The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Carol J Adams

  CHAPTER 5

  DISMEMBERED TEXTS, DISMEMBERED ANIMALS

  Documents originate among the powerful ones, the conquerors. History, therefore, is nothing but a compilation of the depositions made by assassins with respect to their victims and themselves.

  —Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

  This I have consider’d: but tigers eat men; and the opinion of the world is hard to be defeated.—Heetopades

  —Closing words of Joseph Ritson’s An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty

  Feminism and vegetarianism often appear together in novels but the meaning of this is left unexplored. The use of vegetarian characters by women writers is a tradition that illustrates how to remember vegetarian words.

  A double meaning to dismemberment pervades this chapter: that which fragments animals and that which distorts texts. Dismemberment of vegetarianism in literary criticism follows the objectification/fragmentation/consumption model discussed in chapter 2. First, the text is objectified, held open to scrutiny, reduced to some essential aspects of itself. Then the text is fragmented from itself and its context; this is dismemberment. Once dismembered, the text can be consumed as though it is saying nothing new, nothing that undercuts the patriarchal model of consumption that has obliterated alternative meaning.

  Defining dismemberment

  A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.

  —William Godwin, Fleetwood1

  the outside anti-vegetarian world

  —Bernard Shaw2

  It is obvious what is meant by dismembered animals; that is how we obtain food from them. Dismemberment of texts occurs in many ways in regard to vegetarianism: by ignoring vegetarianism in texts; by failing to provide context or meaning to vegetarianism when it is mentioned; by deeming it inconsequential; and by forcing its meaning to adhere to the dominant discourse of meat.

  Critical dismemberment is a major issue for feminists. We learn that literary history dismembers by excluding women’s writings from the established canon.3 In addition, acts of dismemberment of a text occur when it is slit from its cultural context, such as the “mishandling of Black women writers by whites.”4 Similarly, if the existence of vegetarianism is not ignored, texts that include vegetarianism are often interpreted without any reference to vegetarian tradition or the positive climate of vegetarianism that might have served as a backdrop to the author’s treatment of the issue of vegetarianism.

  Feminist critics convey the idea that textual violation has occurred through the use of violent imagery. Elizabeth Robins complains that critic Max Beerbohm proceeds “to dismember . . . the lady’s literary remains.”5 Lorraine Bethel comments that Zora Neale “Hurston, like many Black women writers, has suffered ‘intellectual lynching’ at the hands of white and Black men and white women.”6 Just as a black writer refers to the treatment of a black writer by conjuring one of the quintessential forms of white racist violence against black people—rape of black women by white men would offer another metaphor of violation—so a vegetarian writer may express feelings about textual violation by referring to images of butchered animals and raising the issue of dismemberment.

  Caren Greenburg adds to this discussion of dismembered texts by exploring the meaning of the “specific relationships among reader, text, and author” in the light of “an Oedipal form of reading.” The Oedipus myth “implies that the roles at both ends of the creative process are essentially male and that the mediating text is female—and dead.”7 Acts of criticism on this representative dead female body, the text, are acts in which “the critic reduces the text to a repetition of himself.” She turns to the myth of Echo to develop more fully this insight:

  Echo’s mythic body dismembered is the myth disseminated and become versions, the Word disseminated and become words. . . . Why must the text be eliminated? Why must Echo be picked to shreds or ignored? The underlying threat posed by the text and exposed in this reading is that without textual violation, the mark or body which remains may be a locus from which language may seem to emanate.

  Greenburg’s analysis of the fate of the (female) text provides a basis for understanding the projects of vegetarians who are concerned with the literal, the animals’ (symbolically female) bodies and the fate of texts in general.

  What feminists see in the fate of women’s texts, vegetarians see in the fate of animals. If the fate of the literal text parallels the fate of the literal animal—both becoming dismembered and consumed—then there is a parallel in wanting to preserve the integrity of an original text and being a vegetarian. In their parallel concerns, feminists and vegetarians seek to establish definitions against patriarchal authority. Inevitably they write against the texts of meat.

