Animals and Women Feminist The

by Carol J Adams

  Women are, of course, acutely aware of power relations and of the extraordinary effort required to turn those relations around. Although tales of menacing animals are a staple in popular literature, stories that allow animals final victory are rare. A return to peace usually means the death of the animal, or its submission one way or another. In “ Attack at Dawn ” (in Corrigan and Hoppe, With a Fly ’ s Eye, 1989), Cris Mazza arranges for a truce between an angry rooster and a frightened woman, without forcing either one into the position of victim. 7 The woman has shared the warmth of her bed with this rooster when he was a chick. As an adult penned in a coop, he attacks her whenever she comes near him. Her fear causes her to do the masculine thing at the peak of their conflict: she smacks the rooster on the “ red earlobe ” (the detail is particularly painful) with a wooden dowel. No victor emerges from this conflict. Panic alone motivates the woman ’ s violence, and she deeply regrets having hurt Clarence. Clarence lives to attack again; he does not yield. The woman changes weapons; in the future she will use a broom, bristle end forward, simply to keep Clarence at a distance. Mazza conveys the emotion of the conflict with singular intensity. She does not fudge either the fear on the woman ’ s part or the aggression on the rooster ’ s to produce the conventional outcomes of conquest or friendship. The distance remains between these two beings; the woman finds a way to work with the rooster ’ s otherness instead of fighting it.

  On a larger scale in the reversal of power relations, one can cite Daphne du Maurier ’ s “ The Birds ” (in Echoes of the Macabre, 1952), which presents a vision much more apocalyptic than that of Alfred Hitchcock ’ s movie version of her story. Du Maurier gives final victory to the birds, who wreck humankind ’ s technology and evidently annihilate most of the human population. She sides with the birds even to the extent of denying both humans and readers that most human of needs: explanation. 8 Knowledge of the reason for the bird ’ s revolt would perhaps make their victory tolerable, but du Maurier does not make this concession to reason. The vision alone is satisfying. We have made war upon the animals for so long that successful retribution from them is pleasing to imagine. At the same time, the destruction of human society and the denial of explanation imitates the animal ’ s perspective under the assaults of humankind. Du Maurier puts humankind in the role of the victimized animal: helpless, disorganized, and completely confused. Granted, the whole of humankind, men and women alike, falls before the power of the birds. Yet there is singular pleasure in the uprising and absolute victory of those who have been conceived of as thoroughly conquered even in their very being.

  Women know what it is like to be victimized, to have one ’ s difference used as a rationale for suppression and violence. Instead of reproducing the conventions of conquest, and using those conventions to compose the narrative of the animal, the women writers discussed here expose and subvert the assumptions underlying victimization. While most admit that there is little hope of toppling hierarchies of dominance, they give their allegiance to the animal victim. These writers reclaim the totality of women ’ s status as victim by kinship with the more obviously victimized animal, grant freedom to the animal, however temporary, and sometimes dramatize that truly inconceivable phenomenon: the literal indomitability of animal otherness.

  Identity

  We have seen identification with animals in stories women write about animal victims. The issue of identity qua identity arises in women ’ s narratives, likely because women recognize the cultural devices that deny animals a sustaining sense of individuality. The idea of otherness takes the foreground in analysis of women ’ s stories that address the rift between animal and human identity. In the stories I discuss for their work upon identity, women writers examine the distance that Cris Mazza acknowledges in “ Attack at Dawn. ” These stories provide a corrective to anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism may appear unavoidable in literary uses of animals, yet the writers discussed in this section politicize projections of human qualities onto animals at least as far as questioning those projections.

  Harmless as such projections might seem, even children ’ s literature can come in for criticism over anthropomorphism. As early as 1974 (early, that is, in the history of our rethinking of ideas about animals) Deirdre Dwen Pitts spoke of the talking animal as a “ pathetic mechanism ” in children ’ s stories and demanded that children ’ s literature respect “ the dignity of [the animal ’ s] ordered world ” ( “ Discerning the Animal of a Thousand Faces ” ). Pitts is well ahead of her time, and ours, in insisting that literature honor the otherness of animals. Clarice Lispector and Nadine Gordimer, among others, locate the animal ’ s identity in the dignified silence the animal preserves.

