Every once in a while, I like to put on my thinking cap (it’s pointy, of course) and consider big-picture questions about stories and story-craft. This turned out to be one of those days.
When I write about species issues or veganism in a fiction context, I like to work in either the Horror or Science Fiction genres. With Horror, I like to play with the ideas of predator and prey. What can I do to make the human reader empathize with prey?
Horror is great for putting humans back in the food chain. These scary stories make us think how we would hope to be treated if we encountered a predator who was stronger than us and was at liberty to farm, hunt, or otherwise consume us if they chose to.
Or, what can I teach the reader (and myself) about human nature when I put humans into the roles of different types of predators? Does the reader identify with the predator in my story? Do they enjoy this feeling or does it disturb them?
In Science Fiction I like the opportunity to place a story in an alternate world, perhaps with the same effect as the Horror strategies I delineated above. Science Fiction is another great way to play with the boundaries around species. We can write about human and non-human hybrids or challenge the ethics of modern scientific practices.
Both Horror and Science Fiction allow for the deliberate blurring of species lines. The Wolf-man of Horror or the Human Fly of Science Fiction would be a couple of examples. The details of these stories give us the opportunity to play with multiple layers of context.
The role as predator or prey is central to these stories. In some, the non-human traits of the protagonist are a curse. In others, they are a gift. Spider-man, for example, is made a super hero by the blending of his human and non-human traits.
What traits can be designated human versus non-human? The whole concept is subjective. Often, human beings say that language is a marker that distinguishes our species from others. We ignore the obvious fact that other species speak to one another in their own ways.
Another trait that humans claim as exclusive to our own species is morality. This is a highly ironic assertion given our treatment of virtually every other living thing on the planet (and quite often one another).
So, what are the tangible differences, if any? They seem to be constructed entirely of assumptions and biases.
For centuries, human beings in a predominance of major world cultures have been taught that we are separate from and somehow superior to other animals. This is so much the case that the phrase, “other animals,” sounds discordant and somehow offensive to the uncritical listener.
Non-human animals are used by people for food, labor transportation, entertainments, fashion, sport, comfort, therapy, military service and testing, and scientific experimentation. Although industrialization removed some of the burden on non-human animals for things like transportation and labor, their situation has continued to decline.
Increases in meat-eating amongst the growing throngs of humanity have created more and more exploitative agriculture. This not only harms the animals inside the industry but displaces others. Species go extinct daily as habitat is destroyed and our planet is pushed closer and closer to collapse.
It seems like whenever non-humans almost get a break, our species finds a way to undo the progress. It seems to me that, if we fail to redact our world-view in which non-human animals are mere tools, toys, or obstacles then our bottom-line behaviors will never change.
Take lab-grown meat. It is a great hope that lab meat will reduce the suffering of farmed animals and the climactic destruction of agriculture. At the same time, science is finding a new “use” for these creatures.
Despite ethics-motivated funding bans, scientists are persisting in their work to perfect techniques whereby human organs can be “custom-ordered,” with the consumer’s DNA used to cultivate human hearts, livers, etc. inside the living bodies of creatures like sheep, pigs, and cows.
This way humans can keep eating animals (even if lab-grown) and get an animal’s organ for transplant once this unnatural and unhealthy diet has given them heart disease, diabetes, or something of the type. This is the kind of mad scientist nonsense that even Mary Shelley wouldn’t have wanted to believe. What was that about humans being the only species with a sense of morality?
As already discussed, non-human animals aren’t the only ones who suffer due to “othering.” The other can be a fluid designation. When we are so accustomed to seeing those who look, speak, think, act differently than ourselves as inferior it has a broad impact. Any time you hear people discussing whether to be “humane” to other humans, they are (usually unconsciously) taking a position that these other folks are below them and therefore something less than fully human.
Human history is full of periods when white people have argued with a totally straight face that non-whites are a different (and inferior) species. Caucasians are not alone in this, but we serve as an easy example. The United States has been a repeat offender.
