Catherine Brown

DH Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World

May 2019

 

The following paper was given at the 33rd annual international DH Lawrence conference held at the University of Nanterre, Paris, 3rd-7th April 2019. The title of the conference was: ‘Lawrence and the Anticipation of the Ecocritical Turn’. 

 

 

Two Lawrencians converted me to veganism, and this fact – I would like to argue today – is less paradoxical than it on the surface appears.

 

I’m going to argue that whereas Lawrence was neither a vegetarian nor a vegan – quite apart from the fact that the latter term was invented 14 years after his death – his thought contains much that speaks to veganism, which is in asexplosive a growth phase in the Western world now, as was vegetarianismduring Lawrence’s own lifetime.

 

Carrie having laid the groundwork of placing Lawrence within what Margot Norris in 1985 called a ‘biocentric tradition’, I want to zoom out again to the surface. To consider the extent of Lawrence’s conventional attitudes towards animals in his life and art, before again looking under the surface to see what contradicts these.

 

Lawrence would certainly have been aware of vegetarianism, and its contemporary alignment with resistance to the machine age.

 

It was a prominent part of Tolstoyism, theosophy, suffragism, and socialism.

 

Willie Hopkin and Alice Dax were friends with the crusading vegetarian Edward Carpenter.

 

Katherine Mansfield took a vegetarian cure at Bad Warishofen in 1909, and her protagonist in ‘Germans at meat’, of 1910, has been vegetarian for the samethree years as her evidently-failed marriage, suggesting an analogy between her female independence and that stolid conventionalism metonymically expressed by her interlocutors’ consumption of meat.

 

The Brewsters werevegetarians, as were the Lawrences’ neighbours near Villa Mirenda the Wilkinsons.

 

The London in which Lawrence arrived in 1908 had numerous vegetarian restaurants, and it was these that had converted the young Mahatma Gandhi to born-again vegetarianism twenty years before.

 

And yet, for the most part, Lawrence seemsto have been comfortable within the omnivorism (OED 1871) and speciesism (OED 1975) that was dominant in his as in our culture.

 

A Kafka, sensitive to the very sight of meat, he was not. In 1902, whilst a pupil teacher in Eastwood, he worked in accounts at Gethin Hogg’s Pork Butcher’s. Self-conscious at having been placed in full view in the window, he was not, as far as we know, conscious of proximity of carcasses.

 

No gourmet, he often refers to ‘meat’ generically, without any attempt to recall what vegan theorist Carol Adams calls the ‘absent referent’ of the animals concerned.

So, to Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1924: ‘would you bring some meat as usual’.

 

From June 1925 the Lawrences became farmers of chickens and a cow at the Kiowa Ranch, he tending to the cow, and Frieda to the chickens and the production of butter.

 

 

And it was during the American period of 1922 to 5, when he witnessed and practiced a particularly close relationship with, and dependence on, animals, that he most intensively reflected on man’s killing of animals in his own self-interest.

 

In essays of the three consecutive years 1923-5, respectively concerning Fenimore Cooper’s 1841 novel The Deerslayer, ‘Pan in America’, and ‘the Death of a Porcupine’, he thought through, and strove to justify, this practice.

 

In the Fenimore Cooper essay:

 

‘The tiger was a terrible problem to Shelley, who wanted life in terms of the lamb […] The full eye of the deer or the rabbit or the horse would stagnate and lose its lustre, save for the keen, strange eye of the wolf and the weasel, and of man

 

In ‘Pan in America’ he argues that with Pan’s help Indians instinctively, psychologically overcome their quarry:

 

‘If there is no flaw in his abstracted huntsman’s will, he cannot miss.[…] And the deer, once she has let her quivering alertness be overmastered or stilled by the hunter’s subtle, hypnotic, following spell, she cannot escape.’

 

In the following year, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, he goes further, by concentrating on the benefits of such a system to the hunter:

 

‘Wherever man establishes himself, upon the earth, he has to fight for his place, against the lower orders of life. Food, the basis of existence, has to be fought for even by the most idyllic of farmers. You plant, and you protect your growing crop with a gun’ – and of course it is the case that even or especially the vegan needs to explain how the crops they need in order to survive will be protected.

 

Yet in each essay more urgently than in the last, there is the sense that Lawrence is trying to characterize in Lawrencian terms an activity from which he instinctively revolts – a revulsion which Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine makes explicit, and which had been felt by Lawrence when Tony Luhan shot a porcupine at Lobo Ranch in 1924. According to David Ellis: ‘Tolerant though he was of Brett’s rabbit hunting, Lawrence protested that he did not want porcupines shot on his property, however much damage they did to the trees (whose trees were they anway?)’

