Bearing the vegetarian word
Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party demonstrates several aspects of bearing the vegetarian word and provides the opportunity to discern how a vegetarian’s privileging of the literal is handled by a woman writer. We meet the vegetarian of the novel, Cornelius Cardew, within the context of meat eating. Tom Harker, a poacher, has caught a rabbit, knifed it, and pocketed it. As he returns home, anticipating the dinner that will soon be his, he encounters Cardew who is completing a twenty-mile hike and requires directions to a local inn. Cardew, invited to walk along with Tom to regain his proper path to the inn, notices Tom’s distinctive limp, which is “due to his attempt to conceal the bulge of the rabbit in his pocket.”24 Cardew wonders if it is a war wound and Tom, lying, reports that his limp was caused by a mantrap. Indignant at this outrage, Cardew launches into a discourse on the killing of animals. While the readers and Tom are aware that Cardew is preaching to a meat eater, Cardew thinks he is conversing with a possible convert. In this conversation the first form of bearing the vegetarian word through allusion appears—the literal words of a vegetarian from an earlier text are invoked. Cardew proclaims, “Until we can recognise the universal kinship of all living creatures we shall remain in outer darkness.” Here Cardew recalls the words of Henry Salt who defined a “Creed of Kinship”: “the basis of any real morality must be the sense of Kinship between all living beings.”25 To reinforce his ideas, Cardew hands Tom a pamphlet that bears these words, summarizing his viewpoints on the issue of animals.
The next day in the midst of a traditional shooting party, Cardew pickets it and hands his pamphlet on “The Rights of Animals, a Vindication of the Doctrine of Universal Kinship” to the host, which spurs a conversation about printing in general. This common ground of a shared interest in pamphleteering confirms Cardew as a Ritson-like character with a literal interest in writing.
Cardew has multiple vegetarian texts, he bears vegetarian words on both picket and pamphlet, and in these writings bears the literal words of previous writers. Through the title of his leaflet, Cardew is bearing the words of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Percy Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet. Colegate summons a third “vindication” of that time as well: A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes—the first written response to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication—which parodied her book by extending her claims to animals. Henry Salt remarked that this response to Wollstonecraft’s book demonstrates “how the mockery of one generation may become the reality of the next.”26 Colegate cleverly evokes the sense that efforts for women’s rights can be undercut by implying that consideration of animals will be next—the message of the Rights of Brutes—through the following mocking response: “Sir Reuben Hergesheimer was describing to Minnie how a lunatic had appeared waving a placard and how he had taken for granted that it must be a suffragette and been astonished to find out that the agitation was on behalf of animals. ‘Votes for pheasants, I suppose.’ ”
The second aspect of bearing the vegetarian word that appears in Colegate’s novel is when a character in fiction recalls a historic vegetarian. Colegate’s vegetarian character is based on Henry Salt, called by Heywood Broun the “father of modern vegetarianism” because of his influence on Shaw and Gandhi.27 Besides the interrelated texts, there are many notable biographical parallels between the fictional Cardew and the historical Salt. Colegate makes Cardew, like Salt, involved in the Fellowship of the New Life and the Fabian Society. She has Cardew, like Salt, become a vegetarian while at public school. Salt tells us in his memoirs: “Thus gradually the conviction had been forced on me that we Eton masters, however irreproachable our surroundings, were but cannibals in cap and gown—almost literally cannibals, as devouring the flesh and blood of the higher non-human animals so closely akin to us.”28 Salt founded the Humanitarian League, a reform-oriented group that, like Cardew, concerned itself with animals’ rights, the extension of the franchise, land reform and socialism, among other issues.29
The third form of bearing the vegetarian word in this novel appears in language that refers directly to dead animals. Cardew calls the killing of animals “murder,” the body of a dead animal is called a corpse rather than the more frequently used term carcass, and the number of dead birds is closely calculated.
The last form of bearing the vegetarian word involves the proselytizing motif, the hope that individuals will be prompted by their reading of vegetarian texts to stop eating meat. Cardew believes his vegetarian word will be made flesh. He imagines the reactions of a family that has received his pamphlet, “words which would strike them first as strange and then as startling and then as scintillating with a fine refulgent light which made everything new and plain and held out to them quite irresistibly the clear necessity that they, the labouring poor, exploited by the rich, should connect themselves by sympathetic alliance with the animals, exploited by all men.”30
Cardew represents vegetarian writers like Percy Shelley, Joseph Ritson, and Henry Salt who attempt to reproduce their own vegetarian conversion for others by adding texts to the vegetarian canon. They seek multi-generational, multitextual vegetarian readings against the cultural texts of meat. They presume a continuous relationship between text and reader in which the text, protected, left whole, will have an effect on the reader who greets the words literally.
