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

by Carol J Adams

  7.James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 19.

  8.Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 296.

  9.Turner, p. 17.

  10.Cited in Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (New York: Macmillan, 1950; Octagon Books, 1973), p. 378.

  11.Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (London: Phillips, 1802), p. 89. Percy Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 6, Prose, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), p. 11, (hereinafter called Vindication).

  12.John Oswald stated the viewpoint this way: “When he considers the natural bias of the human heart to the side of mercy, and observes on all hands the barbarous governments of Europe giving way to a better system of things, he is inclined to hope that the day is beginning to approach when the growing sentiment of peace and good-will towards men will also embrace, in a wide circle of benevolence, the lower orders of life” (p. 11).

  13.His most recent biographer calls him a “British military intellectual,” commenting “the most sensational-biographical oddity being his combining a military career with a Pythagorean diet.” David Erdman, Commerce des lumières, p. 3.

  14.Vindication, p. 13.

  15.As Keith Thomas notes: “Vegetarianism was also encouraged by Christian teaching, for all theologians agreed that man had not originally been carnivorous.” Man and the Natural World, p. 289.

  16.Thomas, p. 289, in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford, 1968), i. 558.

  17.See Ritson, p. 55. Alexander Pope, Epistle III, “An Essay on Man,” 11. 152–54, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), pp. 142–43.

  18.Paradise Lost, Book 5, 11. 303–4, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1957), p. 309.

  19.Newton, p. 5.

  20.See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 230, 234–46.

  21.Quoted in Shelley, Vindication, p. 6 and cited as “Plin., Nat. Hist. lib. vii. sect. 57.”

  22.Vindication, p. 6.

  23.Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Sir Samuel Garth, trans. John Dryden (London, 1720), Book 1, p. 8.

  24.Madeleine A. Simons, “Rousseau’s Natural Diet,” Romantic Review 45 (1 Feb. 1954), pp. 18–28.

  25.From the Confessions, 1, 72, quoted in Simons, p. 25. Mary Shelley reread the Confessions while transcribing Frankenstein in October 1817.

  26.Shelley, p. 101.

  27.Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), Part 2, 373, pp. 60–61.

  28.William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785, New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1978), p. 599.

  29.Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating, ed. Howard Williams (London, 1883), p. 241. This observation first appeared in the Medical Journal for July 27, 1811.

  30.Vindication, p. 13.

  31.Williams, p. 243.

  32.Denise Riley, “Waiting,” in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties, ed. Liz Heron (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 239.

  33.David Ketterer, Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, the Monster and Human Reality (University of Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1979), p. 15.

  34.Shelley, p. 119.

  35.Marc A. Rubenstein, “ ‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 15 (Spring, 1976), p. 169.

  36.Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. (1792; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), p. 32.

  37.Shelley, p. 227 (Introduction to Third Edition).

  38.Marcia Tillotson, “ ‘A Forced Solitude’: Mary Shelley and the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster,” in The Female Gothic, ed. by Juliann E. Fleenor, (Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1983), p. 168.

  39.Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, “Theories of Feminist Criticism: A Dialogue,” in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), p. 68.

  40.These have been described as strategies of negative politeness in Penelope Brown, “How and Why Are Women More Polite? Some Evidence from a Mayan Community,” in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), p. 116.

  Chapter 7

  Epigraph: “Civilization? Culture?” notes for Vegetarian Pocket Monthly. Box 2, file no. 33, “Vegetarian Writings, circa 1952–3.” All correspondence and unpublished manuscripts by Agnes Ryan cited in this chapter are in the Agnes Ryan Collection of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. Permission to publish material provided by The Schlesinger Library and the late Henry Bailey Stevens.

  1.Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 142.

  2.Edward Carpenter and George Barnefield, The Psychology of the Poet Shelley (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1925), p. 19.

  3.C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 202.

  4.Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911, London, Virago, 1978), p. 176.

  5.Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1938, 1968), pp. 13–14.

  6.Agnes Ryan, “The Heart to Sing,” unpublished autobiography, pp. 314–15.

  7.Kohlberg is so struck by this that he cites this interchange in three of his lectures in Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, Volume I: The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 14, 46, 143. James Sully’s Studies of Childhood details a similar transition. He describes a four-year-old who objected to his parents eating animals, to the killing of seals, and the hunting of stags. He wants the police to stop such activities and is informed that “They can’t do that because people are allowed to kill them.”

