In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter claims:
Meat, the “roast beef of old England,” was not only the traditional food of warriors and aggressors but also believed to be the fuel of anger and lust. Disgust with meat was a common phenomenon among Victorian girls; a carnivorous diet was associated with sexual precocity, especially with an abundant menstrual flow, and even with nymphomania.50
Showalter’s source for this claim is an article by Joan Jacobs Brumberg about “chlorotic girls.”51 Chlorosis was a form of anemia. Common to these girls’ responses to food was a disgust for meat. Brumberg reports that one contemporary studying the disease observed in 1897: “Almost all chlorotic girls are fond of biscuits, potatoes, etc. while they avoid meat on most occasions, and when they do eat meat, they prefer the burnt outside portion.” One girl reported to her family doctor that “I can’t bear meat.” A medical guide observed that among chlorotics: “the appetite for animal food completely ceases.”52 These are physiological responses which numerous other people have observed their bodies making; but a psychological interpretation is applied to them. The implication we are left with is that the girls feared their sexuality and possible nymphomania. The source for the claims that “meat eating in excess was linked to adolescent insanity and to nymphomania” is an article on women and menstruation and nineteenth-century medicine.53 Their source is an article from 1857, when the Graham model for sexuality and meat eating was widely popular. That these girls of the 1890s may have had an alternative perspective available—the perspective described above in which autonomous female identity was associated with vegetarianism—is not considered.54
Another viewpoint for considering disgust at the thought of meat is to recognize that the person expressing the disgust may have associated the form meat with the absent referent, the dead animal. The girls’ objections to eating meat may be related to their dislike of the idea of eating animals. In fact, Blumberg provides evidence that this association had been made by some of the girls. “For many, meat eating was endured for its healing qualities but despised as a moral and aesthetic act.”55 As though writing in confirmation of the idea that girls might find meat unaesthetic, Lady Walb. Paget reported in 1893, “I have all my life thought that meat-eating was objectionable from the aesthetic point of view. Even as a child the fashion of handing around a huge grosse piece on an enormous dish revolted my sense of beauty.”56 Blumberg continues: “Contemporary descriptions reveal that some young women may well have been phobic about meat eating because of its associations” and provides this quotation from a 1907 article:
There is the common illustration which every one meets a thousand times in a lifetime, of the girl whose [functions need much fat but whose] stomach rebels at the very thought of fat meat. The mother tries persuasion and entreaty and threats and penalties. But nothing can overcome the artistic development in the girl’s nature which makes her revolt at the bare idea of putting the fat piece of a dead animal between her lips.57
This article, written in response to an article by Dr. Josiah Oldfield, a vegetarian, is not concerned with chlorotic girls. It is reflecting on the issue Oldfield raises that “there is something in the very idea of eating a dead body which is repulsive to the artistic man and woman.”58 The writer of this article posits that the girls have an “artistic” response to eating dead animals. In fact, the article does not recommend that meat eating be enforced on the girls, but rather that they get their sources for fat from nonmeat items.59 What this article most demonstrates is that “artistic men and women” and many girls restore the absent referent, they see themselves as eating dead animals rather than meat.
Is restoring the absent referent evidence of a meat phobia? Has the girl described in the above quotation overimagained anything? It appears that conflict in interpretation arises because some medical doctors and now historians assume that the meat being avoided is referent to the girls’ experience of their bodies. Is the meat referring to their sexuality? or their own bodily bleeding? or have they restored the absent referent—the bodies of animals? Perhaps young girls did not eat meat because meat had a specific meaning in their own world and because they had overcome the structure of the absent referent. Indeed, what if dislike of meat was not limited to chlorotic girls? As the above article implies, many girls found meat unappetizing, but apparently the only times in general that their reactions were chronicled were when their other responses fit the culturally defined notion of “chlorotic girls.” But then the question arises, “Could someone who has a psychological problem with food also have a legitimate objection to meat?”