  The interrelated sensibilities involved in respecting the integrity of a text and the integrity of animals’ bodies become evident in a brief review of the writings of Joseph Ritson (1761–1803). Ritson is of interest because of his attempts to defend texts from the imposition of (male) editors and because of his avid vegetarianism.

  Joseph Ritson: Vegetarian-at-Arms

  The particularity which governed Ritson in the higher criticism made him a fussy stickler in the humble walks of life. What appears in one sphere as critical scrupulousness seems in the other like finical foolishness. The editorial care for an accurate text becomes a personal anxiety about the teeth and the diet.

  —H. S. V. Jones, “Joseph Ritson: A Romantic Antiquarian”8

  Joseph Ritson’s life exemplifies the interweaving of literal concerns. Ritson was concerned with mangled and massacred animals, words, phrases, and texts. Besides refusing to view dead animals as meat he was devoted to issues of the proper spelling, definition, and etymology of words and the overzealous critical treatment of texts. Just as the text was not editorial property that could be changed and altered according to the whims and tastes of the editor so animals were not human’s property to be altered, castrated, or killed according to the whims and tastes of meat eaters. He became enraged at dismembered texts and dismembered animals.

  Figure 5 RITSON AS HIS CONTEMPORARIES SAW HIM

  From the caricature by Sayer, published by Humphrey on March 22, 1803

  Frontispiece to vol. 2, Bertrand H. Bronson Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938, 1966).

  Ritson, called by one of his biographers “Scholar-at-Arms,” was also a vegetarian-at-arms, ready and willing to battle with the larger meat-eating culture to forward vegetarian meaning. When one studies the caricature of Ritson by James Sayer that appeared in 1803 (see Figure 5), the year Ritson died, his concerns and that of his detractors are evident. In the background, nature is omnipresent: large rats are eating carrots, a cow sticking her head in a window is munching lettuce from a large bowl. Parsnips, beets, and other root vegetables stand among the books on the book-shelves, juxtaposing this vegetarian food with written texts. Joseph Ritson’s own An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty lies opened to the title page. In front of it a chained (carnivorous) cat is straining at her restraints, trying to reach the rats. (We infer that Ritson would deny even cats their right to eat meat.) The only other identifiable book on the bookshelves is the Bible, and it is also the only one that is tilted, askew, not allowed to stand upright. In Ritson’s left pocket sits The Atheist Pocket Companion. A frog, atop some books and next to the root vegetables, watches as Ritson dips his quill into an inkstand labeled “Gall.” A “Bill of Fare” reads: “Nettle Soup, Sour Crout, Horse Beans, Onions Leeks.”

  The caricature implies that Ritson really consumes other eighteenth-century scholars and their books, as he was an avid critic of others’ works. He is writing a manuscript called “Common Place.” Among the notable comments are “Warburton a fool and Percy a Liar/Warton an infamous Liar/ a piper [?] better than a Parson” referring to three of his fellow antiquarians. Two knives stab
a picture of Thomas Warton as depicted in the frontispiece of his book History of English Poetry, a book with which Ritson had numerous quarrels. This caricature of Ritson is entitled, “Fierce meagre male no commentator’s friend.” This is Ritson as his contemporaries saw him.

  Ritson devoted his adult life to re-membering texts and protecting animals. In describing what editors have done to their texts, such as Shakespeare’s plays, he uses explicit references to violation, alteration, corruption, injuring. This inflamed manner of speaking appears when he writes about meat eating. Ritson called meat eating “the horrid, unnatural crime of devouring your fellow creatures.”9

  Ritson believed in the integrity of any surviving text and its right to be unabused by editors who laid their hands on it. One biographer calls this a “devoted attachment to the very form and body of these ancient productions.”10 He spent years gathering ballads, folk songs, nursery rhymes; in a sense, an attempt to protect “anonymous”—that “prolific female author”11—from having her works disappear as well. He challenged overzealous editors who continually imposed their egos on the text; protecting the (female) text from (male) violation.