  C. (loudly and passionately). “Allowed, allowed? People are not allowed to take other people and kill them.”

  M. “People think there is a difference between killing men and killing animals.”

  Sully refers to this time period as a time when the boy was wrestling “with the dreadful ‘must,’ which turns men into killers,” and refers to the fact that at this time the boy has also learned to accept as positive the existence of soldiers. (James Sully, Studies of Childhood [New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1914], p. 475.)

  Matthew Lipman’s Lisa, a book to aid children in focused discussions of philosophical and ethical issues, begins at episode 1 with the question, “Can We Both Love Animals and Eat Them?” A debate about hunting is described. One side argues that killing people evolves from hunting; the other that killing people is different from killing animals. Lisa remarks, “Once we get in the habit of killing animals, we may find it hard to stop when it comes to people.” (Matthew Lipman, Lisa [Upper Montclair, New Jersey: Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, 1983], pp. 1, 2.)

  8.Walter de la Mare, “Dry August Burned,” The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 365.

  9.Mary Alden Hopkins, “Why I Earn My Own Living,” in These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Originally published 1926–1927 in The Nation), ed. Elaine Showalter (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1978), p. 44.

  10.Reported in Andro Linklater, An Unhu
sbanded Life: Charlotte Despard, Suffragette, Socialist and Sinn Feiner (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 179.

  11.The four were Alice Park, Lucinda Chandler, May Wright Sewall, and Mary Alden Hopkins.

  12.Eugene Christian, Meatless and Wheatless Menus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), pp. 6–7.

  13.Quincy Wright, A Study of War, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 134.

  14.Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work vol. 1 (London: Redway, 1896), p. 28.

  15.Percy Shelley, On the Vegetable System of Diet, in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 6, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), p. 343.

  16.Quoted in Max Davis, The Case for the Vegetarian Conscientious Objector with a foreword by Scott Nearing (Brooklyn, NY: Tolstoy Peace Group, 1944), p. 13.

  17.Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties: A General Survey and some Personal Memories (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945; reprinted by Folcroft Library Editions, 1975), p. 140.

  18.L. F. Easterbrook, “Alcohol and Meat,” Nineteenth Century and After 95 (February 1924), p. 306. One recent vegetarian, a true inheritor of this position, traced his abandonment of meat eating to viewing “posters that showed the devastation of people and property in Vietnam.” In response he asked himself, “What am I doing eating meat? I’m just adding to the violence.” The New York Times, interview with Frederick P. Salvucci, March 21, 1975, p. 33. Dick Gregory writes of the connection between vegetarianism and the nonviolent civil rights movement:

  Under the leadership of Dr. King I became totally committed to nonviolence, and I was convinced that nonviolence meant opposition to killing in any form. I felt the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” applied to human beings not only in their dealings with each other—war, lynching, assassination, murder and the like—but in their practice of killing animals for food or sport. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and brutal taking of life.

  Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature ed. James R. McGraw (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 15–16.

  19.Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 15.

  20.The more extensive appeal to English women to become vegetarians during World War II is detailed in Raynes Minns, Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front 1939–45 (London: Virago, 1980).

  21.Mikkel Hindhede, “The Effect of Food Restriction During War on Mortality in Copenhagen.” Journal of the American Medical Society, 74 No. 6 (February 7, 1920), p. 381. Similar studies after World War II confirmed a relationship between a drop in mortality and the rationing of food. Axel Strøm M.D. and R. Adelsten Jensen, M.D. “Mortality from Circulatory Diseases in Norway 1940–1945,” The Lancet 260 (Jan. 2, 1951), pp. 126–29.

  22.Mervyn G. Hardinge and Hulda Crooks, “Non-Flesh dietaries. 1. Historical Background,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 43 (December 1963), p. 548.

  23.Quoted by Rynn Berry, Jr., The Vegetarians (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1979), p. 44.

  24.Henry Salt, Seventy Yars Among the Savages, quoted in George Hendrick, with the special assistance of John F. Pontin, Henry Salt: Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters (Urbana, Chicago, London: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 84.

  25.Agnes Ryan, “For the Church Door,” March 1943, Box 2.

  26.Amanda Cross, The James Joyce Murders (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967), p. 89.

  27.See Paul Fussell’s discussion of these works, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 91.