Laws governing the ownership and treatment of non-white slaves mirrored those applied to livestock. Genocidal bounties for native people’s skins or assorted body parts was the origin of the offensive term, “Red Skin.” The American period of the Chinese exclusion act (the late 1800s) saw Chinese immigrants portrayed as “pests” like wild pigs and rats in mainstream media. The U.S. is certainly not alone.
The current United States administration (the President, in fact) is on record referring to Muslims and especially South Americans as “animals” and an “infestation.” Controversy about how immigrants arrested at the border are being kept, sometimes even in cages that Senatorial visitors have compared to “dog kennels,” adds to this age-old intersection of speciesist and racist “othering.”
The machinery and methods of the Nazi holocaust were based upon American slaughterhouses. There were also periods of time when men asserted that women were so inherently unlike them, we were basically a whole other type of creature. The word chattel, derivative of cattle, refers to owned animals. It has also been applied to slaves, women, and children who are owned by the male head of house.
The idea that only men can be clergy in certain religions is a remnant of this view. But, it is not only religion. Science of a more dimly-lit and patriarchal period suggested women had floating uteruses that would clog up their other functions and make them intellectually as well as physically incapable of performing the same tasks as men.
These biases extend to laws as well as normative behaviors. Tradition tells us that the “rule of thumb” in British Common Law sought the “humane” treatment of women by stipulating that their owners (husbands, fathers) could only beat them with implements the diameter of their thumb. The truth of this is now somewhat controversial, but I would suggest that the patriarchal sentiment that kept the saying alive for centuries was and is very real.
Why haven’t we gotten rid of all this nonsense in our supposedly enlightened age? I think it has to do with fear. Specifically the fear of what might happen to us if we start letting go of our privileges.
Once you start letting “others” into your sphere of concern it gets harder to exclude everyone else. This is what Southern slave-holders and misogynist culture-bearers were screaming about during progressive movements like Abolition and Suffrage.
In a way (thankfully), they were right. The more we think about similarities the more of them we see. It becomes harder and harder to marginalize others. Though the last hold-out of our most cruel biases remains speciesism.
Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, put feminism on the map by writing Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. She made such a splash with this treatise on the basic humanity and equality of women that it elicited an immediate satirical response connecting women’s rights directly with non-human animal’s’ rights. Thomas Taylor published Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Though he put forth some valid anti-speciesist arguments, he was intending them as satire. He was trying to say, “If you’re going to let women in, what next? Sheep?”
Thankfully, Taylor didn’t get the last word. In 1813 Wollstonecraft’s son-in-law, Percy Shelley, finished the “Vindication” trilogy with Vindication of Natural Diet. He made an earnest pro-vegetarian (vegan, by modern definition) argument. In his version the message was basically, “Yes, sheep too. Speciesism is a meaningless and harmful bias. Eat plants.”
He went through all the arguments for vegetarianism as motivated by ethics, health, social equality, and environmentalism. The last sentence of the booklet was literally in all-caps, stating, “NEVER TAKE ANY SUBSTANCE INTO THE STOMACH THAT ONCE HAD LIFE.”
There has long been a tendency to question the validity of species as a marker of superiority. I would like to consider three authors whose work merges at a particularly interesting point. At least, it interests me. These writers were feminists who wrote Science Fiction which played with the concepts not only of gender but of species.
My three authors were women in times of rigid patriarchy. Their treatment of the other therefore tended to put women and non-humans into a lot of the same categories. They did this by making non-humans or human/non-human hybrids the subjects (and sometimes even the protagonists) of their stories. These three writers are Lady Margaret Cavendish, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Each of these writers are usually understood through the lens of their gender. The fact that they were writing as women in an era when most writers were men makes it understandable for readers to focus on this element of their perspective when trying to understand their subtexts and deeper meanings.
For instance, Shelley’s Frankenstein is usually understood as a story about men taking reproductive control away from women. The male doctor in the story learns to make a new life without the normal biological processes in which a mother is central.
We miss out if we fail to take our analysis of these women’s work even deeper than gender. They all included non-human animals in their sphere of concern and used their own perspective as the other to interact with other species. The lessons that their work has to offer modern readers and writers is what I would like to take a closer look at.
