There are vast readings and writings
investigating the use of the animal symbol, how such an embracing symbol can be
used to signify anything. Evidently the extensive topic proves that the animal
symbol can be used to argue any of the author’s individualistic ideas. Within
custom, this essay will compare three texts that raise approaches to a meat-free
diet, and the reasoning behind it. The periodic shift between the three texts
may also allude to changing perspectives toward the topic due to cultural
phenomena as explained in critical writings. Jonathan Swift’s text Gulliver’s Travels (1726) highlights
issues within the English culture throughout different lands, and within book
four, interrogates the animal perspective. The exploration of animal ownership
through Gulliver’s journey is similar to Prendrick’s in H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896),
where animals of rational behaviour abstain from flesh, controlled by a
humanist’s desire for evolution. An evolution J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) would argue is
caused from a lacking in our ‘humanities’. This investigation of the animal
symbol will in addition, implore how the fictional space that literature
creates is a platform to critique the morality of our actions.
The personal development undergone by Gulliver within book four is astronomical
as he revaluates human mastery. The first voyage to Lilliput places Gulliver as
a giant to preside over the minute Lilliputians as he pleases. Utilised as a
monster of destruction against the King’s enemies, Gulliver is suspended within
a balance of power, as his body affirms physical dominance, though he desires
the royalty’s approval, acting as their aid. The application of obedience
within the Lilliput visit persists until Gulliver’s final return from Houyhnhnmland.
When he reunited with his family, finding them “intolerable, much less could I
suffer to eat in the same Room”.[1] This change of control also draws to point
the breaking of conventional norms, which is reinforced through eating habits.
Gulliver’s behavioural change around
different company is an important reflection of how the consumption of animals
is challenged by the end of the novel. Upon arrival to Lilliput, Gulliver is
surprised at his inability to continue with pleasantries without food, where he
presses his finger to his mouth repeatedly. The King replies by commanding
“Baskets full of Meats” to be thrown into Gulliver’s mouth,[2]
there being a loss of control over consumption through the barrier of language.
The animal is also minimised and depersonalised as only a means of sustenance,
“I observed there was the Flesh of several Animals, but could not distinguish
them by the Taste. There were Shoulders, Legs and Loins shaped like those of
Mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller then the Wings of a Lark”.[3]
No real differentiation of description between animals can be given other then,
“I eat them by two or three at a mouthful”,[4]
which is an embellished illustration of the problems with vast consumption of
meat and “the horrors I here omit” that surround farming industries.[5]
The lavished quantity of animals consumed by Gulliver here may be contrasted to
his descriptions of life and eating within the Land of the Houyhnhnms.
Refocusing Gulliver’s experience
within the fourth book away from an allegorical reading and onto an exploration
of symbolic animals. The symbolic animals within Houyhnhnmland highlight an
inversion of horses and humans within their roles of society. Gulliver’s first encounters
with ‘brute’ yahoos, creatures that contain the same form of humans, though
possess little capacity of rationality, contrasted with his meeting of the horse
people of Houyhnhnm, “the Behaviour of these Animals was so orderly and
rational so acute and judicious,”[6]
The inversion of mastery is highlighted by Kelly as the “differences between
the dominant,” where the ‘rational race’ maintain the ‘lesser creatures’ as
serving companions,[7] placing
the animal symbol within a human role, and lowering the human to creature. Placing
Gulliver within a context that challenges all traditional values of western
society causes the protagonist to contrast England and Houyhnhnmland, and
drawing the conclusion that the second is the better, even if he occupies a
serving role under a master.
The permanency that Houyhnhnmland has pressed upon Gulliver is again
highlighted through his return home, when adding how his family know “to this
hour they dare not presume to touch my Bread, or drink out of the same Cup,”[8]
physically trying to distance himself from his yahoo family while recreating
his Houyhnhnmland diet of mostly bread and milk. Gulliver discloses very early
in this voyage with detail the Houyhnhnm’s diet, consisting of hay and oats,
“neither of these were Food for me”,[9]
leading him to producing bread, and drinking milk for sustenance, under the
horse influence. The cultural connection that is established by food is present
in Lilliput and again in Houyhnhnmland, where Gulliver “desires to return to
‘my own Species’”,[10]
which is overcome when he manages to identify what he can eat.
