, inarticulateness, or confusion in those who are usually in control; the deflection of the story to a focus on food and eating habits; or the reference to significant earlier figures or events from vegetarian history: all become the means for establishing an interruption, a gap in the narrative in which vegetarianism can be entertained.54 Although the interruption is set apart, the meaning it contains speaks to central themes of the novel, unifying the interruption and the interrupted text through acute critical comments about the social order and meat eating.55
In the works of modern women writers the intrusion into the text of a vegetarian incident announces a subversion of the dominant world order, enacted through the subversion of the text itself by the textual strategy of interruption. What was once silenced breaks into the text, deflecting attention from the forces that generally silence it, both thematically and textually. Interruption provides an opportunity for refocusing the trajectory of the text, as well as providing a protected space within the novel for expanding the front. Interruption does battle with the novel for meaning, wresting meaning from the dominant culture as represented in the text itself.56 In essence, expanding the front requires extending the scope of the novel, taking it to new topical territory, and this is the function of interruption, which provides the needed space for such expansion. A vegetarian presence destablizes patriarchal concerns.
Isadora Duncan’s meditation on the connection between war and meat eating in her autobiography My Life exemplifies the interruption of narrative. She interrupts a discussion about her life during the Great War to assert: “Bernard Shaw says that as long as men torture and slay animals and eat their flesh, we shall have war. I think all sane, thinking people must be of his opinion.” From her wartime experience she concludes:
Who loves this horrible thing called War? Probably the meat eaters, having killed, feel the need to kill—kill birds, animals—the tender stricken deer—hunt foxes. The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?57
Duncan’s interruption is clearly announced to readers by her beginning reference to Shaw and her ending with a literal invocation of what she believed to be his words.58 However, she provides a distinctly feminist interpretation to Shaw’s insights. By positioning the masculine pronoun between the butcher and the bloody apron, she implicitly indicts male behavior.
The most notable interruption in a text occurs during a Thanksgiving dinner in France, described in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America, a novel referred to briefly in chapter 1. The novel moves forward without much regard to any specific ethics of consumption. Suddenly, a vegetarian speaks, attention becomes riveted to what the vegetarian is saying and not eating. The interruptions occur on many levels. Roberta Scott, a young American, refuses both dark and light meat from her host, a NATO general. Shocked, he must set down his carving knife before he can say, “No turkey?” With the carving knife he has arrogated power, and each slice of speared meat reinforces his military presence. Her refusal challenges his use of these symbolic implements and thus his power. His implements remain unused as he learns of her vegetarianism, and he must resort to playing “impatiently” with them as he solemnly informs his guest, “This is Thanksgiving!”59
Later, his wife asks, “What made you decide to take up vegetarianism? I don’t mean to be intrusive, but tell us, do you really think it’s cruel to kill animals?” Again, the general’s actions are arrested by the presence of vegetarianism: “The general, who was carving seconds, paused with his knife in mid-air to await the verdict.” In the midst of this interruption we find Miss Scott’s precise echoing of the vegetarian position on warfare, artfully introduced into the text prior to a heated argument about the war in Vietnam: “Why, some people actually claim that it’s a flesh diet that’s turned man into a killer of his own kind! He has the tiger’s instincts without the tiger’s taboos. Of course that’s only a hypothesis. One way of testing it would be for humanity to practice vegetarianism for several generations. Maybe we’d find that war and murder would disappear.”
McCarthy’s chapter uses domestic events to figure the claim that meat eating causes war, as it traces the slowly escalating rage of the general for whom carving recalls his military might. He announces that he is “in command here,” and discounts Miss Scott’s refusal by giving her turkey anyway. But she will not eat it, nor any of the gravy-polluted foods he proffers. Her refusal implies that if meat eating and war are related, as some people claim, then the dining-room t
able is a part of the extended front; her vegetarianism functions as a condemnation of war. The table soon becomes a site of simulated warfare, as an enlistee makes the sounds of an automatic machine gun. Meanwhile, the general perceives the subtle condemnation and escalates the verbal battle as he argues for the bombing of Hanoi. Pinpointing the cause of his bellicosity his wife confides, “Between you and me, it kind of got under his skin to see that girl refusing to touch her food, I saw that right away.” McCarthy’s novel pursues the question of how far moral obligations should extend; this interruption suggests that they extend to the quintessential bird of America.