For each, I will give a short biographical sketch. Remember that whole biographies have been written about each. There is plenty to explore if you are interested. Bear in mind, their vegetarian or animal-rights interests are usually omitted or negated in these mainstream works.
Second, I will include some brief samples of their work in which they address species. And finally, I will list my own understandings of how these writers employed different creative strategies to play with concepts of species and sameness versus otherness.
Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673):
Margaret Lucas, whose anti-vivisectionist and literary exploits earned her the nickname “Mad Madge,” was born to upper-class parents in exactly the wrong place and time. Her family’s support of the monarchy during the English Civil War led to their home being destroyed by a pro-parliament mob when she was about eighteen.
The family cashed in some goodwill from the royal family that landed Margaret a job as a lady in waiting to the Queen (Henrietta Maria). She met and married William Cavendish, the Marquis of Newcastle while serving the exiled Queen in Paris.
Like her father and brothers, Margaret’s husband was a progressive who supported her intellect and education. He paid for the publication of all her books. One of these books became an early example of the Science Fiction genre. This was “The Blazing World.”
Often described as a “satirical utopia,” the story follows a human woman who is lost at sea and washes up in an alternate dimension. Here, the creatures are all human/non-human hybrids. There are bear-people, fox-people, fish-people, and so on.
In a nod to the speciesism she was raised in, Margaret does have her human protagonist immediately enshrined as Empress by these other beings. But, she conveys a world in which non-humans have moral agency. Often, they are portrayed as superior to humans in that regard.
The book is a fanciful romp in which she uses the Empress’ interactions with these strange creatures to contemplate subjects such as natural science and ethics. The questions they tackle include, “Why is the sun hot?” “Why is coal black?” and “Should monsters (the other) be used in scientific experiments?”
In an Avatar-like climax, the Empress leads an army of anthropomorphic creatures back into our world. Together, they defeat the evil humans who caused her exile.
Margaret engaged in animal-rights related topics in her fiction and non-fiction. She wrote books on natural history and rhetoric. Due to her noble status, she was one of the rare women allowed into the Royal Society of London in 1667, which was basically the think-tank of the times for philosophy and science. There, she took on some of the heavy-hitters of her day.
Among other things, she challenged Rene Descartes on his practices of vivisection. In other words, she challenged his popular argument that non-human animals are not sentient and therefore can be used by humans in any way we see fit. Descartes’ work is still used as a rationale for scientific and military uses of other animals.
Given a Classical education by her father and brothers, Margaret seemed to favor the ethical vegetarianism of writers like Plutarch and Ovid. She particularly loathed the blood sports of the noble class.
Her poem, “The Hunting of the Hare,” does such a good job of “humanizing” a hare named Wat that the story of his torture and death is quite difficult to read. Bear in mind that Margaret wrote in a time when the English language was spoken and written very differently. This version of her poem is updated in language. It sometimes messes up the cadence of the poem, but it makes her meaning more clear.
Then Wat was struck with terror, and with fear,
Thinks every shadow still the dogs they were.
And running out some distance from the noise,
To hide himself, his thoughts he new employs.
Under a clod of earth in sand pit wide,
Poor Wat sat close, hoping himself to hide.
Her use of anthropomorphism, in this case, is a clear example of how the tactic can be effective in getting normally uncritical, speciesist readers to question a culturally normative practice.
In the end, “Poor Wat” is captured and torn apart by the hounds. Margaret finishes the poem with an indictment not only of hunting but of meat-eating. She says:
As if that God made Creatures for Man’s meat,
To give them Life, and Sense, for Man to eat;
Or else for Sport, or Recreations sake,
Destroy those Lives that God saw good to make:
Making their Stomachs, Graves, which full they fill
With Murdered Bodies, that in sport they kill.
Yet Man doth think himself so gentle, mild,
When he of Creatures is most cruelly wild.
And is so Proud, thinks only he should live,
That God a God-like Nature did him give.
And that all Creatures for his sake alone,
Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.