 

In this essay I identify a modified version of the dynamic that Hugh Stevens does (as some of us heard last Saturday in London) concerning same-sex relationships: that Lawrence’s argumentationon the subject is undercut by Lawrence’s art, which reveals a queer aesthetics. To translate this into Lawrence’s ownterms, he puts his discursive fingerin the aesthetic panthat carries the representation of Winifred Inger.

 

Yet in Reflectionsthe equivalent is not quite the case, in that Lawrence’s artistry, in part, supportshis argument. A beautiful, anaphorically-patterned argument unfolds like a liturgy: ‘Life is more vivid in the x than in the y’. ‘The x can devour the y. The w can devour the x’. Yet the same beauty pertains to the description of the heaven of perfected relationships, which is Lawrence’s emotional refuge from the revulsion at killing with which the essay begins.

 

Moreover the entire essay is dramatic; it describes the unfolding not just of events, but of Lawrence’s responses to them – thus the argument concerning hierarchy emerges as a retrospective justification for a crime passional. Reading it as a short story rather than as an essay puts one particularly on one’s guard against accepting as its conclusion such opinions as:

‘Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans, Americans all say the same’, which echoes his earlier poem ‘Snake’:

 

‘The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed’

 

The essay is at its most dramatic when it is attending to individuals, at which point the animals are gendered – the dog is always a he, but the porcupine is only a she once he has killed it.

 

On the other hand, this essay does posit arguments, in a way that the fictional works with which Stevens is concerned do not, and these fail bothin relation to the narrator’s emotion, andon any rational analysis. I am going to take the trouble of challenging those arguments, because they are amongst the bestin favour of meat-eating that I have encountered.

 

The narrator manifests no instinctive revulsion from eating a lettuce, yet the argument’s flat ontology refuses the flora-fauna distinction which is central both to biology and to the narrator’s affect. Hence the essay’s dismissal of vegetarianism by a false reductio ad absurdum:

 

‘In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part of all existence and of all being. […] The Buddhist who refuses to take life is really ridiculous, since if he eats only two grains of rice per day, it is two grains of life.’

 

In this context, ‘We did not make creation, weare not the authors of the universe’ has the force of an excuse in response to an unvoiced accusation.

 

The distinction between ‘being’ and ‘existence’, which Lawrence tries to use to create a utopian fourth dimension, is unclear, since both rely on vividness.

Existence pertains to groups, and being, to individuals, but the latter subverts the former given the enormous potential variations between individuals in a group.

 

‘Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me’ –

but what if life, at one given moment, is more vivid in the Mexican than in Lawrence?

 

It is one of the points of Peter Singer’s foundational 1975 monograph Animal Liberation that capacity does not follow species boundaries. A mature baby has less capacity than a mature monkey, but we do not therefore deem it acceptable to test drugs on a baby, despite the greater applicability such a test may have.

 

Lawrence asks ‘What do we mean by higher? Strictly, we mean more alive’ ‘This is the truth behind the survival of the fittest’. But this apparent revision of Darwinism then collapses into the orthodoxy that might is right.

 

His assertion that we get vitality by absorbing it from creatures lower than ourselves, is in one sense obviously true in that all beings obtain sustenance from those which they have the powerto consume; but then he adds that the ‘best way’ to get vitality is from being in relationship, which lurches towards a wholly other metaphysic and morality.

 

‘There will be conquest, always. But the aim of conquest is a perfect relation of conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming’ seems to be a desperate projection of a meat-eating world in which the killed animals acquiesce.

 

Three years later, Lady Chatterley’s Loverand Mellors are both ambivalent about hunting. Many of the novel’s references to shooting are unreflective. The gun is Mellors’s icon, symbolic of both his phallus and his profession; Connie can recognise his silhouette at the edge of the wood by its outline, and that of the gundog equally ever at his side.

 

Yet he is not, in the terms of the 1924 essay,possessed of the Pan instinct.

 

‘An owl still hooted. He knew he ought to shoot it.’

 

He later defends himself to Connie:‘They used to say I had too much of the woman in me. But it’s not that. I’m not a woman because I don’t want to shoot birds’.

 

The narrator adds:

‘Yet he could live alone, in the wan satisfaction of being alone, and raise pheasants to be shot ultimately by fat men after breakfast. It was futility, futility to the nth power.’

 

Yet one senses that his facilitation of fat men’s sport does not entirely account for Mellors’ reluctance, which remains without elucidation, but which we may guess rhymes with that expressed in ‘Man and Bat’:

 

‘What then?