  Applying Ritson’s formula for respecting the integrity of the literal texts to basic vegetarian precepts reveals the following vegetarian standards. First, the proper role of the editor who respects the text would become the proper role of humans who control animals. Rather than dismembering them, s/he permits them wholeness. No editorial egocentricity will impose a (male) will on the (female) body. Encumbering a text with superfluity parallels what is done to an animal to make her, once dead, palatable: cooking her, seasoning her.

  In An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty, Ritson forwards two arguments simultaneously—consider these facts about vegetarianism, he argues in the main text, and in the footnotes he suggests, consider these ideas about texts in general. In attempting to assemble arguments against meat eating, Ritson must ponder the nature of humanity and the nature of texts. He creates antiphonal voices; the first discusses the Golden Age of vegetarianism, the other is concerned with a similar “Golden Age” of writers—Hesiod, Homer, and others.

  Chapter 1, entitled “Of Man,” demonstrates the basic unity in this antiphonal dialogue. What we encounter is a doubling of genesis, a focus on beginnings. Not only can one say that “in the beginning was the word” but in the beginning were the words of orators and writers about the beginning, a beginning that was vegetarian. Succinctly stated, his formula appears to be: to talk of vegetarianism is to talk of beginnings; to talk of beginnings is to talk of authors and their texts. By returning to beginnings we talk against succeeding texts of meat.

  In arguing that people ought not to eat the other animals Ritson tries to erase the boundaries that distinguish humans from animals. He points out that human beings are similar to vegetarian animals such as monkeys and “oran-outangs.” Evidence of human quadrupeds who lived like or with animals, such as a wolf boy, in his view further erode differences between human beings and the other animals. Finally, he argues that language itself might come from the other animals. Ritson, assuming that meat eating arises because of differences between human and nonhuman animals, seeks to establish our similarities.

  Many of the topics in his book appear in subsequent vegetarian writings: one does not need meat to survive; animal food is not necessary for strength; animal food is unhealthy; a vegetable diet promotes health; humanity and ethics require a fleshless diet. As evidence, Ritson cites example after example of individuals or countries living mainly as vegetarians. It is not surprising that he frequently overstates his case: animal food, he argues, was the cause of human sacrifices, and cannibalism follows from meat eating. At these times, he fell prey to colonialist views and inherited the legacy of racist misunderstanding of Africans and Aztecs.12

  Ritson’s detractors were actually gleeful with the appearance of An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, for they saw it as discrediting his other works, writings that challenged their editorial decisions. In their eyes, his scholarly arguments were undercut by his exaggerated claims on behalf of vegetarianism. Ritson unfortunately announced “that the use of animal food disposes man to cruel and ferocious actions.” How then did he explain his vitriolic writings against other scholars? For, of course, people noticed the contrast between his scathing and venomous writing style when discussing texts and his paean to a pacific vegetarianism. The review of An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty in the Edinburgh Review refers to “the bloody, murderous, carnivorous ritson, a newly discovered animal of anomalous order” Or the British Critic, which gibed at Ritson’s temper, referring to “his tranquility of soul, which has led him to maintain a restless and envenomed warfare with the whole human race, and chiefly with the most respectable part of it, cannot be too strongly pressed on the reader’s notice, as one of the happy effects flowing from a total abstinence from animal food.”13 Ritson’s ideas were attacked by his critics as ludicrous claims by an irrational man. Later generations were equally critical; the Dictionary of National Biography ungenerously believes that his Essay shows marks of Ritson’s “insipient insanity.”14 (Though the DNB exhibits a similar dismissive viewpoint in their biographies of other vegetarians.)