The rationality of horses that act as a Lord over the land, are always
juxtaposed by the image of the serving yahoos. The contrast in their diets is
reflected within their manner, as the Houyhnhnms do not eat meat, they find it
irrational, where as the yahoo “greedily devour” the ‘offensive’ flesh of other
animals.[11] The
differences between the Houyhnhnm’s diet and those of the yahoo, are reflected
within their manner, where the horse doesn’t eat more then necessary, the yahoo
greedily fights to eat in excess. This association between manner and diet is
further theorised as Kelly outlines how “Houyhnhnmland displays the idealised
pastoral features of Eden and the Golden Age” and that “as in Eden,
vegetarianism prevailed in the Golden Age” as where “meat-eating did not
commence until after the Fall”.[12]
This contrast of paradise and the fall continue through Gulliver’s description
of the horses to be a perfectly designed shape, against the inherent unsightly
aspects of the yahoo. The relationship between the state of paradise of
Houyhnhnmland and Gulliver’s overwhelming desire to remain within the horse community
reinforces the rationality as well as justifies the rationality behind a
vegetarian ideal.
Gulliver uses yahoo skin as leather in
an attempt to distance himself from the race of ‘brutes’, which is an act that
may be associated with the introduction of The
Island of Doctor Moreau, as Prendrick floats in a dinghy with two other
men, and the idea of cannibalism is raised. As the protagonists within both
texts are faced with a decision to desecrate humans, knowing Gulliver chose to
use skin, Prendrick’s opportunity is drawn short when the opportunity is thrown
overboard along with his two shipmates. The novel establishes animal instincts as
a survival attempt, opposing the cultured ideas of civility. The questioning of
cultural ideas is a strong theme reflected within Moreau as the cultural debate surrounding the early 19th
century regarded Darwin’s theory of degeneration as a threat of a regression
into savagery. As Lee outlines, that the “commonality between cannibalism and
meat-eating” is a result from the degenerate theories, and that Wells’ novel
establishes this interchangeable relationship immediately through the cannibal
struggle.[13]
Saved from the dingy, Prendick ends
up cast upon Doctor Moreau’s Island, where experimental creatures roam. As
Prendick comes to meet and understand how the demi-humans were created, he also
learns how Moreau is maintaining order, by reproducing techniques of the
church. The Sayer of the Law repeats as if a prayer to a chanting audience:
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the
Law. Are we not Men?”[14]
To abstain from the consumption of the animal symbol is here symbolised as a
way of accessing humanistic behaviour; “Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”[15]
Similarly to Gulliver, linking the rational beings with the vegetarian diet. As
well as linking religiously to the description of Houyhnhnmland replicating a
Golden Age, Wells can be seen doing a similar thing, as the human-esque animals
do not partake in meat-eating while imitating a community setting, “the lion
shall eat straw like the ox.”[16]
This paradise is contrasted to Moreau’s compulsion to tame nature which is
argued as an exaggeration of the problems with Western science as ‘madness’,[17]
which Prendrick’s questioning monologues stand against; “I asked him why he had
taken the human form as a model”,[18]
when learning about the vivisections mutilating animals. The community is
limited to an imitation, as Moreau has given the creatures a capacity to behave
as humans through vivisection, still lacking the agency to live independently.
The failure within the novel is
performed by the obsessive instinct of the mutilated animals to kill, consume
and return to their natural animal manner. As expeditions on the island uncover
rabbits to be the original victims of the creatures’ regression, it may be highlighted
that the figurative rabbit recognised for its uncontrollable reproduction, is
here embodied as the inability to maintain control over the lives of the
beast-people. Control being the primary reason Moreau encourages a vegetarian
diet within the Island, as it requires a self-governing discipline, while
deterring any blood-thirsts.
Having the novel begin with a cannibalistic pressure upon the narrator,
as he travels toward a savage island, where the inhabitants are constantly
slipping into an animalistic urge, maintains the prominence of consumption. As
Lee highlights the degeneration theory circulating contextually, forced society
to revaluate how to define itself from the animal kingdom through custom, as
evolutionist thinking questioned the separation between animal and human, so
too the consumption of meat was challenged.[19]
This reflection upon custom is similar to that of Gulliver, by examining how
eating fish or flesh can be easily linked to ideas of society’ devolution,
while situating vegetarianism upon the evolutionary chain.
