Clarissa affectionately cares for her poultry and Pamela exhibits her sympathy for animals by releasing a carp and sowing the horse beans she has been using as fish bait in a flowerbed: ‘I will plant life,’ she tells her indignant carp-killing guardian, ‘while you are destroying it.’52 Lovelace, by contrast, proudly acknowledges the continuity between his abuse of animals and women: ‘We begin with birds as boys, and as men go on to ladies; and both perhaps, in turns, experience our sportive cruelty’53. In one of the crowning observations of the novel, Belford (Lovelace’s repentant accomplice) has a moment of clarity when he understands that chauvinism, anthropocentricism and class tyranny all stem from the same human impulse. ‘Lords of the creation!’ he exclaims sardonically:
Who can forbear indignant laughter! When … [he] is obliged not only for the ornaments, but for the necessaries of life (that is to say, for food as well as raiment) to all the other creatures; strutting with their blood and spirits in his veins, and with their plumage on his back … thinks himself at liberty to kick and cuff, and elbow out every worthier creature: and when he has none of the animal creation to hunt down and abuse, will make use of his power, his strength, or his wealth, to oppress the less powerful and weaker of his own species!54
In this Montaigne-like attack,55 Belford realises that humans are inexorably connected to the rest of creation: indeed, they practically are the other animals and thus ought to sympathise with them. Richardson was not taking a radical stance against killing animals, nor advocating the demolition of social hierarchy, perhaps not even calling for the equality of the sexes. But with the recognition of likeness, Richardson did hope that sympathy would bridge the rupture in the moral responsibility that had arisen between the powerful and the weak.56
Just as Cheyne showed that having meat coursing round your veins made you sick, so Richardson strikes his predatory rakes down with providentially perpetrated distempers. As Cheyne explained, illness triggers an awakening of sympathy in the sufferer and initiates their reform.57 The Medicinal Dictionary (1743–5), which Richardson and Samuel Johnson helped to write, said of Hermann Boerhaave, ‘his own pain taught him to compassionate others.’58 With Cheyne’s explicit encouragement, Richardson translated this medical schema into the didactic model of the reformation of the rake,59 and he applied it, without a single exception, to every rake and malevolent female accomplice in Clarissa and Pamela.60
According to Cheyne’s medical theory, sickness could force carnivorous patients to feel sympathy for their animal victims. In Richardson’s novels the rakes’ debauchery of women is figured as preying on animals. When the rake is finally struck down by a providential illness, they learn to sympathise for their victims and reform their sexual diet. In the case of Lovelace, reform comes too late and he is struck down by an illness which he pictures as an animal coming back to take revenge on its predator.61 Cheyne had often spoken to Richardson about the pangs of ‘remorse’ that followed a bout of overeating; Richardson harnessed the etymology of remorse (re-mordere, to bite): the prey literally bites its predator back.62 On his sick-bed Lovelace cries out that ‘Remorse has broken in upon me … A thousand vultures in turn are preying upon my heart!’63 When Lovelace survives his sickness, he is finally killed by Clarissa’s cousin Morden (who shares his etymology with re-morde-re).
Stage One from William Hogarth, ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’
The parallel between sexual concupiscence and meat-eating is explicit, and the role of reconnecting people with their own natural sympathy is the same in Richardson as it was in Cheyne. When Lovelace’s hirelings’ sympathies are finally reawakened they still receive pecuniary benefits from Clarissa’s plight and do nothing to save her.64 This, Richardson indicates, is the equivalent of claiming to sympathise for animals but continuing to eat them. ‘A pitiful fellow!’ exclaims Lovelace of one of them. ‘Such a ridiculous kind of pity his, as those silly souls have, who would not kill an innocent chicken for the world; but when killed to their hands, are always the most greedy devourers of it.’65 Richardson’s image here comes from the Fable of the Bees in which Bernard Mandeville pointed out the hypocrisy of people who could not bear to kill their own poultry, and yet happily ate meat by getting as far as they could from the site of slaughter.66 Cheyne and Richardson both wanted to rejuvenate people’s natural moral feeling by reconnecting the sympathiser with the sympathised.