  Nevertheless, this section does cover some talking animals: a wolf in Ursula Le Guin ’ s “ A Wife ’ s Story ” (in Le Guin, Buffalo Gals, 1988), buzzards in Zora Neale Hurston ’ s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and a cat in Stephanie T. Hoppe ’ s “ What the Cat Brought In ” (in Corrigan and Hoppe, With a Fly ’ s Eye, 1989). In many works of literature, the insertion of words into an animal ’ s mouth entails a kind of violence. The talking animal too often represents a violation of the otherness similar to that evident in the performing animal: it reflects human aggression toward the animal ’ s natural being. In Hurston ’ s, Le Guin ’ s, and Hoppe ’ s stories, however, animal speech is used to communicate, rather than erase, animal otherness. Animals “ speak ” in quite a different sense in the stories in which identity is a central issue.

  Finally, I discuss Alice Walker ’ s unique contribution to literature on women and animals, The Temple of My Familiar (1989). Walker ’ s novel occupies the boundary between identity and community, the third dimension of power and otherness to be analyzed in this essay. One of the most extraordinary features of this novel is Walker ’ s successful evocation of a kind of utopianism, not of society, but of individual identity. The human image she achieves in her novel is the lovelier for its association with animals. We turn first, though, to the conceptual abyss separating human from animal identity.

  Aware, then, that animals possess the pure identity that gazes at us when we gaze at them, Lispector brings animals into moments of self-realization for her characters. Massaud Moises (1971) describes these encounters as episodes of “ ontological transference ” ( “ Clarice Lispector: Fiction and Comic Vision, ” 275), though it must be added that Lispector is clever enough to avoid simply passing qualities from human to animal or vice versa. Instead, human and animal qualities seem to meet in her stories, leaving the individual beings more wholly “ other ” than they were before the encounter. The human characters become “ other ” to themselves, an experience that Lispector sometimes indicates with the idea of death-in-life or simply fainting away.

  One of Lispector ’ s most complicated invocations of the power of animal otherness occurs in “ The Buffalo ” (in Family Ties, 1985). In this story, she works with the projection of qualities of love and hostility onto animals. A woman wanders through a zoological garden, asking the caged animals to “ ‘ teach [her] only to hate ’ ” (123). She needs to find among the animals confirmation of her hatred for a lover who has rejected her. What she sees in all the animals, or what she projects onto them, however, is love, nothing but love — at least until she arrives at the compound that holds the buffalo. The buffalo is the first animal she sees after she has, without knowing it, reclaimed her rage. Just the sight of the buffalo brings her peace, but the punctuating experience is the animal ’ s indifference. The buffalo turns his back to her — a natural act, hardly surprising in zoo animals — but the woman calls out to him, trying to provoke a response. As these two beings stare into each other ’ s eyes, the woman sees what she takes to be hatred. Woman and buffalo are “ caught in mutual assassination ” (131), and the woman faints. Since there is no literal death in the story, the metaphoric assassination instead addresses the fragmentation of identity that comes from the buffalo ’ s total denial of the importance of the wo
man ’ s existence. Lispector elicits a “ fatal ” otherness in the buffalo; “ hatred ” is only the name that the woman gives to yet another disconfirmation of her identity. For the woman in the story, such an assault upon her identity can hardly be taken as a boon, especially when it results in fainting, essentially a loss of self. Yet there is something reprehensible in the need to force other beings to reflect one ’ s desires, and the story becomes a statement to readers about finding strength in one ’ s own identity.

  Likewise, Nadine Gordimer gives clear and crisp expression to the phenomenon of animal assault upon identity in “ The Soft Voice of the Serpent ” (in The Soft Voice of the Serpent, 1952). The story is similar to Katherine Mansfield ’ s “ The Fly ” ; 9 both writers use insects to throw human readings of life off balance, and perhaps even to negate those readings entirely. Insects, of course, are vastly removed from human existence and yet they maintain an identity (hence the value of Kafka ’ s having turned a man into one in “ The Metamorphosis ” ). An interesting connection between Gordimer ’ s story and Lispector ’ s “ The Buffalo ” (and, in fact, Mansfield ’ s “ The Fly ” as well) is that the central character is struggling both to think and not think about the key conflict in his or her life. The man in Gordimer ’ s story has had a leg amputated. He spends his days in a wheelchair, reading and suppressing full awareness of his loss: he “ never let the realization quite reach him; he let himself realize it physically, but he never let it get at him ” (2). Society, of course, prescribes such stoicism.