I have often wondered if Margaret’s experiences during the English Civil War informed her understanding of “being hunted.” In either case, her identity as a woman placed her in the category of other. She pushed against resistance and patronization when it came to her writing, her intellectual interests, and her social justice activism.
As a woman, she seemed to seek to placate her critics by joking about her humble “scribbles.” Perhaps her attempt to express some of her serious beliefs within the context of Science Fiction was a strategy. She stepped completely outside the realm of patriarchal, academic concern. In that way, she was able to speak directly to her readers.
I think that a prime tactic Margaret Cavendish used in her writing about non-humans was anthropomorphism that underscored similarities between species rather than differences. She asserted that non-humans also crave life, avoid suffering, and seek a happy fulfillment for their lives.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851):
Where Margaret Cavendish was fortunate due to her marriage into the nobility, Mary Shelley was similarly advantaged by being born into celebrity. Her parents were prominent intellectuals who constantly pulled the progressive thinkers and artists of their day into their orbit.
Her father, William Godwin, advocated for anarchism. This was basically the movement of human societies back toward non-hierarchical and voluntary associations of the self-governed rather than large governments. His book, “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,” put him at the center of radical philosophical society.
As previously mentioned, her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” This is still regarded as one of the foundation treatises for the ideals and issues of feminism. Tragically, Mary Wollstonecraft died when her daughter was only a few days old.
For Mary, her mother became more of a household deity than a parent. Her grief-stricken father took great pains to educate his daughter in the way he thought his wife would have wanted. More than this, he educated her to carry on her mother’s legacy.
Vegetarians, otherwise known in the old days as “Pythagoreans” or “food reformers,” were part of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft Salon. To what extent Mary herself embraced vegetarian ideals is unclear. But, she was surrounded by vegetarian sentiment, and seemingly made no effort to distance herself from it.
In “Vindication,” Mary Wollstonecraft asserted that non-human animals should also be extended compassion and justice. She said that children must be taught not to abuse animals if they were going to have a good character. She said, “Justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless [they] extend to the whole creation ….”
So, Mary’s daughter had plenty of exposure to vegetarian ideas by the time she met Percy Shelley. Percy had embraced strict vegetarianism (basically veganism) about a year before they met. He was heavily influenced by the vegetarian classical philosophers like Pythagoras, Porphyry, and Ovid.
Percy’s own dietary recommendations in his vegetarian booklet mirror those of his contemporary, Dr. Henry Lambe. We can observe this from Dr. Lambe’s 1813 book which is accurately if inelegantly titled, “Water and Vegetable Diet in Consumption, Scrofula, Cancer, Asthma, and Other Chronic Diseases.”
I bring up Percy’s vegetarian guidebook because it is like a secret decoder kit for understanding the vegetarian messages in Frankenstein.
One example is the reference in Mary’s book to Prometheus. The full title of her story was, “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus.”
Percy’s work talks a lot about Prometheus. If you remember your Greek mythology (or feel like googling it), Prometheus was the guy who decided to circumvent the will of the gods and give humanity the gift of fire.
The gods didn’t think humans could handle the power of fire. They were afraid our species would wreak havoc through the unintended consequences of our ignorant wielding of this technology. Sound familiar? Victor Frankenstein as the Modern Prometheus also tried to act like a god and ended up causing all sorts of suffering.
In Vindication, Percy says, “The supereminence of man is like Satan’s, a supereminence of pain; and the majority of his species, doomed to [poverty], disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event, that by enabling him to communicate his sensations raised him above the level of his fellow animals.”
You may be scratching your head at this point. I’m sure you’ve seen a few versions of Frankenstein. You probably didn’t see anything vegetarian about it. So let me explain the Romantic Era vegetarianism that is prominent in Shelley’s original book.
The “creature” Dr. Frankenstein makes is made of animal parts as well as human parts. He becomes the “Adam” of a new species. He declares his intention to eat vegetarian foods like acorns and berries. If you pay attention, he never eats meat. Only occasionally when foraging does he take some cheese or milk. The creature’s diet mimics the preferential foods of classic vegetarian forebears like Ovid, Plutarch, and Milton.
