Anne Tyler’s The Clock Winder exposes the functioning of the structure of the absent referent through the issue of consuming a turkey. One of the chapters is framed by the necessity for Elizabeth, who has been absorbed into the Emerson household as handyman, to kill a turkey for Thanksgiving. “Elizabeth stood by her window, flattening the rolled sleeves of her paint-shirt and wondering what she would do if it took more than one chop to kill the turkey. Or could she just refuse to do it at all? Say that she had turned vegetarian?”46 Though she does not wish to kill a live turkey for Thanksgiving, she has no difficulty going to a supermarket and buying a dead turkey. The difference between killing a living turkey and buying a dead turkey is found in the structure of the absent referent.
The might-have-beenness of vegetarianism echoes in other Tyler novels so that the question arises, is “the vegetarian who is not” a talisman in her novels? Vegetarianism is something in the past or potentially in the future, but not in the present. For instance, The Accidental Tourist refers to a restaurant that might become vegetarian; in If Morning Ever Comes, the thinness of Ben Joe is attributed to a relapse into what had been his discarded vegetarianism; in The Tin Can Tree, Janie Rose, a young child tragically killed in an accident was a vegetarian.47
Can it be that literary consciousness is paradigmatic for vegetarian consciousness? A phenomenology of vegetarianism recapitulates the phenomenology of writing: of seizing language, of identifying gaps and silences. This vegetarian phenomenology includes identification with animals or animals’ fate; questions of articulation, of when to speak up or accept silence; of control of food choices; and of challenging patriarchal myths that approve of meat eating. As opposed to the brokenness and violence characteristic of the fall into patriarchal culture, vegetarianism in women’s writings signifies a different way of relating to the world. We are told that there is something metaphorically instructive about our relationship to animals. Feminist use of story telling often conveys the importance of this metaphorical relationship. This story telling suggests that as we consider the power for nuclear annihilation or for interpersonal cruelty based on rigid social mores, vegetarianism may point to a reordering of the patriarchal moral order.
For a feminist-vegetarian reading of the vegetarian body
To be a feminist, one has first to become one . . . Feminists are not aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a “fact” into a “contradiction.”
—Sandra Lee Bartky48
We cannot tell the truth about women’s lives if we do not take seriously those dietary choices which were at odds with dominant culture. Vegetarianism spoke to women. They would not have adopted it, maintained it, proselytized for it, if vegetarianism were not a positive influence on their lives. This is a historical fact that needs to be accepted and then responded to by scholars studying women’s lives and texts.
Vegetarian women’s activism and their writings have been absorbed into the literary and historical feminist canon without noticing that they are saying and doing something different when it comes to meat eating. The numerous individual feminists who became vegetarians—from the Grimké sisters to Frances Willard, Clara Barton, Annie Besant, Matilda Joslyn Gage, May Wright Sewall, and Mary Walker—evidence a pattern of challenging patriarchal culture not only because it rendered women absent but also because it rendered animals absent. As women expressed and explored their own subjectivity, animals were released from the object category in which patriarchal culture had placed them. Consequently women writers such as Maxine Kumin, Alice Walker, Brigid Brophy, and Maureen Duffy actively articulate animal rights positions. In this same vein we ask, what has been the literary effect on Alexis DeVeaux, poet, playwright, and novelist, who acknowledges that along with having her first play produced, winning the Black Creation Literary Contest, and witnessing the immensity of poverty in Haiti, giving up meat was one of the seven transformative turning points in her career and life?49
Clearly, the reasons vegetarianism spoke to women and how they responded to it require close examination. What did feminist-vegetarians see themselves as doing? What compromises were they willing to accept? Feeding meat to a family like Gloria Steinem’s vegetarian grandmother? Was it necessary for her to suppress feelings of disgust at the serving of meat? How do people live with the consequences of their dietary choices? How many authors and activists were vegetarians or included vegetarianism in their writings? What sort of vegetarian-feminist network existed? And what did meat-eating feminists think of it? We know, for instance, that Susan B. Anthony rushed to devour a steak in New York City after two days with some vegetarians.
Many historians and literary critics may metaphorically rush to devour a steak because meat eating makes sense within our dominant culture. But what is needed in developing a feminist-vegetarian critical theory is sensitivity to literary and historical meanings that differ from traditional interpretations. Any activity that counters prevailing custom requires innovation, persistence, and motivation.
In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood offers this observation about eating animals: “The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people. . . . And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life.”50 Vegetarian activities counter patriarchal consumption and challenge the consumption of death. Feminist-vegetarian activity declares that an alternative worldview exists, one which celebrates life rather than consuming death; one which does not rely on resurrected animals but empowered people.
