Representing the Modern Animal in Culture

Ziba Rashidian, J. Dubino, A. Smyth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137428646
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428653
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

Examining a wide range of works, from Gulliver's Travels to The Hunger Games, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture employs key theoretical apparatuses of Animal Studies to literary texts. Contributors address the multifarious modes of animal representation and the range of human-animal interactions that have emerged in the past 300 years.

PART I

Identity: Lives with Domestic Animals in the Modern Era

CHAPTER 1

The Noble Brute: Contradictions in Equine Ideology, East and West

Donna Landry

Instead of being obliged to drag through the dirt after the most sluggish, obstinate, and despised amongst our animals, I was mounted on the noblest that the earth contains, had him under my care, and was borne by him over hill and dale, far outstripping the wings of the wind.

Thomas Holcroft, Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft

There is no Creature so gentle as a Turkish Horse; nor more respectful to his Master, or the Groom that dresses him. The reason is, because they treat their Horses with great Lenity. . . . This makes their Horses great Lovers of Mankind; and they are so far from kicking, wincing, or growing untractable by this gentle usage, that you shall hardly find a masterless Horse among them.

Ogier de Busbecq, Travels into Turkey

Although they might at first seem entirely incompatible, nobility and brutality were the defining characteristics of “his lordship’s Arabian,” a phrase heard often in early modern England. No other animal except the human laborer suffered from such a contradictory identity. Breeding for improvement from Eastern bloodstock, in the light of Eastern ideas about horsemanship and relations with animals, helped produce an imperial discourse in which humans and horses became increasingly interchangeable. One of the richest results of this discursive convergence is Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735). In light of the transformations accompanying the arrival of Eastern horses, Jonathan Swift’s satire stands revealed as even more brilliantly and presciently critical than it has previously been thought to be. Its targets are imperialism, colonialism, mercantile capitalism, the agricultural revolution—as manifested in intensified extraction from land, beast, and human laborer—and instrumental reason more generally.¹ Without explicitly saying so, Swift appears to be participating in the comparison of imperial styles of rule that arose in discussions of horsekeeping in this period, and in which European brutality was contrasted with Ottoman leniency.

The production of the Thoroughbred from Eastern stock in a mongrel mix of formerly separate Oriental strains parallels and prefigures the breeding of slaves and the proletarianization of servants and colonial subjects within the British Empire. The human laborer, whether an African slave or a white British or Irish servant, was scrutinized and disciplined according to a racialized and genetically conditioned grid of valuation and judgment. Ironically, what counted as miscegenation among humans and was deplored could be celebrated within equine cultivation as producing perfection through an eclectic mixing of desirable characteristics, topped up with hybrid vigor. Those “highly adaptable” racial categories of the eighteenth century, as described by Felicity Nussbaum (254), continued to dispose of the equine species in ways that combined a sanguine view of racial mixing for the good of the English stock as a whole with a complementary emphasis on purity, signified by the General Stud-Book, beginning in 1791. By the early nineteenth century, with regard to both humankind and horsekind, a more “vigorous attention to hybridity and mongrelization” had emerged (Nussbaum 254), with a consequent hardening of racial prejudices against Africans and other subjugated peoples (heightened by the abolitionist legislation of 1807 and 1833), and a nationalist obsession with the purity of the Thoroughbred’s by now imaginatively Anglicized gene pool.

Swift’s representation of imperial logic and colonial damage both reflects and predicts the itinerary of British imperialism. Gulliver’s Travels remains both prescient of things to come and highly topical, replete with booty from the venerable and vulnerable Levant trade, especially those equine imports. Morally sensitive and ever tractable, Swift’s Gulliver tries desperately to refashion himself to fit in with the civil society of equines upon whose shores he finds himself in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver reflects that since horses “were the most generous and comely Animal we had,” who “excelled in Strength and Swiftness,” their fate was all too often a despicable one (Swift 224). Uplifted by Houyhnhnm influences to the point where he cannot bear people, Gulliver takes refuge in the stables when he returns to England. He purchases two young “Stone-Horses”—stallions—and hires a groom to look after them. Conversing with them for at least four hours a day, he is pleased that his horses understand him “tolerably well” and that, “Strangers to Bridle or Saddle,” they live “in great Amity” with him and “Friendship to each other” (Swift 271). Thus Gulliver attempts to repair the damage done to Houyhnhnmkind in Britain and Ireland.

Common Brutality

Swift embeds within Gulliver’s reportage to the Master Houyhnhnm a minia-ture indictment of contemporary horsekeeping practices, anticipating Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty by more than a century. If horses happened to belong to “Persons of Quality,” Gulliver recounts to his Houyhnhnm audience, and they were thus “employed in Travelling, Racing, and drawing Chariots,”

they were treated with much Kindness and Care, till they fell into Diseases, or became foundered in the Feet; but then they were sold, and used to all kind of Drudgery till they died; after which their Skins were stripped and sold for what they were worth, and their Bodies left to be devoured by Dogs and Birds of Prey. (224)

To add insult to injury, Gulliver adds, appealing to Houyhnhnm sensitivities, that these are the lucky horses. The others, the “common Race of Horses,”

had not so good Fortune, being kept by Farmers and Carriers, and other mean People, who put them to great Labour, and feed them worse. I described as well as I could, our way of Riding; the Shape and Use of a Bridle, a Saddle, a Spur, and a Whip; of Harness and Wheels. (224)

Master Houyhnhnm wonders why the horses tolerate such treatment and do not throw or roll on and crush their jockeys, who are mere “Brutes” (224). The dapple-gray Master Houyhnhnm is the only figure of governance and authority in the text, apart from the King of Brobdingnag, to show any interest in the outside world. The gray horse and the King, neither of whom is human, ironically “show the real humanist’s eagerness to learn from strange experience” (Erskine-Hill 64). Gulliver explains how horses were “trained up from three or four Years old to the several Uses we intended them for,” that most of the “Males” were “castrated” “to take down their Spirits, and make them more tame and gentle,” and that in any case, these horses “had not the least Tincture of Reason any more than the Yahoos” did in Houyhnhnmland (Swift 224). Swift takes a scholastic commonplace from his undergraduate days at Trinity College, Dublin, that man was animal rationale, with the property of reason, while horses were only animal hinnibile, with the property of whinnying, and inverts it (Erskine-Hill 65).

