Jane Austen and Animals

Barbara K. Seeber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317111450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The first full-length study of animals in Jane Austen, Barbara K. Seeber's book situates the author's work within the serious debates about human-animal relations that began in the eighteenth century and continued into Austen's lifetime. Seeber shows that Austen's writings consistently align the objectification of nature with that of women and that Austen associates the hunting, shooting, racing, and consuming of animals with the domination of women. Austen's complicated depictions of the use and abuse of nature also challenge postcolonial readings that interpret, for example, Fanny Price's rejoicing in nature as a celebration of England's imperial power. In Austen, hunting and the owning of animals are markers of station and a prerogative of power over others, while her representation of the hierarchy of food, where meat occupies top position, is identified with a human-nature dualism that objectifies not only nature, but also the women who are expected to serve food to men. In placing Austen's texts in the context of animal-rights arguments that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Seeber expands our understanding of Austen's participation in significant societal concerns and makes an important contribution to animal, gender, food, and empire studies in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 The Animal Question and Women

DOI: 10.4324/9781315590295-2

Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.

(Letters 336)

William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) figures prominently in cultural histories of the human–animal relationship in the eighteenth century. In Kathryn Shevelow’s For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement, Hogarth’s engravings mark a “point of transition,” the “moment at which earlier, scattered, individual expressions of concern for the abuse of animals began to coalesce into a large collectivity” (146). Hogarth spelled out his didactic intention in the “Autobiographical Notes”:

The four stages of cruelty, were done in hopes of preventing in some degree that cruel treatment of poor Animals which makes the streets of London more disagreeable to the human mind, than any thing what ever, the very describing of which gives pain. … it could not be done in too strong a manner, as the most stony hearts were meant to be affected by them. (Qtd. in Engravings by Hogarth n.pag.)

The narrative charts Tom Nero’s progression from torturing animals as a boy (“The First Stage”) to abusing animals as an adult in his work as a coachman (“The Second Stage”) to thieving and murder (“Cruelty in Perfection”). The final engraving, “Cruelty Rewarded,” focuses on Tom Nero’s executed body as the object of medical dissection. Scalpels and knives, variations of the instruments of torture used on animals in the first and second engravings, are now turned on him. And, in a reversal of the human–animal hierarchy, a human body becomes meat as a dog feasts on Tom Nero’s heart. Given the text’s emphasis on the protagonist’s corruption, this latter reversal seems more of a comment on Tom’s brutishness rather than a leveling of the human–animal hierarchy. Hogarth’s series is exemplary of the eighteenth-century moralist argument for humans’ indirect obligation to animals, since it vividly suggests that cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans. While animals are similar to humans in their sentience—“the describing” of “the Creature’s pain” in turn “gives pain”—Hogarth’s primary focus is on the human agents and the debasement of their humanity. The class dimensions of Hogarth’s print have received much commentary. The male figure who seeks to intervene in the animal abuse in the first engraving is markedly middle-class in opposition to Tom Nero and the other participants in cruelty.¹ However, as Shevelow argues, “Although those who physically perpetrate the acts depicted in the first and second stages are all members of the laboring classes, the upper classes share culpability for the violence on their behalf” (131). Members of the professional classes overcrowd Tom Nero’s hackney coach, presumably to save money, without regard for the consequences—the excessive burden on the horse, who, “subdu’d by Labour,” collapses, and is then subjected to his “cruel Master’s rage.” Similarly, while the “tender Lamb,” already “faint” from exhaustion, “dies beneath the Blows” of an “inhuman Wretch,” its death implicates the much larger system of food production. And in the final engraving Hogarth expands the scope of cruelty to the “state-sanctioned violence of the executioner and the surgeons” (Shevelow 139). Cruelty pervades and implicates the lower as well as the upper ranks of society in Hogarth’s engravings.

¹ Robert Malcolmson, among others, has argued that anti-cruelty discourses mask class politics. However, “the continuity of the modern humane movement with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought on the ethics of human relationships with animals should not be forgotten” (Maehle 100). Similarly, literary critic David Perkins states, “No important argument has yet been adduced, on the question of right conduct toward animals, that was not already urged in the eighteenth century” (“Cowper’s Hares” 58). Diana Donald (224) also challenges the argument that anti-cruelty discourses are class politics in disguise, as does Hilda Kean (31–32, 36).