The interruptions of The Shooting Party are caused by the appearance of Cornelius Cardew, who actually interrupts the shooting by bearing the vegetarian word through picketing. He shoulders his “Thou Shalt Not Kill” banner and marches “straight down the line in front of the guns.”60 Some of the shooters refuse to cease their firing, especially the most competitive one: “The interruption had not caused him to lose a single shot,” but for the others, “their concentration had been broken by the interruption.” By Cardew’s interruption, the historical alliance between feminism and vegetarianism is suggestively summoned; he hands out his own pamphlet which as we saw in chapter 5 evokes past writers of vindications—Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Percy Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet.
As these examples demonstrate, the interruptions contain their own legitimating mechanism by summoning historical figures who endorsed what the interruptions convey—the message of the expanded front. Essentially, vegetarian tradition provides the authority for interrupting the text with vegetarianism. Shaw is summoned by Duncan and Brophy, Salt by Colegate, the Doukhobors (Russian pacifist-vegetarians who migrated to Canada) by McCarthy and Atwood, and Kingsford by Ryan. It is striking that two different texts linking vegetarianism and pacifism insert the name of the Doukhobors, who maintained their vegetarianism and pacifism in rigorous circumstances, persecution, and banishment in Russia as well as migration as a group (estimated as high as 7,500 individuals) to Canada. The Doukhobors become grounding figures. This tradition of providing additional authority through historical references is a version of what any embattled group does—that is, evoke touchstone figures who in feminist terms we might consider “role models.”
This historical invocation of past vegetarians imprints a distinctly feminist hermeneutic: Duncan’s view of male butchers as inuring the world to bloodshed; McCarthy’s female challenge to male bellicosity through dietary choice; Colegate’s allusions to Wollstonecraft and Shelley as well as Salt. Situating historical reference within the interruption suggests that the notion of an expanded front is one that recurs in history. And through the feminist hermeneutic brought to vegetarian history, a causal link with male dominance and war is effected. Interruption destabilizes the text and the culture it represents.
Overcoming dominant viewpoints
There is not always encouragement and acceptance for those who try to introduce meanings for which there is no conceptual space in the social order.
—Dale Spender, Man Made Language61
There is a kind of seductiveness about a movement which is revolutionary, but not revolutionary enough.
—Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father62
How can we explain the heightened sensitivity by twentieth-century women writers to violence against animals and the failure among literary critics to remark on this sensitivity? When female marginality is “in dialogue with dominance” it invokes the position of animals, who are also on the margins, who are also absent referents.63 Part of the otherness with which women writers identify is the otherness of the other animals; both are caught in the overlapping structure of oppression in which each functions as absent referents for the other. The “assertive repossession of voice” includes the expression of voice through identification with those who have none.64
Through specific female identifications catalyzed by male oppression, the character reflects on the question “How would you like it if this were done to you?” When Margaret Atwood’s Marian cannot think of herself as I, when her first-person-singular identity is interrupted, her body becomes alert to the oppression of the other animals. What evolves is a poetics of engagement between women and animals, and a belief that violence against other animals carries the same seriousness as violence against people; where meat eating is, there is the front. Vegetarianism becomes, then, a necessary accompaniment to pacifism. Challenging the dominant ethos that animals exist for human consumption by extension challenges a world at war.
Generally women as well as men hold to the powerful, dominant ethos regarding animals, just as Marian returns to eating meat once she is able to think again in the first-person singular. This causes the muting of a tradition that does not hold to the dominant ethos.