  28.Henry Salt, “Sport as a Training for War,” in Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers, ed. Henry Salt (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd. for the Humanitarian League, 1914).

  29.In Graves’s Good-bye to All That (Jonathan Cape: 1929, Harmondsmith, UK: Penguin Books, 1957) the first paragraph of the first chapter ends: “or Mr Eustace Miles the English real-tennis champion and vegetarian with his samples of exotic nuts, I knew all about them in my way” (p. 9). See also Fussell, The Great War, pp. 203–20.

  30.In his introduction to The Home, William O’Neill maintains that Gilman “published very little after the war,” and attributes this to the fact that “World War I, and the changes that accompanied it, destroyed the moral foundation of her career” (William O’Neill, Introduction to The Home by Charlotte Perkins Gilman [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972], p. x.) In contrast, I would argue that the war confirmed her claim of the need to involve women and women’s values in decision making, and that Herland and His Religion and Hers suggest in opposite ways, first positively and then negatively, the conclusion that violence was a result of male dominance. His Relgion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924).

  31.Isabel Colegate, The Shooting Party (New York: The Viking Press, 1980, New York: Avon Books, 1982), p. 131. Other quotations cited in this chapter are found on pp. 20, 102, 188.

  32.See for instance Susan Schweik, “A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Writers and the Second World War” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1984) which examines the phenomenon that, especially during wartime, women are to be the receivers of information, objects who read, not objectors who write; repositories of meaning, not originators of meaning.

  33.I am indebted here to DuPlessis’s analysis, in Writing beyond the Ending, of women writers’ strategy for challenging traditional romance. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

  34.Marge Piercy, Small Changes (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1972, Greenwich, Conn: A Fawcett Crest Book, 1973), p. 41. The succeeding quotations in this paragraph are found on pp. 42, 48.

  35.These metaphors are mine and not Piercy’s. I use them to suggest that from her epiphanal moment in her kitchen, Beth evolves a systematic, ongoing rejection of a male, meat-eating culture that can be best represented by using metaphors from the anti-war movement.

  36.Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (Boston: Little Brown and Co., New York: Warner Books, 1969), p. 25. Further quotations in this chapter are found on pp. 155, 183, 279.

  37.Atwood reports that the idea for this scene came as she was looking “at a confectioner’s display window full of marzipan pigs. It may have been a Woolworth’s window full of Mickey Mouse cakes, but in any case I’d been speculating for some time about symbolic cannibalism.” This scene, both as she experienced it as an individual and inscribed it as a novelist, exemplifies the structure of the absent referent. She saw a Marzipan pig or Mouse cakes; she imagines an edible woman cake. This association demonstrates the interchangeability of the categories of animal and woman. In addition, the relationship between symbol (cake animal or cake woman) and reality (consumed animal or consumed woman) suggests the alliance between what is really consumed and what is figured as being consumed. See Margaret Atwood, “An Introduction to The Edible Woman,” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), p. 369.

  38.Letter to Freshel, October 14, 1936, Box 6, file no. 81.

  39.Letter, March 23, 1937, Box 4, file no. 82.

  40.“Who Can Fear Too Many Stars?”, Box 3, file no. 35, p. 131.

  41.Berry interview with Brophy in Berry, p. 88.

  42.Henry Bailey Stevens, The Recovery of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1949), p. 105.

  43.Brigid Brophy, “An Anecdote of the Golden Age [Homage to Back to Methuselah],” in The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968), p. 35.

  44.See for instance, “The Rights of Animals” and “Women” in Brophy, Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), pp. 15–21, 38–44; Hackenfeller’s Ape (London: Allison and Busby,
1953, 1979); and “In Pursuit of Fantasy,” in Animals, Men, and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans, ed. Stanley Godlovitch, Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris (London: Gollancz, and New York: Taplinger, 1972).

  45.June Rachuy Brindel, Ariadne: A Novel of Ancient Crete (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 76.

  46.June Rachuy Brindel, Phaedra: A Novel of Ancient Athens (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).

  47.It could be argued that Shelley’s Queen Mab is the first feminist, vegetarian, pacifist Utopia.

  48.Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), p. 27. First serialized in the Forerunner 6 (1915).

  49.As I summarize this position in chapter 6, 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.” Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 2. 373, p. 61. See also Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet: Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971, 1982), pp. 67–74.