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

by Carol J Adams

  Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade;

  The same his table, and the same his bed;

  No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed.17

  Milton in book 5 of Paradise Lost describes Eve preparing “For dinner savoury fruits, of taste to please / True appetite.”18

  The Romantic vegetarians heartily accepted the notion of the meatless Garden of Eden. They infused their peculiar interpretation in their consideration of Genesis 3. They transformed the myth by locating meat eating as the cause of the Fall. For instance John Frank Newton’s The Return to Nature; or, Defence of Vegetable Regimen posits that the two trees in the Garden of Eden represent “the two kinds of foods which Adam and Eve had before them in Paradise, viz. the vegetables and the animals.”19 The penalty for eating from the wrong tree was the death that Adam and Eve had been warned would befall them. But it was not immediate death; rather it was premature, diseased death caused by eating the wrong foods, i.e., meat.

  Approaching the Fall from this interpretation deflects attention from the role of Eve as temptress, and removes the patriarchal obsession with the feminine as the cause of the evil of the world. Because of the vegetarian attention given to the (male) role of butchers, and the presumed manliness of meat eating, the evil that fills the world after the fall is generalized, if not masculinized. In support of Gilbert and Gubar’s suggestion that Eve is all parts of the story of Frankenstein—especially the Creature20—the Creature, unlike Adam, but like Eve in Milton’s depiction, must prepare its own dinner of “savoury fruits.” And when the Creature envisions its companion, it does not posit food preparation as her role though she will share its fare.

  The myth of Prometheus

  Both Mary Shelley and the Romantic vegetarians weave another myth of the Fall into their writings: the myth of Prometheus who stole fire, was chained to Mount Caucasus, and faced the daily agony of having his liver devoured by a vulture, only to have it grow back each night. Besides the standard Romantic view of Prometheus as a rebel against tyranny, Mary Shelley knew of an additional interpretation of the myth. For Romantic vegetarians, the story of Prometheus’s discovery of fire is the story of the inception of meat eating. They accepted Pliny’s claim in Natural History that “Prometheus first taught the use of animal food (Primus bovem occidit Prometheus).”21 Without cooking, meat would not be palatable. According to them, cooking also masks the horrors of a corpse and makes meat eating psychologically and aesthetically acceptable. Percy Shelley provides the Romantic vegetarian interpretation of this myth: “Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease.”22

  It is notable how the Creature in a tale subtitled The Modern Prometheus handles its introduction to fire and meat. Finding a fire left by some wandering beggars, it discovers that “some of the offals that the travellers had left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the berries I gathered from the trees.” From this, it does not adopt meat eating, but rather learns how to cook vegetable food. “I tried, therefore, to dress my food in the same manner, placing it on the live embers. I found that the berries were spoiled by this operation, and the nuts and roots much improved.” The offals figure meat eating; the Creature rejects this Promethean gift.

  The Golden Age and the natural diet

  Descriptions of what the Creature eats reveal Mary Shelley’s indebtedness to vegetarian meals described by Ovid and Rousseau. In this, her book bears the vegetarian word through allusion to previous words about vegetarianism. The Golden Age described in book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a time prior to the erection of dwelling places, a time of contentment with acorns and berries, a time when animals were not excluded from the human circle by meat eating:

  Content with Food, which Nature freely bred,

  On Wildings, and on Strawberries they fed;

  Cornels and Bramble-berries gave the rest,

  And falling Acorns furnisht out a Feast.23

  After the Creature announces its vegetarianism to Victor, it promises that once Victor fashions a companion, the two shall retreat to South America, and there live faultless lives. Ovid appears to be the source for the precise wording of Shelley’s vegetarian-pacifist vision the Creature presents to Victor, in particular, the use of “acorns and berries.” quoted earlier, as the source of nourishment. The Creature enters into a fallen world in which it is rejected and seeks to establish a new Golden Age in which harmony through vegetarianism reigns.

  The Creature also bears the vegetarian word of Rousseau in his descriptions of food. From the Discourse on Inequality, when he first suggested that one of the links in the chains that kept humankind in bondage was an unnatural diet, through Émile and La Nouvelle Heloise, vegetarianism is Rousseau’s ideal diet.24 Émile, Sophie, and Julie were all vegetarians. Mary Shelley precisely renders Rousseau’s ideal diet in the Creature’s narrative. Rousseau rhapsodized in The Confessions, “I do not know of better fare than a rustic meal. With milk, eggs, herbs, cheese, brown bread and passable wine one can always be sure to please me.”25 Once forced to leave the Promethean fire behind because of the scarcity of food, the Creature’s next encounter with food is a paraphrase of Rousseau’s favorite meal in rustic surroundings: “I greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherd’s breakfast, which consisted of bread, cheese, milk, and wine; the latter, however, I did not like.”26 (Wine was tabooed by Romantic vegetarians as well as meat). In a village, the Creature again responds with pleasure to the ideal foods Rousseau identified: “The vegetables in the gardens, the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages, allured my appetite.”

