Animals in Irish Literature and Culture

Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Borbála Faragó

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137434807
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Animals in Irish Literature and Culture spans the early modern period to the present, exploring colonial, post-colonial, and globalized manifestations of Ireland as country and state as well as the human animal and non-human animal migrations that challenge a variety of literal and cultural borders.

Part I
Hunting and Consuming Animals

1

‘Our sep’rate Natures are the same’: Reading Blood Sports in Irish Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century

Lucy Collins

The relationship between human and animal worlds has a long history of literary representation in Ireland, extending back to medieval texts in Irish and in Latin. Poems such as John Derrick’s ‘Image of Irelande’ from 1581 signal the presence of precursors – his praise of falcons is linked to the importance of hunting birds in late medieval Ireland and, perhaps, to a lingering memory of the significance of the bird in earlier Irish literature.¹ Typically, texts from the Renaissance period in Ireland deliberately blurred the boundary between animal and human life in order to emphasize the ‘barbarous’ nature of the Irish people: works by Giraldus Cambrensis, Edmund Spenser, and Sir John Davies were widely read in their own time as well as being influential for later writers.² By the early nineteenth century, however, there was a significant change in the way that animals were perceived, founded on an increasing awareness of the close ties between human and nonhuman life. Thus, complex historical processes underpin the representation and reading of animals during this period, and the specific differences between humans and nonhumans in the Irish context must be set within the cultural and legal conditions of the time. This essay is concerned primarily with the relationship between the ideological and the aesthetic – specifically with how literary representations of shooting, hunting, cockfighting, and bull-baiting set the terms by which the subject of cruelty to animals in the long eighteenth century may be understood.

Though there are earlier instances in which the close working relationship between human and animal in Ireland is described, it was in the eighteenth century that the interdependence of the two began to be recognized more fully, first in poems that praised the beauty of domestic and farm animals and later in work that explored the more turbulent forms of interaction constituted by blood sports. The economic imperatives of animal husbandry tended to reinforce conventional assumptions of stewardship, but by mid-century – due to a complex intersection of ethical and scientific enquiries – poets began to examine the relationship with a more critical eye, reflecting on the exploitative attitude that many humans adopted towards animals and considering its implications for professed religious belief and for issues of social justice, especially in the context of race and gender. This scrutiny was inflected by class judgements, however; most advocates of animal welfare turned their attention first to situations more commonly associated with the lower classes, outlawing cockfighting and bull-baiting while making no attempt to legislate against stag hunting – a pursuit traditionally associated with the wealthy and considered to represent a ritualized form of encounter between human and animal. Cruelty was first identified with an ignorant and uncivilized population: in creating a more compassionate society, therefore, legislators sought to begin at the bottom of the social scale. The desire to distinguish between stag and fox-hunting, on the one hand, and cockfighting and bull-baiting, on the other, was thus at least in part class-driven.³

In her exploration of the meanings that hunting had acquired by the eighteenth century, Donna Landry observes that ‘hunting tradition constitutes the chase as both human immersion in the natural world, in animal being, and a meditation upon human responsibilities towards fellow creatures’.⁴ In this way the practice teaches humans both about animals and about themselves: Jason Scott-Warren has suggested that ‘the bearpits and cockpits enabled animals to become objects of knowledge, exposing their inner natures to outward view’, though admittedly on terms set by their human observers.⁵ This exposure did not happen only in the presence of humans, however, but in that of nonhuman animals too, drawing attention to relationships such as those between hounds and horses, or between trained hunting animals and their quarry. This dynamic offers a counterbalance to Cary Wolfe’s concern with the ways in which cultural studies ‘repress[es] the question of nonhuman subjectivity, taking it for granted that the subject is always already human’.⁶ The evolution of poetic forms and styles during the long eighteenth century shows how these changing subjectivities are accommodated by new aesthetic approaches.