Of particular interest to this study is that Tom Nero’s progression of cruelty from animal to human victims takes a gendered form. Tom murders his pregnant girlfriend; the maid was “betray’d” into “lawless Love” and “soon Crime to Crime succeeds”: she steals from her Mistress for her lover, who then kills her. Eighteenth-century women writers developed the connections between violence towards animals and violence towards women. For example, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, the heroine’s brother advances along lines similar to those in Hogarth’s didactic tale: “from tormenting insects and animals … [he] became the despot of his brothers, and still more of his sisters” (1:124). In Frances Burney’s Camilla, a novel to which Jane Austen subscribed, the heroine is confronted with the spectacle of monkeys who, with the aid of “fierce blows” (429), are trained to play music, and bullfinches who are similarly beaten into “learn[ing]”(492). When Camilla, “pained” by the bullfinch keeper’s “sever[ity],” “inquired by what means he had obtained such authority,” the man “with a significant wag of the head, brutally answered”: “By the true old way, Miss; I licks him. … everything’s the better for a little beating, as I tells my wife” (492). The parallel between the treatment of animals and women is made explicit, and the animal abuse sheds disturbing light on the heroine’s painful education plot. Austen was aware of animal welfare discourses and, I argue, drew on them in her work.

The status of animals, or the Animal Question, to use Paola Cavalieri’s coinage, was the subject of rigorous scientific, philosophical, and political debate during Austen’s lifetime. Discussions of animals in cultural history, contemporary theory, and literary criticism locate in the eighteenth century a significant shift in the human–animal relationship. The founding of animal protection organizations such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 (which became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840) and, closer to our own day, the Great Ape Project in 1993 are connected to the animal welfare and rights movements of the eighteenth century and to the early steps towards legal protection of animals that took place during this time.² In 1800 and 1802 William Wilberforce put forth anti-bullbaiting bills, both defeated in the House of Commons, while 1809 saw the introduction of an anti-cruelty bill by Lord Erskine in the House of Lords, “the first of its kind ever to be debated in any Western legislature” (Kenyon-Jones 79). Given that Erskine’s “address was widely reported in the press and subsequently published as a pamphlet” (Kenyon-Jones 80), we may assume that Austen would have read or heard about it. While Erskine was defeated, and it took until 1822 for the passing of the Martin’s Act, the first anti-cruelty bill (specifically to “Prevent Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle”), its ultimate success is inseparable from the history of animal welfare and rights in the eighteenth century.³

² The Great Ape Project seeks to establish a United Nations Declaration granting nonhuman great apes the status of individuals, with basic legal rights of life, liberty, and freedom from torture. Legal rights for great apes have been successfully advanced in Spain (2008). See similar advocacy for whales and dolphins in the 2010 Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans. ³ See Chapter 3 in Kenyon-Jones’s Kindred Brutes for a detailed account, and also Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800.

The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes’s categorization of animals as machines, without souls or reasoning and feeling capacities and, hence, exempt from claims to moral consideration, was challenged on a number of fronts in the eighteenth century.⁴ For example, Richard Dean, in An Essay on the Future Life of Brutes. Introduced with Observations upon Evil, its Nature and Origin (1768), sought to “confute … De Carte” and “the Absurdity of the Doctrine, which teaches that Brutes are unintelligent Machines” (2:xix–xx): “dumb Animals are liable to Infelicity as well as Men: … they have their Pains and Sicknesses, suffer many Sorrows from internal Disorders, and many Pangs from external Injuries, and finally languish, decay, and die as he himself does” (1:2–3). Man should “consider, that as Brutes have Sensibility, they are capable of Pain, feel every Bang, and Cut, and Stab, as much as he himself does, some of them perhaps more” (2:104). Dean also argues for animal souls: “Certain it is, that a future Life of Brutes cannot be absolutely denied, without impeaching the Attributes of God. It reflects upon his Goodness, to suppose that he subjects to Pains, and Sorrows, such a Number of Beings, whom he never designs to beatify” (2:73).⁵ Arguments for animal souls, animal sentience, and animal language were advanced, all with important implications for the question of the ethical treatment of animals, ranging from indirect to direct obligation to animals. Andreas Holger Maehle summarizes this debate: “Either indirect obligations towards animals were constructed on the basis of direct duties to God, to other human beings or to oneself; or animal rights were conceded by analogy to human rights, the consequence being direct obligations towards animals. Whereas the latter argument appeared after 1750, the former can be traced back to the early eighteenth century” (91).

⁴ There are excellent overviews of this history by Shevelow, Keith Thomas, Andreas Holger Maehle, Aaron Garrett, and John Simons. ⁵ John Hildrop, in Free Thoughts upon the Brute Creation (1742–43), also argued for animal souls and kindness to animals. In contrast, Humphrey Primatt contended that animals had a right to just treatment on earth because they were barred from the justice of the afterlife: “as we have no authority to declare, and no testimony from heaven to assure us, that there is a state of recompence for suffering Brutality, we will suppose there is none; and from this very supposition, we rationally infer that cruelty to a brute is an injury irreparable” (42–43).