Embodied meanings
“The doctor says she needs a good beating if she won’t eat properly.” You tried to say you couldn’t stomach the welling blood the brains the private thinking tissues of the dead animal the pipes rivulets channels conduits and gulleys with their muscular veinous edges, tripe, brains and tongue. There were iron pails of sheeps’ heads in the kitchen for boiling into broth. There were monthly pails of bloody white rags soaking. You had to eat everything that was put before you.
—Denise Riley, “Waiting”60
Where does female meaning go in a patriarchal culture? If meanings have nowhere to go in terms of the verbal world, where do they go? Perhaps women’s meaning is spoken in a different way at that point when they find themselves muted. Is it possible that food becomes the spoken language of dissent? Since women are the main preparers of food in Western culture and meat is defined as men’s food, vegetarianism may carry meaning within a female language which seeks to escape its own mutedness. If “women tend to use speech to build upon rather than challenge the other’s statements,”61 then food choices can be a less confrontative initiation of challenge to another than breaking speech boundaries. Women may code their criticism of the prevailing world order in the choice of female-identified foods. In this case, women’s bodies become the texts upon which they inscribed their dissent through vegetarianism. The adolescent girls whose refusal to eat meat is called phobic actually epitomize the situation of women whose meanings had nowhere to go; their inarticulateness became coded in food choices.
The work of scholars confirms the alliance between women and the symbolic meaning of food choices. Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women offers some observations that are not exclusively restricted to interpretation of medieval women’s experience. Bynum found that food acts as symbol for women more than for men: “Food practices and food symbols characterized women’s experience more than men’s.” She concludes, “Food behaviors helped girls to gain control over self as well as over circumstance. Through fasting, women internalized as well as manipulated and escaped patriarchal familial and religious structures.”62 Brumberg suggests that food “was an integral part of individual identity. For women in particular, how one ate spoke to issues of basic character.”63
If the body becomes a special focus for women’s struggle for freedom then what is ingested is a logical initial locus for announcing one’s independence. Refusing the male order in food, women practiced the theory of feminism through their bodies and their choice of vegetarianism.
There can be signs of uneasiness with the idea and fact of eating meat without this being a sign of personal or psychological problems. Gender roles, male dominance, and menstruation, to name just a few issues that arise from women’s experience, are intertwined with our mythology of meat eating without even beginning to take into account the issue of the fate of animals. An alternative way of considering the girl’s refusal of meat is this: they perceived meat as a symbol of male dominance—whose control over their lives would tighten as they reached adulthood—and thus they rejected not male eros but male power. This is not a totally illogical or ahistorical conclusion. There are many instances of the intersection of feminist and vegetarian insights that suggests an underlying, though generally unexpressed, feminist hostility to meat eating which these girls enacted. Consider
Inez Irwin who recalls her childhood to explain the source for her radicalism:
As I look back on those years, the mid-day Sunday dinner seemed in some curious way to symbolize everything that I hated and dreaded about the life of the middle-class woman. That plethoric meal—the huge roast, the blood pouring out of it as the man of the house carved; the many vegetables, all steaming; the heavy pudding. And when the meal was finished—the table a shambles that positively made me shudder—the smooth replete retreat of the men to their cushioned chairs, their Sunday papers, their vacuous nap, while the women removed all vestiges of the horror. Sunday-noon dinners! They set a scar upon my soul. I still shudder when I think of them. . . . Through all this spiritual turmoil there had been developing within me a desire to write. . . . When I look back on my fifty-odd years of life on this planet, I wonder what was the real inception of my desire to stand alone—fighting, ancestry, liberal influences; discussion-ridden youth? Perhaps it was those Sunday dinners!64
Irwin is apparently writing about the time period of the late nineteenth century, when the adolescent girls refused their meat. Irwin’s traditional Sunday dinner features a menu similar to that the adolescent girls would have encountered. Irwin is disconcerted by the following texts of meat: the bleeding, bloody roast; the male carver; the gorged men; women’s role in removing the vestiges of the horror. Irwin’s identification of the horror of Sunday dinners, which left a scar upon her soul, suggests that something is going on in the home which when confronted, thought about, responded to, sets one to shuddering. For a rebel, it may set one to writing; for adolescent girls it may set them to meat avoidance.