During the Romantic period there was growing scientific evidence of the close links between human and animal in both anatomical and psychological terms. As Peter Heymans recounts:

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed a general loss of taxonomic stability, whereby the universal and static character of social, political and biological laws was increasingly disputed. Changeability and evolution had become keywords, not only in the biological sciences, but also in the radical liberal politics of William Godwin and Thomas Paine, who criticised the conservative ideology underlying class divisions and the dehumanising labour conditions that these divisions appeared to authorise and nourish in an early-capitalist economy.⁷

This linking of scientific and political thought is an important development, signalling the interdisciplinary nature of ethical arguments. Many poems from the mid-eighteenth century onward seek to reflect on the larger moral framework for their representation of animal life by linking it to debates on slavery and on the rights of women. This has led David Perkins to argue that to read the concern for animal welfare expressed in these poems as a metaphor for the rights of certain human groups is in fact to exacerbate the exploitation of animals. However, these parallels can be interpreted not as making light of the suffering of animals but, conversely, as offering a context within which the full moral implications of such an abuse of power can be read.⁸

The poetic representation of blood sports is an important area in which these changing intersections may be traced. While there are many different kinds of representation and these are reflected in the variations of form and style in the poems, they may be divided into two broad types: those that celebrate the excitement of the sporting event and its capacity to express aspects of community, and those that register either implicit or direct opposition towards the killing of animals in this way. The different kinds of readership suggested by these poems indicate both the cultural visibility of blood sports in Ireland and the range of positions that could be adopted in relation to them. Increasingly, the wanton destruction by humans of other living creatures came under scrutiny in these poems; as well as being progressive in their political attitudes, these works were often innovative in form and technique.

The killing of game birds has a long history in the British Isles and evolved significantly in the course of the eighteenth century, from the snaring of wild birds on the ground to the breeding of pheasant, partridge, and grouse for shooting. Historically the role of the wildfowler required patience as well as deep familiarity with the birds’ habitat, knowledge that contributed to the larger understanding of birdlife in Ireland during this period.⁹ As the century progressed, the desire to increase the reliability of the practice became evident: landowners incorporated into their estates elements of landscape design that simulated the birds’ natural habitat and carefully stocked their lands to ensure maximum success for sportsmen.¹⁰ By mid-century, shooting birds in flight was considered to offer the greatest challenge, and technical improvements in gun making facilitated better performance, adding greatly to the popularity of the sport.¹¹ Not everyone appreciated these advancements, however. James Henderson’s poem ‘The Woodcock’, published in 1784, undermines the sport of game shooting – which he describes as a ‘vulgar pleasure, and the sport of boys’ – and sets it against the beauty and tranquillity of life in nature.¹² The irony inherent in the poet’s praise for the ‘youth of spirit … /… famous with the gun!’ soon becomes clear, as the speaker takes the part of the threatened bird: ‘Stir not, O woodcock, though the stars appear, / Or fly not that way, for the fowler fear’.¹³ Another poem, written just over five years later, also depicts the destructiveness of the sport of shooting: the pseudonymously published ‘Lamentation of Cara Pluma’, addressed to a Belfast gunmaker, is voiced by a female pheasant who has lost her mate. Grieving her family, now dead or ‘scatt’red wide’, she draws on her experience to question man’s moral character: ‘If man was form’d thus to destroy, / Alas! – why is he call’d humane’.¹⁴

A much earlier text also adopts the voice of the bird and is prescient in its treatment of the destruction of birdlife. Laetitia Pilkington’s 1725 poem ‘The Petition of the Birds’ was written when she and her husband Matthew – the poet and art historian – were on their honeymoon and is explicitly addressed to him ‘on his return from shooting’.¹⁵ In this way the poem clearly interweaves personal issues with animal welfare, a strategy that does not invalidate its concern for animals but rather places it in the larger context of an ethics of relationship. Addressin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword: Margo DeMello
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: Kathryn Kirkpatrick
• Part I Hunting and Consuming Animals
• Part II Gender, Sexuality, and Animals
• Part III Challenging Habitats
• Part IV Unsettling Animals
• Selected Bibliography
• Index