Unlike the two previous texts examined for their animalistic qualities, Elizabeth Costello approaches the issues
surrounding the consumption of animals from a human view. The novel compiles a
selection of lectures, and conversations with people regarding the various
sensitive issues. The chapters three and four largely circulate around ‘The
lives of Animals’; as chapter three regards the philosophers and the fourth
reviewing poets’ relationships to the topic. Costello voices problems with
animal farming industries, and the inhumane number of killings. Inhumane as she
mentions how it is only in “abstract we may be able to count to a million,”[20]
with equal difficulty conceiving of others’ deaths, so inhumane here represents
in unjust acts as well as humans' inability to conceive certain large ideas. To
heighten the impact of her argument, Costello compares the cattle slaughter to
the holocaust, reducing the people living in the countryside at the time to
immoral people for ignoring the horrors ‘for one’s own sake’.[21]
Philosophically the point that Costello is making about animals, is that
reason is not enough, setting a distinction between herself and St Thomas’
argument that “animals, lacking reason, cannot understand the universe but have
simply to follow its rules blindly, proves that, unlike man, they are part of
it but not part of its being.”[22]
Followed by a correction of Costello’s ‘dilemma’ that “reason and seven decades
of life experience” explain how reason cannot be anything other then a
‘suspicious’ “being of a certain spectrum of human thinking”.[23]
In true character representation Coetzee has his narrator admit and understand
all lengths to her own hipocracy, as she is “wearing leather shoes” and
“carrying a leather purse”, while discouraging an “overmuch respect” for
herself.[24]
Surrounding Coetzee’s work is an undistinguishing question to how the
author’s slips between the creator and the character of the novel. Utilising
Vint’s argument on the Island that
Prendick is first driven from the house by the cries of a female puma, that the
importance of the female symbol being physically within the animal, which
inspires Prendick’s “link to female sentimentality.”[25]
Sentimentality being understood as an aspect of femininity, it may be deduced
that the significance of Elizabeth Costello being a female, means she has a
greater capacity for sympathy. And as Doniger highlights “the assumption that
any animal that one ate had to have been killed by someone led to natural association between the ideal vegetarianism
and the ideal of nonviolence toward living creatures”.[26]
Costello is given a greater agency but also a greater conviction on matters of
the heart, the heart being, possibly a leather purse, where animals are kept.
Her sympathies with animals are laid from the first chapter, “I feel like
Red Peter” a challenging statement that acknowledges the limits of literature
to imitate the thought of an animal. Refocusing the argument of animal
liberations away from reason, toward sympathy. The use of simile within her
statement is an example of how “Costello tries passionately to convince her
audience of her commitments, Coetzee recurrently dramatizes her lack of
success” as isolation and passive aggressive arguments.[27]
As the narrator unfolds her arguments on stage, it may be suggested that the
failure to persuade her audience into Vegetarianism is a reflection for her
rejection of reason. As she comments how “I am not a philosopher of the mind
but an animal exhibiting” a wound which is covered up, “but touch on in every
word.”[28]
Concluding how Costello discourages the eating of animals but encourages
through her own lectures, the reading, and consumption of animals created
within the symbolic realm.
The three texts examine different approaches to how the partaking of
animals affects their consumers. Gulliver’s
Travels opens the digestive divide to then occupy the space, surrounded by
a higher rational being of the horses with only truth and gentility for
attributes, which is juxtaposed with the yahoos’ lowly being. Doctor Moreau carries on with the
similar themes of rationality in association to vegetarianism, but uses a more
aggressive result in animal nature when eating flesh. While Elizabeth Costello upholds the animalist
liberations, argues for vegetarianism reforms to take place upon sympathetic
compulsion. Despite the innumerable health benefits and inventive food options
- that will be omitted from this essay - these three texts provide a large
spectrum of reasons behind a vegetarian diet, and at the very least provide a
platform that allows for a large enough consumption of animals through literature.
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[7] Ann Kelly, “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Owner:
Conversations with Animals in Book 4,” ELH
(The Johns Hopkins University Press) 74, no. 2 (2007): P323.
[10] Michael Franklin, “Lemuel Self-Translated; Or, Being
an Ass in Houyhnhnmland,” The Modern
Language Review (Modern Humanities Research Association) 100, no. 1 (Jan
2005): 1-19.
[12] Ann Kelly, “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Owner:
Conversations with Animals in Book 4,” ELH
(The Johns Hopkins University Press) 74, no. 2 (2007): P332.
[13] Michael Lee, “Reading Meat in H.G. Wells,” Studies in the Novel (University of
North Texas) 42, no. 3 (2010): P260.
[16] Ann Kelly, “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Owner:
Conversations with Animals in Book 4,” ELH
(The Johns Hopkins University Press) 74, no. 2 (2007): 323-349.
[17] Sherryl Vint, “Animals and Animality from the Island
of Moreau to the Uplift Universe,” The
Yearbook of English Studies (Modern Humanities Research Association) 37,
no. 2 (2007): P86.
[19] Michael Lee, “Reading Meat in H.G. Wells,” Studies in the Novel (University of
North Texas) 42, no. 3 (2010): P250.
[25] Sherryl Vint, “Animals and Animality from the Island
of Moreau to the Uplift Universe,” The
Yearbook of English Studies (Modern Humanities Research Association) 37,
no. 2 (2007): P90.
[26] Wendy Doniger, “Reflections: Compassion toward Animals
and Vegetarianism,” in The Lives of
Animals, 93-106 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999). P97.
[27] Elizabeth Anker, “Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment, and
the Limits of Rights,” New Literary
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