Hit him and kill him and throw him away?

 

Nay,

I didn’t create him.

Let the God that created him be responsible for his death’

 

 

In other works too, the connection between meat and masculinity is repudiated:

 

In a rustic recasting of ‘Germans at meat’, the Saxton family of The White Peacock sits down at table, and Emily:

‘looked disconsolately at the underdone beef on her plate.

“I do hate this raw meat,” she said.

“Good for you,” replied her brother, who was eating industriously. “Give you some muscle to wallop the nippers.”

She pushed it aside, and began to eat the vegetables. Her brother re-charged his plate and continued to eat.’

 

In Quetzalcoatl the male-meat association is not just satirized but inverted, as the bullfighters are gendered by Kate as effeminate butchers, and boys:

 

‘They looked like eunuchs, with their smooth faces. And common as butcher’s assistants. She understood so well why the performers in Roman arenas were mere slaves, regarded as such’

 

‘It’s just a performance of human beings torturing animals[…] Dirty little boys maiming flies – that’s what they are. Only being grown-up, they are bastards, not boys.’

 

In the 1926 essay ‘Man is a Hunter’, Lawrence ridicules the portentous masculinity of Italian hunters, and its disjunction with the smallness of the birds they shoot. ‘Man is a hunter! L’uomo e cacciatore: the Italians are rather fond of saying it. It sounds so virile.’

 

He is repelled when offered some game, and presented with:

‘three robins, two finches, four hedge sparrows, and two starlings, in a fluffy, coloured, feathery little heap, all the small heads rolling limp’

The ‘small mouthful of little bones each of these tiny carcases must make’ is described by David Ellis as being ‘too much for his English sensibilities’. I do not think that the national hypothesis is required, but that Lawrence is manifesting an instinctive, and widespread, sense of pathos.

 

‘imagine the small mouthful of little bones each of these tiny carcasses must make!

But, after all, a partridge and a pheasant are only a bit bigger than a sparrow and a finch. And compared to a flea, a robin is big game. It is all a question of dimensions.’

 

Unable to follow whither this line of argument trends, he swerves, and ends the essay with a quip:

‘If the master wants to hunt, don’t you grunt; let him hunt!’

 

But pathos for a large animal is also manifested in the 1923 poem ‘Mountain Lion’ written after he encountered a shot lion:

 

‘I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans

And never miss them.

Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!’

 

Then again he reported to Brett in 1925 that:

‘We bought two mountain lion skins – nice – wish you could have taken one to the ranch’

 

That is, Lawrence clearly manifests the split between life as predominantly lived, and the affect achieved through acts of attention, which characterizes all human lives.

 

More particular to Lawrence is the kind of attention which produces violence.

 

We have seen it already in relation to the porcupine. Lawrence’s infamously assaulted his own dog, Bibbles, in February 1923 for unfaithfulness to himself both with a local Airedale, and, as it were, with Merrild, with whom she saught refuge.

 

And Brett recalls how in 1925 Lawrence became enraged with a chicken which persisted in being broody, rushed out, grabbed her by the legs, and ‘adroitly’ chopped her head off.

‘Damn her’, you say, ‘she was brooding again; after all the trouble I took […] she still brooded. So I’ve chopped off her head. Serves her right, too!’

 

I agree with David Ellis that it is

‘impossible to avoid feeling that there was a connection with the relationship between Lawrence and Frieda.[…] Lawrence’s complicated attitude to Frieda’s sexuality and her maternal feelings seems to underlie the manner in which he disposes of the hen.’

And, I would add, of Bibbles.

 

Both incidents recall what Mark Kinkead-Weekes calls ‘‘that most horrific creation of sex-war violence, which bears the closest relation to […] Birkin’s belief that there are murderees as well as murderers’, the early poem ‘Rabbit Snared in the Night’:

 

In this the persona tells a snared rabbit on his lap:

 

‘It must be you who desire

this intermingling of the black and monstrous fingers of Moloch

in the blood-jets of your throat.

 

Come, you shall have your desire,

since I am implicated with you

in your strange lust.

 

In all three cases, I would argue that the distinction between humans and animals is abolished at the level of affect, and retained only at the level of differential power and the law.

Lawrence often wished to cull people;

Mellors says of his former wife:

‘I’d have shot her like I shoot a stoat, if I’d but been allowed […] It ought to be allowed.’

And he would shoot the Cliffords:

‘with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion.’

 

Lawrence offered Merrild violence when he interposed himself between Lawrence and Bibbles. One assumes that what restrained him was an apprehension of Merrild’s superior physical strength, and legal position.