Appealing to his imagined equine audience, while reversing his human readers’ presuppositions about human reason and animal irrationality, Swift makes the familiar strange. He excoriates the injustice of class hierarchy, so thoroughly infused within the body politic that it applies equally to horses and humans. In the light of this defamiliarization, such common practices as the gelding of stallions to make them more tractable appear no longer to be mere matters of human convenience. They stand revealed from the Houyhnhnm point of view as violations of the natural order of things. In its brutality and unthinking use of living beings as mere instruments of human convenience, Swift renders early modern horse culture, embedded as it is within imperial mercantile culture generally, repugnant.

Swift’s was an early instance of what would become a staple trope of eighteenth-century representation of animals: the exposure of human cruelty. In The Adventurer (1753), John Hawkesworth contrasted the lives of a donkey and a horse to protest against both low and elite forms of abuse. The donkey, “the slave of indigence,” is worked and beaten to death; the horse, “the pride of greatness” and “the favourite of caprice, avarice, and barbarity” suffers a more complicated demise (220). Once again, servitude has become slavery, and luxurious humanity exploits the living for profit. Having won a match race against a mare whose owner offers to double the stakes the next day for any gelding that can beat her, the racing stallion is castrated by his greedy owner and immediately “mounted and spurred on to the goal” (Hawkesworth 221). So great is his competitive spirit that the horse wins the race, only to die at the finishing post. In the afterlife, the horse’s ghost reports to the donkey: “ ‘Injured as I was, the love of glory was still superior to the desire of revenge: I determined to die as I had lived, without an equal; and having again won the race, I sunk down at the post in an agony which soon after put an end to my life’ ” (Hawkesworth 221).

Overhearing this “horrid narrative” in a dream, the author “blushed that I was a man” (Hawkesworth 221). In 1792, Hawkesworth’s essay was reprinted to accompany The Life and Death of a Race-Horse by Thomas Gooch, a series of prints modeled upon six paintings that had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783. Like the series of four aquatints after Thomas Rowlandson’s The High Mettled Racer of 1789, Gooch’s illustrations graphically materialized Swift’s and Hawkesworth’s exposés (Warner 5–7; 17 n.18). The Thoroughbred racehorse joined Hogarth’s Rake and Harlot in a progress-to-dissolution narrative. In the wake of Swift’s prescient critique, a mid-century popular periodical discourse about cruelty to animals had become, by the abolitionist decades of the 1780s and 1790s, a visual program not only comparing but also connecting human and animal slavery as effects of empire and mercantile wealth accumulation.

The gullible Gulliver, saturated with Houyhnhnm lore, turns the world upside down in a radical way and, in so doing, reveals how animals, servants, colonial subjects, and slaves are all implicated in British imperial and mercantile aspirations. Swift has Gulliver, however absurdly, take it upon himself to rectify such injustices, reversing human-equine power relations. It is humans who will be trained to labor; horses will be kept and cosseted and do no work. Among the pacts Gulliver makes with himself after retiring from travel are (1) instructing his family in the Houyhnhnm virtues, in so far as he finds these particular Yahoos trainable or “docible Animals”; (2) forcing himself to behold his own “Figure” in a “Glass,” in order to accustom himself to bear looking at human bodies again; and (3) lamenting “the Brutality” of British and Irish Houyhnhnms, while always treating “their Persons with Respect, for the sake of my noble Master, his Family, his Friends, and the whole Houyhnhnm Race, whom these of ours have the Honour to resemble in all their Lineaments, however their Intellectuals came to degenerate” (Swift 276). Here Swift distinguishes cruelty from brutality and returns “brutality” to its roots in brutishness or animal being. British Houyhnhnms—that is to say, actually existing horses—are cruelly treated because they are perceived to be mere brutes or animals. British Yahoos—actually existing humans—behave like brutes toward their fellow beings whenever they behave in cruel and unthinking ways, and that, for Swift, was most of the time.

In creating Houyhnhnmland, Swift reverses the intellectual capacities of horses and humans from the normativities of contemporary Britain. For his part, Gulliver hopes to “Houyhnhnmize” his little bit of England by treating horses with respect in spite of their intellectual degeneration, and by continuing to value their noble lineaments as shared with the superior Houyhnhnm race. He will keep stallions, admire and talk to them, but never ride them. He will continue to smell of the stable, like his groom, whose company he prefers to any other human’s, and his and the groom’s conversation will be chiefly about horses.

In Gulliver’s imagination, the bodies as well as the minds of horses and humans are counterpoised. Gulliver far pref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I  Identity: Lives with Domestic Animals in the Modern Era
• Part II  Anthropomorphism: Animals as Metaphor in the Age of Darwin
• Part III  The Posthuman: Reconceiving Nonhuman Animals in the Contemporary World
• Contributors
• Index