  Ritson’s last book, left in manuscript at his death, is seen as an early example of modern scholarship; but his penultimate book, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, has been viewed as a sign of a degenerative mental illness. In his final manuscript, subsequently published as The Life of King Arthur: From Ancient Historians and Authentic Documents, Ritson reached conclusions that are “in an astonishingly large number of cases essentially those of the best recent authorities” according to a twentieth-century reviewer who sees Ritson as “one of the greatest pioneers of modern scholarship.”15 King Arthur, similar in style to An Essay, relies on assembling translations and citations from other texts; it is called “the culmination of Ritson’s researches into the history and literature of the middle ages, it was the fruit of mature experience.”16 His last work “reveals the author as a scholar of no ordinary attainments,” as one who exercised “sound judgment” and “commonsense.” He is seen as “a critic who, by his passion for accuracy and his tremendous grasp of fact, rebuked an age of intellectual dishonesty, and who, by an acumen at times little short of inspiration, enunciated theories to which the scholarly world has finally returned after long and bitter controversies.”17 If Ritson’s final work reveals a mature scholar, how can his penultimate work be a sign of his insanity? Because it is being judged by the texts of meat which dismember vegetarian words.

  Writing the literal; writing vegetarianism

  When women writers include vegetarianism in a novel it will represent a complex layering of respect for the literal and an acknowledgment of the structure of the absent referent. Women writers who include the issue of vegetarianism could be said to be “bearing the vegetarian word.” Margaret Homans identifies several recurrent literary situations or practices that reveal women’s concern for the literal, which she has called “bearing the Word.”18 For instance, Homans describes how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein recalls the language of Percy Shelley’s Alastor; Mary can be said to be bearing Percy’s words in her novel. Mary Shelley bears Percy Shelley’s vegetarian word as well; Alastor features a vegetarian who consumes “bloodless food,” as does Frankenstein.19

  The issue of vegetarianism is a touchstone to the literal for it addresses the literal activities of meat eating by discussing what is literally consumed. For instance, toward the end of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s Monster writes on stones and trees to leave notes for its pursuer. In this action, we are presented with a multilayered evocation of the literal. First our attention is called to the act of writing. Since the Creature has no paper nor pen, it uses nature itself—stones and trees. As a result we have an explicit writing on the literal, which is nature. One of these marks, which violates by writing on nature, recalls the violation of n
ature: “You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat, and be refreshed.”20 Nature itself bears the words that recall, though undoing, Plutarch’s admonition to “tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive.” The Creature writes on the literal about the fate of the literal and names the absent referent.

  Bearing the vegetarian word in women’s fiction re-members texts and animals through (1) allusion to the literal words of a vegetarian from an earlier text. Allusion provides credence to one’s own position through association. It also renders the literal—actual books—into the figurative framework of one’s writings. (2) Figures in novels who recall historic vegetarians such as the vegetarian matriarch married to a leading artist of the time in Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice, who echoes the cooking ideas of Laura Huxley, widow of Aldous Huxley.21 Helen Yglesias’s The Saviors figures a vegetarian, socialist, and pacifist couple—Dwight and Maddy who after years of political activism made “the long retreat to the good life”—who share many similarities to vegetarian, socialist, and pacifist Scott and Helen Nearing, who attested to “Living the Good Life.”22 (3) Translating vegetarian texts. For instance, Plutarch’s two essays “On Flesh-Eating”—the quintessential authoritative vegetarian texts—were translated by both Joseph Ritson and Percy Shelley. (4) Language that clearly identifies the functioning of the structure of the absent referent by referring directly to dead animals. For instance, Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age opens with a pheasant dying from a heart attack, who “had had the pleasure, at least, of dying a natural death.” The hero of the novel demurs from eating the dead bird because he “did not much fancy a bird that had died in so tragic a manner.” In witnessing the bird’s death, there was no absent referent.23 (5) A final form of bearing the vegetarian word is found when individuals are prompted by their reading of vegetarian texts to stop eating meat, a goal Ritson had for his Essay on Abstinence.