1 - Veganism and Women’s Writing

Summary

What is civilization? What is culture? Is it possible for a healthy race to be fathered by violence – in war or in the slaughter-house – and mothered by slaves, ignorant or parasitic? Where is the historian who traces the rise and fall of nations to the standing of their women?

Agnes Ryan, “Civilization? Culture?”

After Frankenstein’s Creature describes its diet of acorn and berries, and its hope of retreating to South America with its companion, it remarks to Frankenstein, “The picture I present to you is peaceful and human.” The Creature’s idyllic pacifist and vegetarian utopian vision intersects with the themes of a number of novels by twentieth-century women that in challenging patriarchal society hearken to a Golden Age of feminism, pacifism, and vegetarianism. The context against which these more recent novels must be read is World War I – for it was then that the peaceful, vegetarian life envisioned by the Creature and many others encountered its starkest contrast, catalyzing the assimilation of vegetarianism into the antiwar vision of women writers. As Edward Carpenter put it after World War I: “When we think of the regiments and regiments of soldiers and mercenaries mangled and torn … when we realise what all this horrible scramble means, including the endless slaughter of the innocent and beautiful animals, and the fear, the terror, the agony in which the latter exist,” we must “pay homage” to Percy Shelley’s androgynous vision, for he “saw that only a new type of human being combining the male and the female, could ultimately save the world – a being having the feminine insight and imagination to perceive the evil, and the manly strength and courage to oppose and finally annihilate it.”

Just as the Great War is the context for Carpenter’s statement about the need for an androgynous vision to challenge war and animal slaughter, in the wake of World War I many modern women writers trace the causes of both war and meat-eating to male dominance. Events of the Great War yoked the heretofore sporadically linked notions of pacifism and vegetarianism. The Great War quickened vegetarianism, propelling it as a movement into the twentieth century and as a subject into the novels of women writers.