EPILOGUE: DESTABILIZING PATRIARCHAL CONSUMPTION
The eating of animal flesh, an easy matter of course for most people unless made complex by ritual warnings, may yet turn out to be a problem of psycho-social evolution when humankind comes to review and reassess the inner and outer consequences of having assumed the life of an armed hunter, and all the practical and emotional dead ends into which this has led us. Only then will it be possible to separate the superstitious, neurotic and faddish aspects of vegetarianism from its possible ethical persuasiveness.
—Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth
Beneath the equivocations and the hedges that cloak his criticism of meat, Erik Erikson, in the above passage, acknowledges that vegetarianism has ethical meaning; its meaning is connected with the implications of killing animals, the consequences of which are experienced internally and externally. Like many meat eaters, Erikson perceives that vegetarianism is burdened by numerous associations, the superstitious, the neurotic, and the faddish; he fails to admit that so is meat eating. The eating of animal flesh is burdened by superstitions regarding our needs for animal protein and the equation of meat with strength; neurotic aspects of meat eating are revealed in the reactions of meat eaters to the threat of vegetarianism. Erikson’s statement, though acknowledging the troubling dimension of killing animals for food, which has equipped our culture to be armed hunters even when this is no longer necessary, exemplifies the fact that one cannot be an objective viewer of one’s own meat eating. Thus he raises questions about the texts of meat while staying firmly committed to them.
Because of the dominant discourse which approves of meat eating, we are forced to take the knowledge that we are consuming dead animals and accept it, ignore it, neutralize it, repress it. What are the costs of this? What are the implications of repressing facts about the absent referent whose death enables meat eating?
For women in patriarchal culture, additional concerns arise as well. For we have been swallowed and we are the swallowers. We are the consumers and the consumed. We are the ones whose stomachs do not listen—having no ears—and we are the ones who seek to be heard from within the stomach that has no ears.
Eating animals acts as mirror and representation of patriarchal values. Meat eating is the re-inscription of male power at every meal. The patriarchal gaze sees not the fragmented flesh of dead animals but appetizing food. If our a
ppetites re-inscribe patriarchy, our actions regarding eating animals will either reify or challenge this received culture. If meat is a symbol of male dominance then the presence of meat proclaims the disempowering of women.
Many cultural commentators have observed that the rituals that attend the consumption of animals in nontechnological societies occur because meat eating represents patricide. What is consumed is the father. The men are said to resolve their hostility toward their father through the killing of animals.1 The dead animal represents the father whose power has been usurped by the sons, yet, who, as ancestor forgives them. In this typology, the worst fears of a patriarchy—fathers being deposed by sons—are displaced through ritual and the killing of animals. Meat becomes a metaphor for the resolution of the tension between father and son for power; meat is viewed as male. The questions arises: do we ritually enact primal patricide whenever we sit down to a meal of meat?2
Though we are eating “father-food” we are not consuming the father. How can that which we eat be father when we rarely eat normal, adult male animals? The metaphor that whatever is killed becomes father screens the reality behind the metaphor. The reality is the structure of the absent referent. We are continuously eating mothers. The fact is that we proclaim and reinforce the triumph of male dominance by eating female-identified pieces of meat.
Kate Millet remarked that “every avenue of power” is male dominated. This includes the “power” we think we absorb from dead victims who are still bleeding. Meat is a “power-structured relationship” in which power is thought to transfer to the consumer.3 The concept that meat gives physical strength derives from this symbolic power. Meat reflects back male power every time it is consumed. From symbolically defeated females flows the imagined power that is assimilated by the victor. Thus meat is both animalized and masculinized.
A reconceptualization of power has occurred. Power, mana, was imagined to exist in dead animals. Power would be absorbed through the consumption of the animal, and since fathers had power, the power being absorbed was considered to be the power of the father. We have been convinced to surrender part of our concept of power to the consumable, dead animal. We then think we absorb this power as we consume the dead. We are giving back to ourselves the power we think was in the victim.
How do we overthrow patriarchal power while eating its symbol? Autonomous, antipatriarchal being is clearly vegan. To destabilize patriarchal consumption we must interrupt patriarchal meals of meat.
Virginia Woolf seems to suggest that it is when thinking about women that we will forget the meat. Buried within the significant events of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is a small interchange between mother and son. Betty Flanders, Woolf tells us, was thinking of
responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer’s hand. On she plodded up the hill.
“What did I ask you to remember?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Archer.
“Well, I don’t know either,” said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives’ tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than any man?
Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.
She had her hand upon the garden gate.
“The meat!” she exclaimed, striking the latch down.