It may very well be that women’s dislike for patriarchal culture makes meat unappetizing. What can be found in women’s diaries and women’s letters about food? To interpret the meaning of vegetarianism for women it must be set in the context of the male associations of meat eating and female associations with menstruation. Do women become vegetarian because they are more closely connected with blood? In the opposition between female blood versus animals’ bleeding, we have a female constant versus a process that announces control and violence. In addition, our bodily experience of menstruation may differ, depending on whether meat is included in our diet or not. Barbara Seaman and Dr. Gideon Seaman write: “We suspect that there may be elements in meat which aggravate menstrual cramps as well as menopause complaints. In any case, both conditions are rarer in vegetarian societies, and American women who cut back on meat often report improvement.”65 How do we unravel the coded reactions to the women’s or girls’ experiences if we are not equipped to break the code or honor body-mediated knowledge?
Animals’ bodies carry meanings. These meanings can be perceived even when they have been transformed into meat. Our bodies express meanings through food choices. The killing of animals for food is a feminist issue that feminists have failed to claim because of the charged atmosphere of food choices and the structure of the absent referent. Being in touch with the vegetarian body restores the absent referent and body-mediated knowledge.
CHAPTER 9
FOR A FEMINIST-VEGETARIAN CRITICAL THEORY
Papers omitted in vegetarian novel, use in feminist novel?
—Agnes Ryan, note to herself
As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.
—Alice Walker, “Am I Blue?”
eat rice have faith in women
what I dont know now
I can still learn
—Fran Winant, “Eat Rice Have Faith in Women”
Where does vegetarianism end and feminism begin, or feminism end and vegetarianism begin? None of these epigraphs indicates that the writer is changing subjects. Similarly, major moments in feminist history and major figures in women’s literature conjoined feminism and vegetarianism in ways announcing continuity, not discontinuity.
Developing a feminist-vegetarian theory includes recognizing this continuity. Our meals either embody or negate feminist principles by the food choices they enact. Novelists and individuals inscribe profound feminist statements within a vegetarian context. Just as revulsion to meat eating acts as trope for feelings about male dominance, in women’s novels and lives vegetarianism signals women’s independence. An integral part of autonomous female identity may be vegetarianism; it is a rebellion against dominant culture whether or not it is stated to be a rebellion against male structures. It resists the structure of the absent referent, which renders both women and animals as objects.
Not only is animal defense the theory and vegetarianism the practice, but feminism is the theory and vegetarianism is part of the practice, a point this chapter will more fully develop. Meat eating is an integral part of male dominance; vegetarianism acts as a sign of dis-ease with patriarchal culture. I will describe a model for expressing this dis-ease which has three facets: the revelation of the nothingness of meat, the naming of relationships, and the rebuking of a patriarchal and meat-eating world. Lastly I provide ground rules for a feminist-vegetarian reading of history and literature.
Examining the material reality of a vegetarian life enlightens theory, past and present. What do we make of the fact that many notable feminists who have written since early modern times have either responded to animals’ concerns or become interested in vegetarianism? In the seventeenth century, feminist writer Mary Astell cut back on her meat intake.1 Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish discuss meat eating in their poetry as well as positing the Golden Age as vegetarian. As we learned in chapter 4, Aphra Behn, the eponymous heroine of the literary Aphra magazine, wrote a poem in praise of the writings of Thomas Tryon, whose seventeenth-century books on behalf of vegetarianism she said had influenced her to stop eating meat. Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium [sic] Hall describes an animal sanctuary in which humans are not tyrants over animals, and uses Alexander Pope’s words about Eden to reinforce the fact that the animals were protected from meat eating.2 We know that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley makes her Creature who is at odds with the world a vegetarian in Frankenstein.