The creature is formed in his character by the hatred and rejection he faces from human beings. He begins as a loving innocent and ends as a vindictive killer.
Despite this, the creature retains more dignity and more grasp on his moral compass than does his human creator. Like Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shelly hints that non-humans may have a more authentic connection to goodness and innocence than humanity.
The story is a cautionary tale against what we now know as speciesism. Dr. Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus because, like that classical character, he defies the gods to give humans more power than we can safely handle. The consequences are literally monstrous.
Mary is very specific about the creature being a new species. In Volume One, Chapter Three, Victor Frankenstein brags, “A new species would bless me as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.”
When his creature wakes up and tries to embrace him, Frankenstein flees in terror. Playing god turned out to be more than he could handle. He abandons his creation to face the world alone.
Recognized as different by the humans around him, the creature is abused and reviled. He hides in the shed of a farming family and slowly learns to speak by reading books. The creature thinks that imitating human language will earn him acceptance. When he is proven wrong his bitterness and taste for vengeance fester.
The creature affirms this species distinction when he demands that Dr. Frankenstein make him a mate. In Volume Two, Chapter Eight, he says, “…my companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”
The creature was born loving. Through loneliness and rejection, he develops a hatred of human beings that results in a killing spree. Frankenstein playing god unleashes a world of suffering for himself and everyone around him.
Shortly thereafter, in Chapter Nine, the creature elucidates the consequences of speciesism. He says, “Shall I respect man, when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear….”
Here, the creature seems to speak for all non-human animals. His story urges the thoughtful reader to contemplate the consequences of human insensitivity to, as Percy called them, our “fellow animals.”
Frankenstein is an example of a less obvious vegetarian message. You literally need a guidebook (Percy’s Vindication) to understand it. But, the story shares some themes with “The Blazing World.”
Both stories have human-animal hybrids who use human language and mannerisms to convey the inner thoughts and motivations of other creatures. In Margaret’s work, these creatures exist in another world. In Mary’s the creature is created through the hubris of mankind and the misapplication of technology. In both stories, these beings eventually resort to violence and attack humans. Each story has elements of both morality play and a cautionary tale.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935):
Charlotte was born into a family of tough, intelligent women. She lived during the prime times of the Suffrage Movement. She spent many years running an independent press that published books as well as a feminist newspaper. But, times were sometimes tough. She even made money for a while by selling soap from door to door. But, she lived life on her own terms, right up until she killed herself. A proponent of assisted suicide, she employed it when she learned she had terminal cancer.
She seemed to love learning and writing from an early age. Since her father abandoned the family when she was young, her maternal aunts were always around for support. And these aunts exposed Charlotte to a woman’s creative potential.
One of them, Harriet Beecher Stowe, authored “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” A fictional story that exposed the cruelty of slavery, it was so influential that President Abraham Lincoln reportedly called Stowe “the little woman who started the war.”
Charlotte’s mother didn’t want her kids to waste time on flights of fancy. She forbade her children to even read works of fiction. Perhaps in the spirit of rebellion, Charlotte persisted with her creative interests.
Her best-known work was The Yellow Wallpaper, which is a women’s studies classic. Perhaps best described as psychological horror, it’s a fictionalized account of Gilman’s own experience with post-partum depression (specifically the way her male doctor and her husband responded to her distress).
Like many feminists (suffragists) of her era, Gilman saw the plight of non-human animals as very connected to the plight of women, or other oppressed human beings. She wrote a poem that reflected her empathy for other animals after spending a night in a hotel near the railroad, listening to the pitiful noises of the cattle being shipped to slaughter.
THE CATTLE TRAIN
Below my window goes the cattle train,
And stands for hours along the river park,
Fear, Cold, Exhaustion, Hunger, Thirst and
Pain;
Dumb brutes we call them – Hark!
The bleat of frightened mother -calling young,
Deep-throated agony, shrill frantic cries,
Hoarse murmur of the thirst-distended tongue
Up to my window rise.
Bleak lies the shore to northern wind and sleet,
In open-slatted cars they stand and freeze
Beside the broad blue river in the heat
All waterless go these.
