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

by Carol J Adams

  The chops were spoiled. They had been frozen. The warmth of the room was thawing them out. I was horrified. It was a long time since I had known that smell. A terrible and devastating flood of thoughts began to pour in on me. Something true in my life was fighting for release. It is amazing what a lifetime can race through the mind in a half minute.28

  Memories, reactions, revulsions, reflections are triggered by the putrid meat: “Had I ever in my life been able to eat meat at all if I allowed myself to think of the living creature which had been deprived of life?”

  She considers meat from the view of a New Woman who has bifurcated the world at large: “I knew that men were not supposed to mind killing. Weren’t men usually the butchers, the soldiers, the hangmen?” She confides to her husband, “I had never been able to swallow a bite of meat or fish in all my life—if I remembered where the stuff came from, how it came! I told him of the violence, the horror, the degradation that flesh-eating involves.” Ryan reports that she had never heard of vegetarians, but, “I thought of all the girls and women who loathed the handling of meat as I had done, and who saw no way out, believing that flesh food was necessary for bodily health and strength.” Then she hears the president of the Millennium Guild, Emarel Freshel, speak out against meat eating and her reaction is given a new context: “Here was a new type of woman: here was a new spiritual force at work in the universe. . . . She clearly stressed the idea that wars will never be overcome until the belief that it is justifiable to take life, to kill—when expedient,—is eradicated from human consciousness.” According to Ryan’s reconstruction of this event, the revelation of meat eating provides a context for considering the gender role expectations in Western culture. Through exposure to a female role model, Freshel, she finds a context for interpreting the nothingness of meat in a warring world. Her revelation was undergirded by connections between feminism, vegetarianism, and pacifism.

  Ryan’s story of this event conflicts with that of her husband’s, Henry Bailey Stevens. Stevens states that he was skeptical of vegetarianism at first; Ryan portrays him as being receptive to the idea. Stevens says that they had purchased fresh meat; Ryan says they were frozen. Ryan describes her meeting with Freshel as coincidental and endows it with providential meaning, “What power it was that brought me as by accident to the meeting of the Millennium Guild the very week of our awakening I do not know.” But Stevens quotes Ryan as saying, “I’ve just learned there’s a woman giving lectures on vegetarianism.”29 Because Ryan syncretizes her most relevant positions against meat into this event, I am not convinced that the sequence and intensity of her reactions are as she reported. However, in her eyes, this moment was of such consequence that reflecting back on it she saw within it the originating point for all the major positions she held for the next forty years. That she placed them at the point in her life when she became a vegetarian confirms the revelatory experience of the nothingness of meat.

  Experiencing the nothingness of meat can amount to a conversion experience, a turning away from meat eating accompanied by active proselytizing. The zealous loyalty to vegetarianism that characterizes many converts concerned feminist-vegetarian Alice Park, as we see in the epigraphs to this section. Vegetarianism, she argued to Ryan and Stevens, has a context, a context of feminism.

  The revelation of the nothingness of meat may be less dramatic or less elaborately reconstructed as that which we have examined in depth. Yet whatever its trigger—and there are endless catalysts, such as association with an animal who was then butchered, a recall of the eyes of an animal, connecting meat with human corpses, seeing a slaughterhouse, reading another’s views—it brings about a detachment from the desire to eat meat.

  Experiencing the nothingness of meat does not automatically result in vegetarianism: it requires a context and an interpretation. Thus, the second step in the vegetarian quest is naming the relationships. These relationships include: the connection between meat on the table and a living animal; between ourselves and the other animals; between our ethics and our diet; and the recognition of the needless violence of meat eating. The interpretation moves from the nothingness of meat to the conviction that killing animals is wrong. It may include the realization of a continuity between war and meat eating within a patriarchal world as Freshel showed Ryan. Revulsion toward human corpses can erupt into refusal of animal corpses, as happened with George Sand. Identifying women’s fate with that of animals appears in the naming stage as well. Women identify their own nothingness with that of the nothingness of animals when they talk of being treated like pieces of meat. As we saw in chapter 7, when Marge Piercy describes an epiphanal moment in the life of Beth in her novel Small Changes, she links the double-edged nothingness. Beth was a “trapped animal eating a dead animal.”30 It would be illuminating to know how many women became vegetarians because of the analogies they perceived between the treatment of animals and the treatment of women under patriarchy.