The tradition in which modern women writers confront the meaning of meat eating within the context of war is one of a dialectic between silencing and risking speech. It is a tradition that speaks through specificity (i.e., naming what is eaten): interrupting a meal, interrupting a man’s control, interrupting the male tradition with female voices. When women writers raise the issue of vegetarianism, they touch upon their dilemma of being silenced in a patriarchal world. Vegetarianism becomes a complex female meditation on being dominated and dominator.
While modern vegetarianism interrupts modern women’s writing and hence disrupts it as a way of finding space and power to speak, on a deeper level it confirms women’s work. By redefining the front and locating it wherever meat eating is, modern women writers make a powerful statement on the rights of women and women writers to have a voice during wartime. And this feminist, vegetarian, pacifist tradition—tracing its genesis to the Great War—would argue that the war that gave it voice continues today.65
PART III
EAT RICE HAVE FAITH IN WOMEN
The enlightened mortals of the twentieth century will surely be vegetarians.
—Frances Willard, 1839–1898 feminist, vegetarian, and temperance leader
eat rice have faith in women
what I dont know now
I can still learn
if I am alone now
I will be with them later
if I am weak now
I can become strong
slowly slowly
if I learn I can teach others
if others learn first
I must believe
they will come back and teach me
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
slowly we begin
giving back what was taken away
our right to the control of our bodies
knowledge of how to fight and build
food that nourishes
medicine that heals
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
eat rice have faith in women
what I dont know now
I can still learn
—Fran Winant, “Eat Rice Have Faith in Women”
CHAPTER 8
THE DISTORTION OF THE VEGETARIAN BODY
My journal entry, May 4, 1976:
For my frustration about not finding readily accessible information about fem[inists] who were veg. in the past—write an article on Veg. and Fem. Historiography use Mary’s [Daly] analyses from B[eyond] G[od] t[he] F[ather]—how people don’t take seriously thru trivialization, erasure, how does one find a connection when not indexed?
—Frances Willard (glancingly mentioned), Lou Andreas-Salome, Agnes Ryan’s involvement in “lunatic fringe” groups according to the archivist at Radcliffe [Schlesinger Library] 20 yrs ago.
veg—a conscious decision effecting every day of your life, not simply a reform fad
one has to approach your reading material w/ a hopeful, faith-filled attitude, hoping for one small mention.
left Schlesinger at 3:45. Bicycled for an hour along Charles River. Dinner was marvelous—Middle Eastern bread, tomato,
avocado, sprouts, garbanzo beans; sunflower butter on toast w/ bananas. At CSR’s [Carroll Smith-Rosenberg] I couldn’t pass up pound cake and ice cream. Discussed whether Agnes Ryan would be a good candidate for 4th volume of NAW [Notable American Women]. Returning here at 9:00 I read Kate Millet and didn’t do my yoga.
Before finishing this book, you will have eaten at least one meal. Before I finished writing this book, I ate several hundred meals. Before the people whose histories we reconstruct died, they had eaten tens of thousands of meals. If I ate a veggie burger instead of a hamburger this choice says something about me as an historical actor. For I will have had to act in response to these questions:
•How informed am I about what I eat?
•What are my interests in the preparation and aesthetic presentation of vegetable food?
•What are my resources?
•Did I eat at a vegetarian restaurant?
•Did I have available a fast food mix?
•Did I use a vegan cookbook?
•Why did I leave meat out of my diet?
Whenever people consciously excluded meat from their diet, similar questions may be asked of them as well.
Vegetarianism reveals how people live with the often difficult consequences of their decisions. Meat has to do with coded expectations, patterns of responses. I am intrigued by excesses in interpretation that seek to account for who has left meat out of their diet and why, as well as the gaps in interpretation that completely ignore the question. We cannot understand those things for which our historical or fictional sisters are most noted unless we recognize those things for which they are least noted.
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 20