  Often in Clarice Lispector ’ s stories, human beings stare at animals across a space that divides them. In the “ Chronicles ” section of The Foreign Legion (1964), Lispector says that she regards animals “ as closest to God, matter which did not invent itself, something still warm from its own birth ” (148). Some of her short stories locate animals in a godlike position, not by projecting sacredness on them, but by casting them in the role of silent, distant witnesses to human confusion. Her nonfiction theme upon horses, “ The Dry Point of Horses ” ( Soulstorm, 1974), explains that the distant gaze of the animal in fact divides the human being from herself. Noting that she has “ a horse within [her], ” she also reverses this identification when she recalls stroking a horse ’ s mane: “ Through his aggressive, rugged mane, I felt as if something of me were seeing us from far away ” (108).

  The central event in the story does not seem momentous. One day, a large locust attracts the man ’ s attention. He studies the locust; almost a third of this very short story is taken up with his microscopic observations of the locust ’ s physical features. The locust, it turns out, has also lost a leg. The man begins to use the locust to come to terms with his own injury; his wife pities the creature, while he jokes about providing it with a tiny wheelchair. Just at the point when he identifies with the locust completely, laughing and speaking of “ ‘ the two of us, ’ ” the locust gets up and flies away. Both man and wife “ had forgotten that locusts can fly. ” Locusts have a talent and a mobility that humans have not. One imagines that the man and the woman must feel a kind of amazed pain at finding themselves disadvantaged by a seemingly insignificant creature. The animal ’ s negation of identification is as harsh in this story as it is in Lispector ’ s. As in “ The Buffalo, ” too, the animal ’ s silent rebuff casts the person back upon his or her own devices, more fully conscious than before the encounter of personal existential aloneness.

  Assaults upon characters give way to assaults upon readers in the next three stories. They twist the facile conventions of anthropomorphism around to perplex and provoke readers to thought. The true otherness of animals has power to determine the course of the narrative and undermine the very conventions with which the narrative works.

  A narrative rebuff to the reader occurs in Ursula Le Guin ’ s “ The Wife ’ s Story. ” Le Guin practices a deception upon the reader. She leads her readers to believe that they are listening to a woman tell the tale of her love for a man and of the fear that grows as the man begins to behave oddly, frightening the children and coming home with strange odors hanging about him. Clearly, the reader is meant to think that this is a werewolf story, in which the husband ’ s metamorphosis into a beast fully explains the woman ’ s fears. Le Guin retrieves the true horror of the conventional werewolf story in the scene, witnessed by the wife, of the husband ’ s metamorphosis:

  The hair began to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was gone. He was white all over, then, like a worm ’ s skin. And he turned his face. It was changing while I looked. It got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the nose just a knob of flesh with nostril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue — blue, with white rims around the blue — staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face. (70)

  Next — horror of horrors — the husband rears up on his two legs! What we are witnessing is the metamorphosis of a wolf into a man; and what the reader experiences along with the wolf-wife is the ugliness of the human shape from the animal ’ s perspective. How much lovelier are the long ears and muzzle, the array of sharp teeth, the deep brown eyes, compared to human features. “ The Wife ’ s Story ” forcibly divides the reader from attachment to the human image. We are “ other, ” and not in any complimentary fashion. By investing in the animal the power to define the natural state of being, Le Guin undermines human identity. The effect is simultaneously disturbing and liberating.

  Zora Neale Hurston produces a similar effect when she lends a voice to animals in Their Eyes Were Watching God . On the subject of the politics of voice in this novel, it is difficult to expand the territory of Carol Adams ’ s analysis. Adams uses the episode in which Janie persuades her second husband, Joe Starks, to purchase and free an abused mule to illustrate the idea of “ muted voices ” ( The Sexual Politics of Meat, 1990). Her commentary hinges on the fact that freeing a mule from servitude “ ‘ ain ’ t no everyday thought ’ ” — to use Janie ’ s words ( Their Eyes, 70). Adams points out that Janie “ is empowered to speak on behalf of another being ” and that this “ empowerment may arise from recognizing the fused oppression of women and mules — silenced and overworked ” (77). It is not only their joint status as silenced victims that Janie acts on, but also their resistance to being treated as such: the old, wasted mule fights back when some townspeople torment him; he “ jerked up his head, laid back his ears and rushed to the attack. . . . [H]e had more spirit left than body ” (68). Adams observes that, although Janie has the revolutionary thought of saving the mule, her husband receives the glory (77). This analysis goes to the heart of the politics involved in Janie ’ s association with the mule.