  One aspect of naming the relationships is reclaiming appropriate words for meat, words which do not rely on euphemisms, distortions, mis-naming. By re-naming words about meat, vegetarians re-define meat and offer a vision of how human beings should see themselves in relationship to animals.

  The vegetarian quest often becomes more intense over time. In 1905 May Wright Sewall wrote: “I grow to be a more and more enthusiastic vegetarian all the time.”31 As one of the participants on the Ford Peace Ship a decade later, her enthusiasm was not limited solely to vegetarianism. Henry Bailey Stevens’s vegetarian conversion prompted a book, which thirty years later named relationships, those of vegetarianism, goddess worship, and pacifism, The Recovery of Culture.32

  Rebuking a meat-eating world is the final stage in the vegetarian quest. By its enaction vegetarianism rebukes a meat-eating society because it proves that an alternative to meat eating exists and that it works. In the Western world, vegetarians in great numbers are living free of heart attacks, hypertension, and cancer. The practice of vegetarianism seems to confirm the claims of a vegetarian body. But many vegetarians do not rest with the proof of the healthfulness of the vegetarian body. They seek to change the meat-eating world. Thus, though Gloria Steinem tells of her vegetarian feminist grandmother who served meat to her family, individual vegetarians often sought to alter meat-eating habits. We learn of vegetarian, pacifist, and feminist Charlotte Despard who did not serve meat meals to the poor. Agnes Ryan planned a “Vegetarian Pocket Monthly,” a small, easy-to-carry manual, which would provide interested people with hints and thoughts on vegetarianism.

  Vegetarianism does more than rebuke a meat-eating society; it rebukes a patriarchal society, since as we have seen meat eating is associated with male power. Colonialist British (male) Beefeaters are not viewed positively if you do not approve of eating beef, male control, or colonialism. Indeed, male dominance hedges no words in exclaiming against vegetarianism because of a suspected anti-male bias. In seeing the nothingness of meat, we strip it of its phallocentric meaning, and deny it any symbolic, patriarchal meaning that requires an absent referent. Stevens’s The Recovery of Culture simultaneously rebuked male dominance and meat eating.

  The results of rebuking a meat-eating patriarchal world should not be minimized simply because of its perceived personal nature. Meat boycotts after World War II and in the 1970s were accomplished by individuals doing something together. In agreeing on what they would not purchase at grocery stores they forced the reduction of animals slaughtered for food. Though they were not motivated by ethical vegetarianism but by an attempt to gain consumer control, the effect they had was the same as if everyone became a vegetarian and individually acted according to that position. Indeed, it is of interest that women were more likely to observe the boycott than their husbands were.

  Acknowledging the existence of the vegetarian quest helps place individual women’s actions within a context that can make sense of their decisions. From this context sensitive readings of novels and women’s lives arise. The model of the
vegetarian quest provides opportunities for interpretation rather than distortion.

  Vegetarian meaning and literary criticism

  May the fairies be vegetarian!

  —Judy Grahn, The Queen of Swords33

  What does contemporary women’s fiction make of meat eating? There are times when the normative objectification of animals as edible bodies is displaced, eroded, disturbed, times when the texts of meat are overcome by feminist texts.

  Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat. Literary critics need to be alert to the ways in which vegetarianism appears in women’s novels. As identified in chapter 5, vegetarianism appears in fiction through allusion to previous vegetarian words; in characters in novels who recall historic vegetarians; through direct quotations from earlier vegetarian texts; and through language that identifies the functioning of the structure of the absent referent. When Barbara Christian tells us that Alice Walker’s novel Meridian echoes the title of “Jean Toomer’s prophetic poem about America, The Blue Meridian,” we may be led to ask, is the vegetarianism of Meridian’s best friend in the novel an echo of Jean Toomer’s vegetarianism?34

