2 - Veganism and Modernism

Summary

Modernism and Zoophilia

M“ odernism” – an academic term used especially since the 1960s to denote avantgarde Western art forms of the early twentieth-century – has been used within Anglophone literary studies to refer especially to formally-innovative texts written between around 1910 and 1930. Recently “new modernism studies” has challenged this narrow focus, broadening the concept to include works of a range of styles which consciously respond to the conditions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. Their subjects include the nature and role of art as part of this modernity; consciousness and agency; physical health and degeneration; the relationship of ethics to science, new technologies, and mass production; new supra-national political and cultural movements; and new understandings of religion, race, class, gender, and species. All of these subjects inflect the period’s “zoophilia” (the term is from 1894), as manifest in movements including vegetarianism (developing out of a strong Victorian tradition), anti-vivisectionism (which reached a peak in the Edwardian period), and anti-hunting sentiment (which reached a peak between the Wars).

Delimiting the investigations of this chapter to “vegan” authors of the long modernist period, even allowing the term to operate retroactively from 1944, would have left no canonical authors at all, while narrowing by vegetarian writers would have left only a well-trodden few. Rather, this chapter considers how a range of writers – almost none of them vegetarians, but all manifesting elements of a vegan consciousness as broadly conceived – have explored the category of the human in relation to the treatment of nonhuman animals. Veganism is, after all, a human and ethical phenomenon, and with this focus the chapter aims to complement the considerable body of work that has already been done on modernist literary representations of nonhuman animals (notably by critics including Margot Norris and Carrie Rohman). It does so by concentrating on those human characteristics – especially the imagination – which may conduce towards veganism.

This chapter is further delimited by a focus on slaughter and hunting. By considering both we gain a binocular vision of how modernist writers have considered humanity through the lenses of the most violent aspects of its relationships with animals: slaughter relating to human practice since the agricultural revolution, hunting pre-dating it. Thomas Hardy’s 1895 Jude the Obscure and William Golding’s 1954 Lord of the Flies introduce these topics respectively and between them mark the outer boundaries of the period of my concern.