We can follow the historic alliance of feminism and vegetarianism in Utopian writings and societies, antivivisection activism, the temperance and suffrage movements, and twentieth century pacifism. Hydropathic institutes of the nineteenth century, which featured vegetarian regimens, were frequented by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and others. At a vegetarian banquet in 1853, the gathered guests lifted their alcohol-free glasses to toast: “Total Abstinence, Women’s Rights, and Vegetarianism.” In 1865, Dr. James Barry died. Dr. Barry was an army surgeon for more than forty four years, a vegetarian, and someone brought up by an ardent follower of Mary Wollstonecraft; it was discovered upon his death that Dr. Barry was a woman. Some who suspected all along that Dr. Barry was a woman referred to the vegetarian diet and fondness for pets as signs of female gender.3 Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, Matilda Joslyn Gage (an editor of The History of Woman Suffrage with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony), and some leaders of the nineteenth-century dress reform movement were vegetarians. Feminist and vegetarian Alice Stockham was the American publisher of British socialist, anti-vivisectionist, and vegetarian Edward Carpenter.
In 1910, Canadian suffragists opened a vegetarian restaurant at their Toronto headquarters. The Vegetarian Magazine of the early twentieth century carried a column called “The Circle of Women’s Enfranchisement.” In the 1914 book, Potpourri Mixed by Two, two women exchange reflections on vegetarian cooking, women’s suffrage, and other common concerns. Notable independent women of the twentieth century such as Louise Nevelson and Lou Andreas-Salome were vegetarians.4 From all these examples arises a compelling revelation: There is a feminist-vegetarian literary and historical tradition. What is needed to espy it and interpret it?
Reconstructing the history of feminism and vegetarianism
Why can’t we be rounded out reformers?
Why do we make one reform topic a hobby and forget all the others? Mercy, Prohibition, Vegetarianism, Woman’s Suffrage and Peace would make Old Earth a paradise, and yet the majority advocate but one, if any, of these.
—Flora T. Neff, Indiana State Superintendent of Mercy, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, to the Vegetarian Magazine, 19075
A feminist-vegetarian critical theory begins, as we have seen, with the perception that women and animals are similarly positioned in a patriarchal world, as objects rather than subjects. Men are instructed as to how they should behave toward women and animals in the Tenth Commandment. Since the fall of Man is attributed to a woman and an animal, the Brotherhood of Man excludes both women and animals. In reviewing Henry Salt’s Animal Rights for Shafts, the British working-class, feminist, and vegetarian newspaper of the 1890s, Edith Ward argues that “the case of the animal is the case of the woman.” She explained that the “similitude of position between women and the lower animals, although vastly different in degree, should insure from the former the most unflinching and powerful support to all movements for the amelioration of the conditions of animal existence. Is this the case?”6 More recently, Brigid Brophy, vegetarian and feminist, observes: “In reality women in the western, industrialized world today are like the animals in a modern zoo. There are no bars. It appears that cages have been abolished. Yet in practice women are still kept in their place just as firmly as the animals are kept in their enclosures.”7 Or consider this declaration found in The History of Woman Suffrage: “Past civilization has not troubled either dumb creatures or women by consulting them in regard to their own affairs.”8 Who Cares for the Animals? the title of a history of 150 years of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, provides an answer on its cover: women. Margaret Mead’s description of her activist mother invokes two of her favorite causes in one paragraph: “Mother’s vehemence was reserved for the causes she supported. . . . As a matter of principle she never wore furs; and feathers, except for ostrich plumes, were forbidden. Long before I had an idea what they were, I learned that aigrettes represented a murder of the innocents. There were types of people, too, for whom she had no use—anti-suffragettes.”9
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (Bloomsbury Revelations) Page 23