  We can find in women’s writings descriptions of the vegetarian quest, meat as trope of women’s oppression, and the figuring of women’s autonomy through their adoption of vegetarianism. The implications of the inconsistencies of Pamela Smith in Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter may be explained by the connection between autonomous female activity and vegetarianism. Pamela is a vegetarian who eats chicken, a lesbian who sleeps with men. Does the former activity figure the loss of autonomy accomplished by the latter?35

  In feminist writings, vegetarian issues can be found at the intersection of politics and spirituality; in fiction, this intersection is expressed through the politics of mythmaking. Many examples of women’s fiction which figure vegetarian issues do so in the context of new mythmaking. In the process of creating ourselves anew within a meaningful cosmology that reflects feminist values, vegetarianism appears. Thus, we see that those who control the stories, control memory and the future. This is an aspect of Aileen La Tourette’s Cry Wolf.36 In the stories her narrator tells, feminist political consciousness incorporates animals and connections with the nonhuman world. Relationship with animals is embedded within a larger radical vision that examines women and the feminine look, God the Father, and anti-nuclear activity.

  Feminist mythmaking that includes vegetarianism can be found as well in Judy Grahn’s The Queen of Swords, which features vegetarian fairies who reclaim the “beaten flesh” of Inanna, who had been beaten into a piece of meat. When writers call attention to story telling they indicate that mythmaking is a shared process in which the reader engages too. They offer a process of liberation for the readers from the grip of authoritarian authors as well as from the texts of meat.

  Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit reveals the necessity of mythmaking in expressing the painful Bildungsroman of a young woman whose call to be an Evangelical preacher is cut short by the discovery of her lesbianism. The spiritual and psychic turmoil that erupts as she is banished from her home and her church is traced through a mythology of the power of a wizard. A wanderer who is vegetarian must disentangle herself from the hold the wizard has upon her. The wizard’s power is demonstrated by his familiarity with one of her favorite meals: aduki bean stew. The autonomy that is declared by her vegetarianism is threatened by the wizard’s claim to vegetarianism as well. In the parallel stories of her banishment from the church and the myth that tells of the control of the wizard, the hero must decide between allegiance, tradition, and meaning on the one hand, and maintaining the integrity of her own being on the other.37

  Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Birds of the Air features the role of mythmaking in providing meaning to loss and resurrection. Mary is a woman mourning the death of her son Robin. She is at her mother’s home for Christmas. She imagines the story of an ancient feast that featured the reanimation of dead birds. The centerpiece for the ancient feast was a swan; within the swan “were concealed other birds, each containing one smaller. And at the very centre of all, where once had been the swan’s liver, was a wren’s egg, boiled.” Just as the master of the feast raised his knife to begin carving, the feast is interrupted by the appearance of a bedraggled stranger. One person assumes he is a holy person who lives “on nuts and berries and the roots that only such people know of.” She asks him to tell a story but he decides to show them a story instead. The wren’s egg rolls out of the swan, cracks open, and from it staggers a wren chick. The swan heaves and out came “a scorched, plucked, mutilated, part-melted coot.” The sauce is restored to the cows from whom it had been taken, they “lowed with astonishment as their udders filled instantly with warm milk faintly onion-flavoured.” All foods were restored to their natural state: almonds to almond trees; onions entombed in the earth; currants returned to grapes; honey back to the comb; flour to wheat. Birds wandered forth from the belly of the swan: a pigeon, a hen, a duck, a heron, a widgeon, a bustard, a crane. Finally, the swan discards the trappings of quince, gingerbread, and thyme and rises to the rafters. Mary is called back from her “day-dreaming,” as her mother refers to it, by the smell of burnt flesh. “ ‘Something’s caught,’ she said, wishing the turkey could unlatch the oven door, free itself [sic] like four-and-twenty blackbirds, rise like the phoenix and go and gobble in the garden, leaving the flesh-eaters to drink snow and eat chrysanthemums.” But she cannot because the birds of the air are all dead: the Christmas turkey, the swan, the son, Robin.38

  In this mythmaking, the function of the absent referent is clarified through the idea of reanimated birds; birds who escape the fate of being meat. A bird’s body is less transformed by meat eating than that of cows or pigs or lambs. As one Pythagorean commented in 1825:

  in a bird . . . you have the perfect frame before you that once contained a breathing life,—the wings with which it [sic] used to fly, the legs for hopping or perching on a tree, and the parts for eating and singing with—the head and the bill. Therefore, in eating a bird, you have the image before you of a once-living creature, and know that you are destroying it, with its functions.39

  The resemblance between the live and dead bird challenges the structure of the absent referent because the living bird’s body continues to be a referent even in death. It is not absent until consumed. As a result, one aspect of contemporary women’s fiction is the image of the dead bird.