  Diet for a small planet

  Another instance in which the Creature’s views of a fallen world intersect with that of the Romantic vegetarians is its observation that cows need food. It remarks about one cow owned by a poor family that she “gave very little [milk] during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it.” Its reference to the demands that one cow puts on food resources echoes the modern ecological vegetarian position popularized in Frances Moore Lappés Diet for a Small Planet. Lappé argues that the land required to feed livestock would be better devoted to feeding humans.

  This was a longstanding vegetarian issue and its first traces appear in Plato’s Republic when Socrates tells Glaucon that meat production necessitates large amounts of pasture. Resultingly, it will require cutting “off a slice of our neighbours’ territory; and if they too are not content with necessaries, but give themselves up to getting unlimited wealth, they will want a slice of ours.” Thus Socrates pronounces, “So the next thing will be, Glaucon, that we shall be at war.”27 In 1785, William Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy raised the economic and agricultural issues associated with meat eating: “A piece of ground capable of supplying animal food sufficient for the subsistence of ten persons would sustain, at least, the double of that number with grain, roots and milk.”28 Richard Phillips’s 1811 vegetarian article argues: “The forty-seven millions of acres in England and Wales would maintain in abundance as many human inhabitants if they lived wholly on grain, fruits and vegetables; but they sustain only twelve millions scantily while animal food is made the basis of human subsistence.”29 Percy Shelley’s essay culminates this position: claiming that with vegetarianism “the monopolizing eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal. . . . The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.”30

  The slaughterhouse as source for the Creature’s body

  The Creature is “born” into a fallen world; but the Creature was also “born” of this fallen world—as the Romantic vegetarians viewed
it—in that it is made, in part, of items from a slaughterhouse. Unlike many Gothic tales in which a customary raid on the graveyard is obligatory, Victor Frankenstein, in constructing his Creature, makes forays to the slaughterhouse as well: “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials.” How was it that Mary Shelley extended grave robbing to invading the slaughterhouse? Her familiarity with the ideas of Romantic vegetarianism may have influenced her. The slaughterhouse was one of the consequences of the fall from vegetarianism and Romantic vegetarians could not avoid considering it, even if, like John Oswald, they deliberately took long detours to avoid passing slaughterhouses and butcher shops. Sir Richard Phillips traced his vegetarianism to his experience at twelve years of age, when he “was struck with such horror in accidentally seeing the barbarities of a London slaughter-house that since that hour he has never eaten anything but vegetables.”31

  The anatomically correct vegetarian

  That Victor goes to slaughterhouses not only incorporates into the novel the anathema with which vegetarians beheld it, but suggestively implies the Creature was herbivorous. Since it is only herbivorous animals who are consumed by humans, the remnants gathered by Victor from the slaughterhouse would have been parts from herbivorous bodies. Thus, at least a portion of the Creature was anatomically vegetarian. Romantic vegetarians held that humans did not have a carnivorous body; ill health consequently resulted from meat eating. In what would become a standard vegetarian argument, Rousseau discussed the physiological disposition of the body to a vegetable diet. Like herbivorous animals, humans had flat teeth. The intestines, as well, did not resemble those of carnivorous animals. By positing the Creature’s creation in part from the slaughterhouse, Mary Shelley circumvents the anatomical argument that vegetarians of this time found compelling and their critics ludicrous.

  When the vegetarianism of the novel is considered separate from its vegetarian context, it is shorn of the literary allusions it carries and its adherence to the novel’s project of echoing earlier texts goes undetected. In Frankenstein we find a Creature seeking to reestablish the Golden Age of a vegetarian diet with roots and berries; a Creature who eats Rousseau’s ideal meal; a Being who, like the animals eaten for meat, finds itself excluded from the moral circle of humanity.

  Deciphering muted meanings

  We did transcription, copied out set passages in this arching, long-looped hand. I wrote out, over and over, with a calm satisfaction: “I should like to live among the leaves and heather like the birds, to wear a dress of feathers, and to eat berries” This sentence seemed to me to possess an utter and invulnerable completeness.

  —Denise Riley, “Waiting”32

  The Creature embodies both vegetarian and feminist meaning. While the women in Frankenstein enact Mary Shelley’s subversion of sentimentalism by fulfilling feminine roles and dying as a result, and the men represent inflexible masculine roles, it is the New Being who represents the complete critique of the present order which Shelley attempted. The nameless Creature, who Gilbert and Gubar see as seeking for a maternal principle in the midst of a world of fathers, resolutely condemns the food of the fathers as well as their mores; in this sense its vegetarianism carries feminist as well as pacifist overtones. Those who overtly reviled the meat diet of that day failed to see that they were covertly criticizing a masculine symbol. The maternal principle would be present in the Creature’s vegetarian paradise; indeed, the maternal principle is the missing aspect of Romantic vegetarianism.