Belford starts off as one of these hypocrites who fail to see the connection between their own purported morality and their complicity in immoral acts. His desire to dissociate himself from Clarissa’s fate is, declares Lovelace, ‘the palliating consolation of an Hottentot heart, determined rather to gluttonize on the garbage of other foul feeders, than to reform’.67 In the end, however, Belford does reform, and once again Richardson used Cheyne’s dietary model to express it. After suffering a ‘consumptive cough’ and witnessing the demise of his fellow debauchees, his sensibilities are awakened; he becomes ‘a man of sense’, turns away from ‘a life of sense and appetite’ and converts to the ‘palatable’ ‘regular’ diet of married life.68
The medical-metaphorical motifs that Richardson developed in all his novels became standard fare in eighteenth-century fiction. In Tobias Smollett’s novel Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), the heroine Monimia, like Richardson’s Clarissa, is kept in an isolated London residence guarded by a malicious woman collaborating with the rapacious anti-hero, Fathom. Like Clarissa, she languishes under her ordeal and ends up on a severe ascetic diet which threatens her life: ‘Her sustenance was barely such as exempted her from the guilt of being accessory to her own death.’69 As in Clarissa, the novel’s predatory villains, who are figured as carnivorous beasts, are eventually reformed. In Fathom’s case this is precipitated by a distemper which softens his heart and teaches him to feel for his victims. In the case of the murderous Castilian, Don Diego de Zelos, it is represented with the Promethean image of vultures preying on his insides, and modulated through the play on the word remorse. Their consequent reformation, as in Richardson, is adumbrated in their change of diet. Fathom vows to adopt the life of a penitent hermit, and Zelos turns from his bloody past of revenge and violence to adopt a vegetarian ascetic life of penitence: ‘the fields shall furnish herbage for my food; the stream shall quench my thirst,’ vows Zelos zealously.70
Like Cheyne, Smollett studied medicine at Marischal College in Aberdeen, and became a physician-author in Bath. He almost certainly knew about Cheyne and the vegetarian doctor James Graham. Smollett ridiculed dietary faddism by comparing the fervent ‘abstinence’ of some health-conscious gamblers in Fathom with the superstitious ‘abhorrence’ of Brahmins and Pythagoreans.71 He reused this satire in his presentation of the Cheyne-like regimen pursued by Matthew Bramble in Humphrey Clinker, and in Peregrine Pickle, where an old officer manifests his detestation of the Bath medical profession by treating himself for gout by ‘pursuing a regimen quite contrary to that which he knew they prescribed to others’.72 In Roderick Random Smollett rubbished frugal fleshless diets and referred contemptuously to the navy’s so-called ‘banyan-days’ when the meat ration was withdrawn.73 When Smollett’s own poor health forced him to take up a herbivorous diet, he mocked himself, saying ‘I … eat like a Horse.’74
By the end of the eighteenth century, although the literary motifs of Cheynian sensibility were still widely employed, they were as often ridiculed. Jane Austen (1775–1817) extended her satire on the culture of sensibility to its dietary excesses, which she had read about in her favourite novel – Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison – and to which her own parents had been subjected during their residence in Bath.75 In Emma (1815) Mr Woodhouse, father of the eponymous heroine, is the archetype of the hypersensitive hypochondriac who is so particular about food that he consults his apothecary on the dangers of eating wedding cake.76 In accordance with Cheynian dietary principles, Woodhouse’s ‘conviction of suppers being very unwholesome’ forces him to dissuade his guests from eating the food laid
before them: ‘Such another small basin of thin gruel as his own, was all that he could, with thorough self-approbation, recommend.’ With hilarious fastidiousness, he says to one guest, ‘let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else … I do not advise the custard.’77 But for all the mockery, Austen’s personal letters reveal that she was not immune to dietary doctrines herself when, for example, she betrays her assumption that full meals clog the brain: ‘Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton.’78
Despite such taunts, the medical theories of which Cheyne was an architect had a profound effect on the figuration of morality in the eighteenth century. Nervous disorders and their moral implications provided one of the era’s most pervasive representations of the reformation of manners. It became an accepted doctrine that flesh-eating, or at least cruelty to animals, signified and exacerbated a savage disposition which was best dealt with by the natural retributive justice of bodily disorders, which in turn stimulated moral reformation. It was a literary form of Richardson’s creation which could be termed ‘dietary didacticism’.