Essentially, the dialectic between vegetarianism and meat eating in the text represents the dialectic between writer and reader. The former seeks to convert the latter through the power of the text. Reversing the image of a text inscribed on and scarring nature pointing to a dead animal as is evoked in Frankenstein, they hope that from their image of the inviolate text arises the desire for unviolating diets. The signature of a vegetarian in a vegetarian text, whether Cardew or Shelley, Ritson or Salt, is the signature of someone trying to write on the reader, leave a mark on the reader’s own personal text of meat. It is an attempt to make their words flesh and to stop the story of meat. In their expectation of a literal response, they seek no more dismembered texts, dismembered animals, but instead hope for a re-membered text that protects the literal, living animals.
CHAPTER 6
FRANKENSTEIN’S VEGETARIAN MONSTER
Is it so heinous an offence against society, to respect in other animals that principal of life which they have received, no less than man himself, at the hand of Nature? O, mother of every living thing! O, thou eternal fountain of beneficence; shall I then be persecuted as a monster, for having listened to thy sacred voice?
—John Oswald, The Cry of Nature, 1791
Frankenstein’s Monster was a vegetarian. This chapter, in analyzing the meaning of the diet adopted by a Creature composed of dismembered parts, will demonstrate the benefits of re-membering rather than dismembering vegetarian tradition. Just as The Shooting Party draws upon vegetarian ideas and an individual of Edwardian England, the time in which it is set, so Frankenstein was indebted to the vegetarian climate of its day. Therefore this chapter places the themes of vegetarianism within both the vegetarian history of the Romantic period and the implicit feminism of this notable book. In its association of feminism, Romantic radicalism, and vegetarianism, Mary Shelley’s book bears the vegetarian word.
For a work that has received an unusual amount of critical attention over the past thirty years, in which almost every aspect of the novel has been closely scrutinized, it is remarkable that the Creature’s vegetarianism has remained outside the sphere of commentary. The late James Regier saw “Frankenstein as an imaginative ecotype, endlessly adaptable to unmixable seas of thought.”1 By exploring the Creature’s vegetarianism and providing a literary, historical, and feminist framework for understanding it, this chapter offers a few more waves of interpretation to the swelling waters.
The Creature’s vegetarianism not only confirms its inherent, original benevolence,2 but conveys Mary Shelley’s precise rendering of themes articulated by a group of her contemporaries whom I call �
��Romantic vegetarians.” The references that are central to Shelley’s novel and to Romantic writers in general—the writings of Ovid, Plutarch, Milton, and Rousseau—are all united by positive vegetarian associations. The myths of Adam and Eve and Prometheus, clearly evoked in the novel, were interpreted in a vegetarian framework during the Romantic period as being about the introduction of meat eating. Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy, was among the group of vegetarians who formulated this interpretation.
Of the numerous areas of exploration that have attracted literary critics, many overlap with the project of recovering the vegetarian meaning in this novel: the novel’s narrative strategy; literary, historical, and biographical aspects of the novel; and the novel’s feminist/gender issues. In the succeeding sections I consider these three areas and interpret the theme of vegetarianism as it is embedded in each.
Closed circles and vegetarian consciousness
The moral universe is not just a system of concentric circles, in which inner claims must always prevail over outer ones. . . . The model of concentric circles dividing us from them remains, however, very influential. One of its most popular forms is the idea that concern for them beyond a certain limit—and in particular concern for animals—is not serious because it is a matter of emotion.
—Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter3
The Creature includes animals within its moral codes, but is thwarted and deeply frustrated when seeking to be included within the moral codes of humanity. It learns that regardless of its own inclusive moral standards, the human circle is drawn in such a way that both it and the other animals are excluded from it.
The Creature’s vegetarianism is revealed in the innermost of three concentric circles that structure the novel. The outermost circle consists of the letters of Robert Walton while journeying through the Arctic to his sister Margaret Saville in England. Walton’s ship is traveling farther and farther from human society as the story unfolds; but as the story ends, Walton has agreed to return to the folds of civilization. His reversal occurs after Victor Frankenstein, the Being’s creator, is brought half-alive onto Walton’s ship. Bent on avenging the deaths of his wife, his friend, and his brother by destroying the Creature, Victor has followed it to the Arctic. His tale to Walton of his movement away from the human circle—through his lone scientific experiments that culminated in the creation of this Being and his subsequent solitary pursuit of the Creature—is situated in the novel as the mediating narrative between Walton’s tale of wanderlust and the Creature’s woeful story of parental desertion, isolation, and rejection by humans. The inner circle is the Creature’s orphan tale of how it gained knowledge and survival skills, and of what precipitated the murder of Victor’s little brother. Again and again it tells of being violently refused admittance to human society. At the conclusion of this narrative it proposes the creation of a companion so that it need no longer seek inclusion in the human circle; it will be content with companionship in its restricted inner circle.
In a ringing, emotional speech the Creature enunciates its dietary principles and those that its companion will follow when they accept self-imposed exile to South America. Vegetarianism is one way that the Creature announces its difference and separation from its creator by emphasizing its more inclusive moral code. In its explanation of its vegetarianism, the Creature restores the absent referent: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human.”4 The Creature’s vegetarianism serves to make it a more sympathetic being, one who considers how it exploits others. By including animals within its moral circle the Creature provides an emblem for what it hoped for and needed—but failed to receive—from human society.