  Recalling the exclusions enforced by the outer narratives upon the Creature’s inner circle, we find a paradigm for interpreting not only the Creatures’ vegetarianism but one of the feminist aspects of the novel. Embedded within the Creature’s story is yet another story, that of the DeLacey family. Within that family story, we find the story of Safie’s independent mother. It is in fact “the structurally central element of the narrative.”33 Safie had been taught by her mother “to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet.”34 Marc Rubenstein observes that Safie’s mother “is surely a cartoon, distorted but recognizable, of the author’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.”35 In fact, on the second page of the introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft comments of women in her own country that “in the true style of Mahometanism, they are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species.”36

  Women’s anger at confinement and their vision for independence are themselves confined in this novel within numerous layers of concentric circles that represent a society that excludes these issues. Though located at the center of the book, the issues there represented—central to both Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter—have been closed off by the dominant world order. Among other things Frankenstein became a cathartic vehicle for a woman suppressing great anger at being made subordinate.

  The Creature’s vegetarian proclamation is a cipher in the text; though it has been treated in the sense of being without meaning, it is rather a key to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s feelings about discourse and the cipherlike role—that is, the nonentity role—permitted to women by male discourse. As Shelley’s mother proved, women were excluded from the closed circle of patriarchy. In describing the events that led up to the conception of Frankenstein in the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley creates an image of herself as cipher by portraying herself as outside the circle of discourse of the men in her party: She casts herself in the role of faithful listener. “Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener.”37 During the time that Frankenstein was conceived, Byron and Percy Shelley’s many companionable hours were achieved at the exclusion of Mary. Marcia Tillotson, who examines this exclusion, and suggests that the Creature’s rage mirrors Mary Shelley’s own rage over being excluded, queries:

  The question I cannot answer is whether Shelley was fully aware of what she was doing: did she deliberately use the monster’s self-defense to protest against men’s behavior toward women, or did she merely make the monster speak for her without knowing herself that the source of his rage was her own?38

  The Creature’s situation matches that of many women characters for whom tragedy “springs from the fact that consciousness must outpace the possibilities of action, that perception must pace within an iron cage.”39 Yet the Creature’s style of speaking differs greatly from the characteristic forms of speech attributed to women. It is not hesitant, self-effacing, tentative, weak, polite, restrained. Its speech is not characterized by hedges, maybes, perhaps, possibly, if you please.40 The Creature does not avoid confrontation. It is excited, impassioned speech, but clear, unambiguous, direct. It demands, it entreats, it implores, it commands, it prophesies. The Creature is a powerful speaker, it transgresses conversations mightily and fearlessly. It embodies patterns of speech that would have been foreign to many women of that time. Yet like feminists, its speech was muted by the dominant social order; as is vegetarianism. Vegetarianism, like feminism, is excluded from the patriarchal circle, just as Mary Shelley experienced herself as being excluded from the male circle of artists of which she saw herself a part.

  It may be that the compressed form of the Creature’s vegetarian statement causes it to be elided from our collective memory. Since vegetarianism is not a part of the dominant culture, it is more likely, however, that the vegetarian revelations, terse as they are, are silenced because we have no framework into which we can assimilate them, just as the feminist meaning at the center of this novel failed to be analyzed extensively for more than a hundred years. The Creature’s futile hopes for admittance to the human circle reflect the position of that time’s vegetarians and feminists; they confront a world whose circles, so tightly drawn, refuse them admittance, dividing us from them.

  CHAPTER 7

  FEMINISM, THE GREAT WAR, AND MODERN VEGETARIANISM

  What is civilization? What is culture? Is i
t possible for a healthy race to be fathered by violence—in war or in the slaughterhouse—and mothered by slaves, ignorant or parasitic? Where is the historian who traces the rise and fall of nations to the standing of their women?

  —Agnes Ryan, “Civilization? Culture?”

  After Frankenstein’s Creature describes its diet of acorn and berries, and its hope of retreating to South America with its companion, it remarks to Frankenstein, “The picture I present to you is peaceful and human.”1 The Creature’s idyllic pacifist and vegetarian Utopian vision intersects with the themes of a number of novels by twentieth-century women that in challenging patriarchal society hearken to a Golden Age of feminism, pacifism, and vegetarianism. The context against which these more recent novels must be read is World War I—for it was then that the peaceful, vegetarian life envisioned by the Creature and many others encountered its starkest contrast, catalyzing the assimilation of vegetarianism into the antiwar vision of women writers. As Edward Carpenter put it after World War I: “When we think of the regiments and regiments of soldiers and mercenaries mangled and torn . . . when we realise what all this horrible scramble means, including the endless slaughter of the innocent and beautiful animals, and the fear, the terror, the agony in which the latter exist,” we must “pay homage” to Percy Shelley’s androgynous vision, for he “saw that only a new type of human being combining the male and the female, could ultimately save the world—a being having the feminine insight and imagination to perceive the evil, and the manly strength and courage to oppose and finally annihilate it.”2