 

But it is with those moments when Lawrence is not operating with a flat ontology – when he has to do with existence rather than being, that I am principally concerned.

 

And here on several occasions he implies a positive stance towards vegetarianism.

 

InThe Rainbow, Maggie Schofield invites Ursula to her pleasant classroom on Ursula’s first day of work, and eats ‘a vegetarian hot-pot’. This is tried by Ursula, who has ‘never eaten vegetarian things’ ‘But I should think they can be good’.

Ursula’s ‘soul rang an answer to a new refinement, a new liberty. If all vegetarian things were as nice as this, she would be glad to escape the slight uncleanness of meat.  “How good!” she cried.’

 

TheNettle

Food of the North

 

rhymes both with this sentiment and that of ‘Germans at meat’:

 

The food of the north tastes too much of the fat

of the pig

fat of the pig!

 

Take me south again, to the olive trees

and oil me with the lymph of silvery trees

oil me with the lymph of trees

not with the fat of the pig.’

 

 

When Ursula in church hears those Genesis verses habitually quoted in defence of animal-eating:

 

“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you”

She finds that

‘Altogether it seemed merely a vulgar and stock-raising sort of business. She

was left quite cold by man’s stock-breeding lordship over beast and fishes.

 

Seven years later in Aaron’s Rod, Aaron has a dream about the fine naked man in an underground world who is going to be eaten by the tin-miners, and whose skin is:

 

‘stuffed tight with prepared meat, as the skin of a Bologna sausage’. In this nightmare, the protagonist is rendered vulnerable to cannibalism simultaneously by resembling a Bologna sausage, and by being fed on and filled by such sausage – in a condign punishment and animal revengethat is expressed nowhere else so clearly in Lawrence’s writings.

 

The essay ‘Pan in America’ is permissive of game-hunting to the Pan-possessed, but barely tolerant of non-veganism amongst everyone else:

 

‘What can men who sit at home in their studies, and drink hot milk and have lamb’s wool slipper on their feet, and write anthropology, what can they possibly know about[…] the men of Pan?

We can’t get Pan back. ‘But civilized man, having conquered the universe, may as well leave off bossing it.’

 

And in the following year, in ‘Aristocracy’, he all but writes a vegan manifesto, which vigorously reincludes and reanimates the absent and dead referent:

 

‘Do you think, you stuffy little human fool sitting in a chair and wearing lambswool underwear, and eating your mutton and beef under the Christmas decoration, do you think that Amon, Mithraw, mistletoe, and the whole Tree of Life were just invented to contribute to your complacency?’

‘Was not the ram created before you were, you twaddler? Did he not come in might out of chaos?[…] To you, he is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far. But any farther, he is – well, wool.

[…]Don’t you see you are so much the emptier, mutton-stuffed and wool-wadded, but lifeless, lifeless’

‘Do you think the bull is at your disposal, you zenith of creation? Why, I tell you, the blood of the bull is indeed your poison. Your veins are bursting, with beef. You may well turn vegetarian. But even milk is bull’s blood: or Hathor’s.’

 

Then, suddenly, he shifts the preceding from the literal to the metaphoric plain:

 

‘My cow Susan is at my disposal indeed. But when I see her suddenly emerging, jet-black, sliding through the date of her little corral into the open sun, does not my heart stand still, and cry out, in some long-forgotten tongue, salutation to the fearsome one?’

 

Lawrence takes this as far as putting the word ‘owning’ in inverted commas in his 1923 poem ‘Bibbles’, in total congruence with the vegan critique of the idea of ‘owning’ ‘pets’:

 

Bibbles is the

‘First live thing I’ve “owned” since the lop-eared rabbits when I was a lad,[…] and Adolf, and Rex whom I didn’t own.

And even now, Bibbles, little Ma’am, it’s you who appropriated me, not I you.’

 

 

If one takes veganism as the editors of the 2008 monograph Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culturedo, not as a dogma, identity, or state of putative purity, but as a queer nexus of perceptions and affects, then Lawrence can, at moments, be described as vegan.

 

 

‘A BRIEF CODA’

Most of the animals that Lawrence talks about are free or semi-free; the mechanisation that he abhorred had not yet been applied to animals on the enormous scale that has unfolded since the Second World War.

 

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine describes the struggleinvolved in the higher assimilating the lower

But as JM Coetzee’s crusading vegetarian character Elizabeth Costello observes, ‘since [the] victory [of humans over animals] became absolute’ with guns, rather than treating animals like enemies in battle we treat them like prisoners of war. And ‘There are no laws when it comes to prisoners of war’

 

To illustrate this I would like to finish with two brief clips, accompanied by twoNettlespoems, of practices which apply to organic, free range, and RSPCA-approved chickens. Trigger warning: these may be found upsetting.