She had forgotten the meat.4
But how, precisely, do we forget meat once our appetites are acclimated to her? The Yanomano of South America have two words for hunger: one word means that you have an empty stomach; the other word declares that you have a full stomach that craves meat. As the narrator in Colette’s Break of Day discovered—despite seeing the reality of meat, the broken joints, the mutilations, imagining the life that only this morning enjoyed running and scratching, attempting to determine the difference between this and cooking a child, too—the aroma of the delicate flesh dripping on the charcoal gives one a yawning hunger, a hunger that begs that she forget her objections to meat.
The codes of the texts of meat must be broken down. They cannot be broken down while meat is present for it reifies all of the old codes. We must admit that there will be a destruction of the pleasure of meals as we now know it. But what awaits us is the discovery of the pleasure of vegan meals.
To forget the meat we begin by naming and claiming the absent referent, restoring to animals their individual beings. We must consider our own appetites and whether we wish to be dependent on them; we place the importance of acceding to these appetites within the symbolic patriarchal order that they will either accept or challenge.
One way by which we accept the eating of animal flesh is by creating a symbolic order, a cosmology, which reifies meat eating. Patriarchal values are expressed by appropriating images of animals’ deaths into our symbolism. As Joseph Campbell describes this imagery:
the paramount object of experience is the beast. Killed and slaughtered, it [sic] yields to people its [sic] flesh to become our substance, teeth to become our ornaments, hides for clothing and tents, sinews for ropes, bones for tools. The animal life is translated into human life entirely, through the medium of death, slaughter, and the arts of cooking, tanning, sewing.
The killed and slaughtered animal yields as well imagery of ferociousness, territorial imperative, armed hunting, aggressive behavior, the vitality and virility of meat eating. Carnivorous animals provide a paradigm for male behavior. Through symbolism based on killing animals, we encounter politically laden images of absorption, control, domain, and the necessity of violence. This message of male dominance is conveyed through meat eating—both in its symbolism and reality.
According to Campbell, the plant world, in contrast to the animal world, supplies “the food, clothing and shelter of people since time out of mind, but also our model of the wonder of life—in its cycle of growth and decay, blossom and seed, wherein death and life appear as transformations of a single, superordinated, indestructible force.”5 The plant world yields imagery of tending, nurturing, slow evolutionary change, harmony with the seasons. Political implications are derived from a sense of organic unity rather than disjunction; harvest rather than violence; living in harmony rather than having domain over. This is the challenge that the uniting of feminist and vegetarian insights offers: political symbolism based on an affirmation of a diet drawn from the plant world.
Deriving meaning from plant imagery, we can say we wilt if we eat flesh. We will feed on the grace of vegetables. Virginia de Araújo describes such a perspective, that of a friend, who takes the barrenness of a cupboard, filled only with “celery threads, chard stems, avocado skins,” and creates a feast, a grace:
& says, On this grace I feed, I wilt
in spirit if I eat flesh, let the hogs,
the rabbits live, the cows browse,
the eggs hatch out chicks & peck seeds.6
The creation of vegetarian rituals that celebrate the grace of eating plants will contribute to destabilizing patriarchal consumption. In place of the ritual of the fatted calf for the return of the prodigal son, the celebration of the return of a daughter would be vegetarian. Maxine Hong Kingston suggests this in describing her welcome home: “My parents killed a chicken and steamed it whole, as if they were welcoming home a son, but I had gotten out of the habit of meat” She ate rice and vegetables instead.7
To destabilize patriarchal consumption, eat rice have faith in women. By doing so we release Metis, and all who have been swallowed, from the belly of Zeus; we restore wholeness to our fragmented relationships with each other and the other animals. The question before us is, which images of the universe, of power, of animals, of ourselves, will we represent in our food? Of that which has preceded us, what shall remain?
Eat Rice Have Faith in Women. Our dietary choices reflect and reinforce our cosmology, our politics. It is as though we could say, “Eating rice is faith in women”
On this grace may we
all feed.
Love This
Gretchen Primack
If you permit this evil, what is the good
of the good of your life?
—Stanley Kunitz
The body floods with chemicals saying, Love this,
and she does, and births it; it is a boy
she begins to clean and nose, but he is dragged
away by his back feet. She will never touch him
again, though she hears him howl and calls back
for days.
Her breast milk is banked for others. Her son
is pulled away to lie in his box.
He will be packed for slaughter. How ingenious
we are! To make product from byproduct:
make use of the child,
kill and pack and truck him to plates.
And when the gallons slow, we start over,
and her body says, Love this! And she does,
though in a moment she will never touch
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 26