  If the vegetarian quest identifies the nothingness of meat, in feminist novels the image of dead birds reveals the some-oneness of living beings. Signs of revelation of the connectedness of life, especially the role of birds in triggering the recognition, can be found in the writings of many women. Recall the numerous instances in which the issue of consumption or killing of birds has recurred in this book: the literal chickenmeat in the movie The Birds; the two-year-old who asks her philosopher father why they are eating a turkey, who surely wanted to live; the uneaten pheasant, dead of a heart attack; the confrontation at the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1907 over aigretted hats and eating chicken; the hundreds of birds killed in The Shooting Party. With these examples in mind, let us consider first a few historic writings that establish some of the issues that appear when we confront the image of dead birds. The presence of birds, especially chickens, clarifies the functioning of the absent referent in erasing animals’ lives.

  Mary Church Terrell, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, suffragist, and author of A Colored Woman in a White World, had to abandon an attempt to raise chickens because she could not contemplate the idea of eating them. She sold them instead, and recalled that day: “While I was catching them and tying their feet I was weeping inwardly. They are my feathered children. I raised them.”40 Beth Brant recalls her grandfather, who upon deciding to raise chickens for eggs and poultry gave them Mohawk names such
as Atyo, which means brother-in-law. “But when it came time to kill the first hen, Grandpa couldn’t do it. Said it was killing one of the family. And didn’t Atyo look at him with those eyes, just like brother-in-law, and beg not to have its [sic] head chopped off?”41

  Because of her closeness to peacocks, Flannery O’Connor encountered the meaning of the absent referent in dreams about them. “Lately I have had a recurrent dream,” she wrote. “I am five years old and a peacock. A photographer has been sent from New York and a long table is laid in celebration. The meal is to be an exceptional one: myself. I scream ‘Help! Help!’ and awaken.”42

  Colette introduces us to the image of the dead bird, the dead, consumable—but will it be consumed?—bird:

  Vial looked at them and so did I. Good indeed! A little rosy blood remained in the broken joints of the plucked and mutilated chickens, and you could see the shape of the wings, and the young scales covering the little legs that had only this morning enjoyed running and scratching. Why not cook a child, too? My tirade petered out and Vial said not a word. I sighed as I beat my sharp, unctuous sauce, but soon the aroma of the delicate flesh, dripping on the charcoal, would give me a yawning hunger. I think I may soon give up eating the flesh of animals; but not to-day.43

  In Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, the narrator recognizes the similarity between a turkey and a baby. She looks at “the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird.”44 She restores the absent referent. In Atwood’s Surfacing a dead heron represents purposeless killing and prompts thoughts about other senseless deaths. A dead bird figures in Alice Ellis’s more recent work, Unexplained Laughter. Within a story in which the problem of muteness is acutely represented—we are introduced to characters who cannot speak, will not speak, and cannot avoid speaking—the question of what to do with a road-killed pheasant arises. Lydia has invited a vegetarian, Betty, on holiday with her to her Welsh cottage. Betty’s vegetarianism, motivated by concerns about health and cruelty, yet continuously compromised by steak-and-kidney pies or sausages, carries less figurative importance than the role of the dead pheasant in focusing issues of flesh eating. The evening of a funeral, a friend arrives with the dead pheasant. Lydia decides to hang her in the kitchen for a week to allow for seasoning. Betty proposes burying her, “and Lydia did see what she meant, for human death was attended with such ritual and dispatch that for an instant it seemed cruelly perverse to deny something similar to this helpless creature.”45 But Lydia quickly changes her mind and proposes burying the bones after the bird has been consumed.