FIFTEEN
Rousseau and the Bosoms of Nature
In the 1780s the French court was overcome by a fad for rustic chic. In place of heavy jewels, Marie-Antoinette and her intimates sported flowers and grasses in their hair; their breasts sat proudly open to view like Mother Nature’s herself as they affected the simplicity of milkmaids and shepherdesses.1 The Queen’s favourite painter, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, caused scandal by depicting the ladies scantily dressed.2 Courtiers indulged in romances with unheard-of freedom, and even the disapprobation they elicited was balanced with a reverential awe for the natural passion that they claimed as their moral sanction. Even in religion people broke from the shackles of church services and went looking for God in pristine natural forests and wild mountain landscapes.
This popular, back-to-nature cult was initiated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). His call for a liberation from convention was a primary catalyst for Romanticism, and by the end of the 1780s his staunch avocation of political freedom spilled over into the French masses and helped to inspire real shepherds to overthrow the ruling elite of the ancien régime. Aristocrats who had embraced his call for emotional freedom lost their heads on the guillotine, while others joined the rebels at the barricades to bring down the fabric of their own power in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Rousseau detonated the first of his explosive arguments in the First Discourse of 1750, which upended conventional presumptions by arguing that civilisation and culture – far from being the lights that liberated humanity from savage stupidity – had become a ball and chain that fettered human nature. Following his initial success (the essay won the prize at the Academy of Dijon), Rousseau spent the rest of his life trying to goad society down a path that would reunite people with their inner humanity. Essential to his case was his insistence that man was naturally benevolent and that vice was an artificial, avoidable corruption of society. The noble savage, living solitarily in a pre-social state of nature, Rousseau contended, had the instinctive capacity for benevolence built into his very anatomy. Rousseau’s arguments altered the course of European history, inspired some of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are still being grappled with by modern social thinkers. What few people know – though everyone saw it at the time – is that Rousseau’s social philosophy had a fundamental grounding in the vegetarian debate. In his second catatonic essay, the Discourse on Inequality (1755), man’s herbivorous origin underpinned his main argument.
In the very first paragraph of the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau acknowledged, like Edward Tyson, that comparative anatomy had yet to determine conclusively man’s original nature, and announced ironically that he would forgo ‘the supernatural knowledge we have on this point’ (i.e. he would not rely on spurious documents like Genesis for his evidence). In their current state, Rousseau acknowledged, humans were uniquely free from any binding natural instinct and had adapted to become omnivorous: ‘Each species has but its own instinct,’ he wrote, ‘while man perhaps having none that belongs to him, appropriates them all, feeds equally [également] on most of the various foods which the other animals divide among themselves.’3
But in his extraordinary footnotes to the discourse, Rousseau dug deeper into human pre-history and gave full rein to his suspicion that the human animal, ‘in the first Embryo of his species’, had been herbivorous – and this became a building block for his central contention about humanity. Rousseau set out the full scientific case for primitive vegetarianism, from the fleshless diet of orang-utans to the ancient testimony of the Golden Age. But most prominently of all, he introduced new sensational evidence to the old anatomical debate about teeth and guts, which reflected his own, and his era’s, fascination with breasts.4
Rousseau had long been obsessed by the female bosom, perhaps partly because of the death of his mother in the act of giving birth to him. After running away from his home in Geneva at the age of fifteen, he fell into the maternal bosom of the Baronne de Warens who educated him, eventually became his lover and nurtured him in ill health on a diet of milk; he spoke rapturously in his Confessions of his passion for girls’ bosoms. Now, in the Discourse on Inequality, he announced that mammaries constituted a ‘general System of Nature … which provides a new reason for removing man from the Class of carnivorous animals and placing him among the frugivorous species.’5