Through its structural existence as the innermost of three concentric narratives, the Creature’s story reinforces the Creature’s position in society; it must be self-contained because no one will interact with it. The Creature’s litany of rejections by human beings—Victor’s rejection of it once it comes to life; villagers fleeing from it; the attack on it after saving a young person’s life; the DeLacey’s rebuff of its approach—holds up a clue as to what truly embodies the common center of all three tales: Human beings see themselves as their own center, into whose moral fabric neither gigantic beings nor animals are allowed.
The structure reiterates the theme. The Creature must overcome concentricity to be heard, to achieve social intercourse and be assimilated into human society. In this drive to overcome the self-enclosed concentric circles of the novel and of society, the Creature also challenges the concentric circles that philosopher Mary Midgley sees as separating humans from animals. The Creature’s inclusion of animals in its moral code symbolizes the idea that it seeks to achieve in human intercourse, breaking through the concentric circles of us and them.
Bearing the romantic vegetarian word
It was not until after the age of Rousseau . . . that vegetarianism began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the disuse of flesh-food. In this sense it is a new ethical principle.
—Henry Salt, The Humanities of Diet, 19145
Literary critics identify in Frankenstein a distillation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s life and learning, an interweaving of biography and bibliography. Through her father, William Godwin, Mary Shelley met many notable vegetarians, such as John Frank Newton, author of The Return to Nature; or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen, Joseph Ritson, his publisher Sir Richard Phillips, and, of course, Percy Shelley, who had authored A Vindication of Natural Diet and the visionary and vegetarian Queen Mab.6
Romantic radicalism provided the context for the vegetarianism to which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was exposed while growing up. As historian James Turner comments, “Radical politics and other unorthodox notions went hand-in-glove with their vegetarianism.”7 Historian Keith Thomas agrees, “In the 1790s vegetarianism had markedly radical overtones.”8 Turner observes that of all the “novel manifestations of sympathy for animals” that began to appear at this time, “the most profoundly subversive of conventional values was vegetarianism.”9 A clergyman who upbraided Thomas Jefferson Hogg for becoming a vegetarian demonstrated the way in which this subversive reform was greeted: “But this new system of eating vegetables . . . has hung on your Mother as a sort of indication that your determination was to deviate from all the old established ways of the world.”10
Romantic vegetarians sought to expand the human-centered moral circle that excluded animals from serious consideration. To them, killing animals was murder, brutalizing those who undertook it and those who benefited from it. They argued that once meat eating had redefined humanity’s moral relationship with animals, the floodgates of immorality were opened, and what resulted was the immoral, degenerate world in which they and their contemporaries lived. Joseph Ritson thought that human slavery might be traced to meat eating while Percy Shelley suggested that a vegetarian populace would never have “lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre.”11 They argued that including animals within the circle of moral consideration was urgently required.12
Most of the Romantic vegetarians were sympathetic Republicans; they saw the French Revolution as one of the toeholds into reforming the world, eliminating meat eating was another. John Oswald, whose The Cry of Nature; or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (1791) was the first British book of this time to champion vegetarianism, lost his life in France in 1793 fighting for the Jacobins at the battle of Pont-de-Ce.13 Ritson visited Paris in 1791, adopted the new Republican calendar and liked to be called “Citizen Ritson.” Richard Phillips, publisher for both Ritson and Godwin, and founder of the Monthly Magazine supported the Republican cause.
Unlike
many animal reform campaigns of the time, which directed their energy to controlling the abuses of animals occasioned by the sports of the lower classes such as bear or bull baiting, vegetarians went after the jugular of the upperclass—meat eating and blood sports. As Percy Shelley vehemently framed the argument: “It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh.”14
The ideas to which Mary Shelley and the Romantic vegetarians gravitate tantalizingly overlap: each rewrote the myths of the Fall (especially Genesis 3) and the myth of Prometheus. Each ponders the nature of evil and visions of Utopia. In the Creature’s narrative, Mary Shelley allies herself with Romantic vegetarians who decoded all tales of the primeval fall with the interpretation that they were implicitly about the introduction of meat eating. She precisely situates the vegetarian position concerning these two myths in the Creature’s narrative. The two preeminent myths that frame her Frankenstein, the myth of Prometheus and the story of Adam and Eve, had both been assimilated into the Romantic vegetarian position and interpreted from a vegetarian viewpoint by Joseph Ritson, John Frank Newton, and Percy Shelley.
The vegetarian Garden of Eden and the Fall
It was commonly presumed that the Garden of Eden was vegetarian.15 Proof of the vegetarian nature of the Garden of Eden was said to be found in Genesis 1:29: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” (“Meat” at the time of the King James Version of the Bible meant food.) Seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips said of the Golden Age, “On roots, not beasts, they fed.”16 In a phrase that Joseph Ritson would quote, Alexander Pope wrote that in Eden,
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 16