  Both the honesty of the vision and the complexity of the political issues involved in the African-American experience, however, lead Hurston into apparent contradictions. For one thing, she appears to approve of the fact that Janie ’ s third husband, the one she loves passionately, slaps her around “ a bit ” out of jealousy, then pampers her afterwards (176). She also admires Janie ’ s ability to “ shoot a hawk out of a pine tree and not tear him up. Shoot his head off ” (158). One cannot condone either of these acts of violence, but it is possible to use an aspect of identity to explain them. Prescriptive values are under attack in this novel. Hurston subjects any norm that binds free people to challenge on behalf of vitality. Censure of the conventions that slapping a woman is a sign of love, and that a woman who is able to shoot animals is a powerful woman, might be obliged to yield to the novel ’ s defiance of repression in any form.

  Hurston employs a curious animal metaphor, for example, to convey the foreignness of the changes Joe Starks introduces as he seizes the position of mayor in the unincorporated town of Eatonville. Joe uses gilt spittoons, ignoring the traditional tomato can favored by Eatonville men. Of Joe and his innovation, Hurston writes:

  It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it
put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a ’ gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the ’ gator and the ’ gator in your sister, and you ’ d rather not. (59)

  Hurston ’ s metaphor appeals primarily to experience, not judgment. One could denounce Joe ’ s gilt spittoons as an ostentation coming from the white world, but Hurston is more fascinated that condemnatory. Although one might “ rather not ” see one ’ s sister turn into a ’ gator, the image is not horrifying in context. Nor is it playful. The violation of rigid categories speaks to the general emancipatory character of Hurston ’ s novel. Hurston treats the crossing of boundaries between human and animal as a literal possibility. Like the liberation of the mule, Hurston ’ s fusion of animal and human identity in this metaphor “ ain ’ t no everyday thought. ”

  Nor are the developments surrounding the mule ’ s death. The mule dies a natural death. That is to say, no human being kills him. Once again, however, Hurston crosses identity boundaries: the mule “ fought [Death] like a natural man ” and he dies “ on his rawbony back with all four feet in the air ” (72). He dies like a man and like an animal. The mule has become such a favorite in the community that all of the townsfolk, with the exception of Janie, gather in the woods for a Rabelaisian funeral. Joe delivers a mock eulogy, and another man speaks of “ mule-heaven ” and “ mule-angels ” (74). Are they mocking the mule? A sentimentalist might say so. If appeals must be made to heaven and to angels, there is no reason to suppose that animals are excluded from such divine offices. Hurston, however, locates the terms of the mockery on the other side of the equation: the participants in the ceremony, she writes, “ mocked everything human ” (73). The mule ’ s death provides the community with a legitimate occasion for throwing off the restraints of everyday identity. As further confirmation of the importance of animals, Hurston goes beyond the human “ funeral ” to an animal funeral for the mule, conducted by buzzards. She parts company with the realistic mode and speaks in the voice of the folk — that is, the voice that delivers the folktales in which one finds talking animals. The buzzards circle the mule ’ s carcass and engage in a question-and-answer session. “ ‘ Who killed this man? ’ ” the lead buzzard asks. “ ‘ Bare, bare fat, ’ ” replies the chorus (75). The mule who has died like a man is both a man and a meal to the buzzards. Theirs is the earthy perspective. Hurston uses animal identity to challenge ideological norms, including the literary norm of realism. We are free to pick and choose among the acts of defiance practiced by Hurston ’ s characters, but there is no doubt that animals are a significant source of disturbance to strictures upon identity in Their Eyes Were Watching God . Metaphorically and literally, Hurston ’ s animals are politicized in so far as they assault cultural convention.