Rousseau had studied anatomy at Montpellier until he quit because he found it too appalling to dissect animals and ‘delve into their palpitating entrails’.6 But he read the vegetarian anatomy arguments in Plutarch, the Italian physician Antonio Cocchi, and possibly also in Gassendi, Hecquet, Pufendorf and the Tyson – Wallis debate. He was also no doubt influenced by Linnaeus who – as the feminist historian Londa Schiebinger pointed out – used the number of teats as a way of classifying different species, and in 1758 glorified the breast by naming the entire class mammalia (mammals) after the female organ ‘mammae’ – a word derived from noises made by infants suckling at the breast, and in some cultures developed into the name for the mother.7
With bosom-toting enthusiasm, Rousseau observed that carnivores (such as cats and dogs) have numerous nipples and large litters for which they could easily provide enough food because it only took them an instant to catch their prey. By contrast, herbivores (such as goats, horses and sheep) have only one pair of teats and a maximum of two offspring, he claimed, because they had to graze all day long to produce enough milk for their young. Therefore, said Rousseau, ‘a woman’s having only two teats and rarely giving birth to more than one child at a time is one more strong reason for doubting that the human species is naturally Carnivorous’. Even though Rousseau claimed that he was forgoing the case for human herbivorous origins, he nevertheless claimed that the single pair of human bosoms was a primary piece of anatomical evidence in his favour. Breasts were not just symbols of gentle nourishment and innocence, they bore scientific testimony to humanity’s original herbivorous nature.
The significance of this lay in the fact that carnivores fight over their prey, whereas ‘Frugivores live in constant peace with one another.’ If humans were naturally herbivores, then logically they should be innately peaceful and benevolent. This was Rousseau’s fundamental contention about humanity and the guiding principle of his moral crusade. Women’s breasts – testimony of our herbivorous past – were anatomical evidence in favour of Rousseau’s belief that mankind was naturally good.8
No wonder Rousseau encouraged women to bare their breasts with pride, and spoke of the euphemistic ‘breast’ (sein) as the source of human emotion. The front page of the Discourse on Inequality – as if symbolising his manifesto – depicted a woman, broken free from her chains, with one breast fully exposed.9 This enthusiasm
caught on. By 1783 the first portrait of a woman breast-feeding was displayed in public; in 1794 Prussia legally required every fit woman to breast-feed her baby; and the bared breast of Liberty – symbol of egalitarian sympathy freed from its misguided social fetters – became the mascot of the French revolutionary republic.10
In making the argument that man was born good and virtuous, Rousseau was pitting himself against Thomas Hobbes who had argued, a century before, that man’s basic instinct was selfish and the original state of nature was a perpetual war (‘nasty, brutish and short’) in which every creature had a natural right to use its power for its own preservation. In a civilised state, humans divested themselves of their natural rights and obeyed the natural law to do unto others as they would be done by. Animals, however, being irrational, were unable to agree to divest themselves of their natural right and thus could not be protected by mutual covenants of forbearance. Rousseau was appalled by Hobbes’ violent pessimism and insisted (like Shaftesbury and the moral-sense philosophers) that in addition to the instinct of self-preservation, man also had a natural impulse of sympathy: ‘an innate repugnance at seeing a fellow-creature suffer’. This ‘pure emotion of nature’ was, according to Rousseau, ‘the force of natural compassion, which the greatest depravity of morals has as yet hardly been able to destroy!’ Before cultivated civility or social contracts governed mankind, it was raw sympathy that moderated people’s self-interest: ‘from this single attribute flow all those social virtues … generosity, Clemency, Humanity … Benevolence and friendship’.11
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