Harriet Ritvo reminds us that “Wherever we look in nineteenth-century British culture … the role of animals appears not only multiple but contested. … the search for a single generalization or a single unfolding narrative may be intrinsically misguided” (“Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain” 122). It is beyond the scope of this study to do justice to the complex history of the human–animal relationship. My aim here is to pursue two interrelated strands in this history—sentience as the basis for direct ethical obligation to animals and the connections drawn between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans—and to read Jane Austen within this context. Markman Ellis writes, “Just as abolitionists sought to reposition Africans as thinking and feeling people, the animal-cruelty campaigners sought to refigure the cultural construction of brute creation, showing them to be not things but animals possessed with feeling and thus endowed with certain rights” (107). I argue that Austen’s novels resonate with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses about animals as thinking, feeling beings and with discourses which connect the animal question to abolitionism and feminism. Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is neglected and abused, treated without feeling by her family. All of Austen’s heroines, even those whose immediate contexts are more loving, find themselves perilously close to the status of animals in a culture which denied women citizenship, and the novels explore the pain of their subordination and vindicate their feeling, thinking natures. Focusing on discourses about animals, I seek to contribute to the discussion of Austen as engaged with the revolutionary politics of her time. Christine Kenyon-Jones argues that at the end of the eighteenth century, “the issue of animal cruelty became associated with questions of rights and citizenship”: “Since animals could be seen to be metonymically or synecdochically linked to … oppressed human groups, they were drawn into the debate, and the continuum of better treatment and rights was also, to some extent, applied to them” (40).

Eighteenth-century discourses of animal welfare and rights emphasized animal sentience. We see this clearly in Humphrey Primatt, one of the first to present an “alternative to the concept of a merely indirect obligation towards animals” (Maehle 94). In A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals (first published in 1776 and reprinted in the 1820s), he argues that “a man can have no natural right to abuse and torment a beast, merely because a beast has not the mental powers of a man” (12). He dethrones reason as the central determinant of human–animal relations, and, instead, emphasizes the commonality of sentience: “Pain is pain, whether it be inflicted on man or on beast” (7). The ability to feel pain entitles animals to “FOOD, REST, and TENDER USAGE” (147), but “not only their necessary Wants, and what is absolutely their Demand on the principles of strict Justice, but also their Ease and Comfort, and what they have a reasonable and equitable Claim to, on the principles of Mercy and Compassion” (202). Animals, according to Primatt, have a right to “Happiness” (202).⁶ Similarly, Thomas Young’s An Essay on Humanity to Animals (1798) emphasizes that “animals are endued with a capability of perceiving pleasure and pain” (8). The most frequently invoked challenge to the Cartesian mind-body and human–animal duality is that of Jeremy Bentham in his 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: “a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (283). Some eighteenth-century writers on the ethical treatment of animals extend their arguments to vegetarianism. Joseph Ritson, in An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802), links the cruelty of rural sport to meat consumption: the prior is a prejudice and a “custom” (97, 220), just as “animal food [is] not natural to man” (41). John Oswald’s The Cry of Nature; Or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (1791) also includes a case for vegetarianism alongside a denunciation of rural sport. These texts “provided ways of showing how human behaviour could be mediated through temperance and nonviolence” (Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste 41).

⁶ Primatt’s text contravenes the claim that all anti-cruelty discourses are more about social regulation and “effective labour discipline” (Malcolmson 89). Primatt explicitly draws attention to cruelty “of every class and denomination” (77): his examples include sport associated with the lower classes (cockfighting and bullbaiting) as well as the sport of the upper classes (“to chace a Stag, to hunt a Fox, or course a Hare”), the mistreatment of horses, and upper-class culinary privileges (“to roast a Lobster, or to crimp a Fish”) (75). See footnote 1.

In these texts, animal suffering matters in and of itself, but is also seen as intersecting with other forms of oppression. Primatt protests human slavery alongside animal suffering: “the white man (notwithstanding the barbarity of custom and prejudice) can have no right … to enslave and tyrannize over a black man” (11). Slavery is also included by George Nicholson (On the Primeval Diet 223) and John Lawrence in A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses and on the Moral Duties of Men towards the Brute Creation (127). The title page of The Cry of Nature announces its author, John Oswald, as a “Member of the Club des Jacobines,” aligning the animal cause with other revolutionary causes. And Ritson links cruelty to animals to social hierarchies:

Man, who is every-where a tyrant or a slave, delights to inflict on each sensible being within his power the treatment he receives from his own superiors: as the negro revenges the cruelty of his owner upon the innocent dog. Every animal, wild or tame, of which he becomes the possessor, is his property, his prisoner, his slave; to be treated with caprice and cruelty, and put to death at his pleasure. (100)

Thomas Young, in An Essay on Humanity to Animals (1798), writes that “cruelty to animals … tends to render those who practise it, cruel towards their own species”: “humanity towards animals” has “an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Text
• Preface
• Introduction: A Nest of My Own
• 1 The Animal Question and Women
• 2 Making a Hole in Her Heart
• 3 Too Cool about Sporting
• 4 Evergreen
• 5 Legacies and Diets
• 6 Rock and Rain
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index