Hot, fevered, frightened, trampled, bruised
and torn;
Frozen to death before the ax descends;
We kill these weary creatures; sore and worn,
And eat them– with our friends.
The specter of doomed mothers and children calling to one another from the cattle cars reflects Charlotte’s ability to remove the barrier of species and to frame females across species as the same versus the other. She takes this concept much farther in a Science Fiction book she calls, “Herland.”
The story has a snarky and humorous tone. It is told through the incredulous point of view of some “gentlemen explorers” who stumble upon a women-only society and are shocked by the different culture they find.
The women of Herland are essentially a different species. Through parthenogenesis, they produce only female offspring. They state that there have been no men in their civilization for two-thousand years.
A prominent aspect of Gilman’s Herland is that the women do not exploit animals for food or labor. As with the stories of the Golden Age the women of Herland live primarily off fruit and nuts. It is a touchstone of connection with Frankenstein.
In one section of the text, the male visitors ask how these people get milk without cows. A woman named Somel tells them that they rely on their own milk. One small segment of this is as follows:
“Whatever do you do without milk?” Terry demanded incredulously.
“MILK? We have milk in abundance—our own.”
“But—but—I mean for cooking—for grown people,” Terry blundered, while they looked amazed and a shade displeased.
Jeff came to the rescue. “We keep cattle for their milk, as well as for their meat,” he explained. “Cow’s milk is a staple article of diet. There is a great milk industry—to collect and distribute it.”
Still they looked puzzled. I pointed to my outline of a cow. “The farmer milks the cow,” I said, and sketched a milk pail, the stool, and in pantomime showed the man milking. “Then it is carried to the city and distributed by milkmen—everybody has it at the door in the morning.”
“Has the cow no child?” asked Somel earnestly.
“Oh, yes, of course, a calf, that is.”
“Is there milk for the calf and you, too?”
It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us into a further discussion of the meat business. They heard it out, looking very white, and presently begged to be excused.
So in 1915, Gilman is laying out the ethics behind feminist veganism which are still considered radical and fringe today. By removing species as a barrier she includes all females within the scope of feminist concern.
Conclusions:
What strategies can modern readers and writers of the Science Fiction and Horror genres learn from these three women? Here are a few of my own conclusions.
- Anthropomorphism can be a useful tool for leading readers into the first stages of empathy for non-humans. Though it can be misleading, it is also a way to invite people to consider the ways we are similar to other animals. We must be vigilant when using this tool not to fall into anthropocentrism (being human-centered). Margaret Cavendish having her human protagonist immediately made “Empress” by the creatures in the alternate world is one example of this. I feel that it unconsciously assumes, and therefore propagates, the notion of human superiority.
- Stories do not have to be overtly vegan (or vegetarian) to convey vegan philosophies. A vampire who chooses to consume donated blood or another substance versus vampires who hunt or even farm humans would be one example (which I play around with in my own vampire story, “Revenant: Blood Justice”).
- A story can explore the arguments for compassion versus domination without overtly calling them out. Mary Shelly lays out numerous vegetarian philosophies in Frankenstein without beating the reader over the head with them. One drawback of this strategy is that uncritical readers may miss the message. The subtlety of Mary’s vegetarianism has made it all too easy for future generations to erase from the narrative. Watch any adaptation of her novel and just try to pick out a single vegetarian or animal rights subtext.
- Stories that use non-human protagonists, or human/non-human partnerships, to tell an “underdog” kind of story, can help readers to see the similarities between species. The modern motion picture, “Seabiscuit,” contains elements of this strategy. Charlotte uses the social norms of the women in Herland to illustrate that feminism addresses the abuses of females from all species. Breast milk should belong to the mother and her child. Ovum (eggs) should be under the individual female’s “reproductive control.” In other words, the female body is not meant to be owned and consumed by others, either in sum or in parts.
Stories that push back against speciesism seek to showcase similarities between animals, rather than differences. The audience is invited to consider the common goals of both human and non-human animals. These might include the desire for safety and happiness or the love of family.
Anyhow, those are my thinking-cap musings of the moment. Back to the lab.