 

Here is a reminder of Connie’s response to a chick:

‘it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment.[…] Life, life! pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear!’

 

Beak-amputation is a standard practice with one-day old female chicks to reduce stress-induced pecking:

 

‘Debeaking Female Chicks in Australia’

 

‘what is a man to do?

 

When year by year, year in, year out, in millions, in increasing millions

they dance, dance, dance this dry industrial jig of the corpses entangled in iron

and there’s no escape, for the iron goes through their genitals, brains, and souls –

then what is a single man to do?’

 

 

And this is one of the two standard methods, along with gassing, to dispose of the around 7 billion malechicks culled worldwide per year.

 

Clip:

‘Standard Practice for ‘Free Range Eggs’ (Male Chick Maceration)

 

The dark, satanic mills of Blake

how much darker and more satanic they are now!

[…]

And now, the iron has entered into the soul

and the machine has entangled the brain, and got it fast,

and steel has twisted the loins of man, electricity has exploded the heart’

 

 

Information on vegan organisations is on your handouts.

 

Thank you.

 

 

LAWRENCE AND THE ANTICIPATION OF A

VEGAN WORLD HANDOUT

 

 

TIMELINE OF ANIMAL-RELATED EVENTS

 

(All in the UK unless otherwise stated)

 

DATE EVENT
1600s Development of numerous religious, vegetarian movements in England. Abstainers from meat often designated ‘Pythagorean’(OED in this sense 1599)
1634-1703 Thomas Tryon, prominent supporter of vegetarianism
Late 1700s Development of a large scale meat and dairy industry, in the wake of the Enclosures
1776 Adam Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations that a vegetable diet is more land-efficient than a meat diet
1809 The Bible Christian Church, which is vegetarian, founded
1813 PB Shelley ‘A Vindication of a Natural [vegetarian] Diet’
1818 Frankenstein (in which the monster is vegetarian)
1824 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founded
1835 Cruelty to Animals Act banned animal-baiting, including cock-fighting
1840 Victoria grants royal charter to SPCA, which becomes RSPCA
1842 ‘Vegetarian’(OED)
1847 Vegetarian Society founded
1849 Cruelty to Animals Act – general prohibition on cruelty
1850 Vegetarian Society founded in the USA
1854 ‘Carnivore’(OED), ‘Herbivore’(OED)
1855 ‘Anthropocentric’(OED)
1859 ‘Vivisection’(OED, as applied to an experiment); the practice takes off from this point onwards
1871 ‘Omnivore’(OED); Battersea Dogs Home founded
1875 National Anti-Vivisection Society founded
1876 Cruelty to Animals Act placed some limits on animal experimentation
1877 Black Beauty
1881 GB Shaw converted to vegetarianism by reading Shelley
1888 Tolstoy converted to vegetarianism; Gandhi’s vegetarianism renewed by his stay in London
1894 Corn flakes invented as part of a vegetarian diet by John Harvey Kellogg
1896 HG Wells, ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’; National Anti-Vivisection and Battersea General Hospital founded (did not use vivisection)
1898 British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection founded
1902 Society of Friends Vegetarian Society founded
1903-10 The affair of the brown dog, London
1903 Women’s Social and Political Union (later suffragettes) founded – many adherents were vegetarian and anti-vivisection
1904 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
1908 First World Congress of Vegetarian Societies, Dresden
1911 Protection of Animals Act
1917 People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, PDSA, founded
1911-29 Works by DH Lawrence mentioned in this talk
1924 League Against Cruel Sports founded
1930s-40s Several leading Nazis vegetarian, including Hitler and Himmler; development of the battery system for hens
1934 Protection of Animals Act outlaws rodeos (which were visiting the UK from the US)
1940 ‘Post-humanism’(OED)
1944 ‘Vegan’ (OED); Vegan Society founded in the UK
1960 Abandonment of Animals Act
1963 Hunt Saboteurs’ Association founded
1967 Compassion in World Farming founded
1971 ‘Posthumanism’(OED)
1975 Animal Liberation, Peter Singer; ‘Speciesism’(OED)
1976 Animal Liberation Front founded
1977 ‘Ecocriticism’(OED)
1980 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, founded in the USA
1985 Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence
1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act
1990 Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat; 75% of hens worldwide kept in battery cages; veal crate banned in UK
1991 ‘Pescatarian’(OED)
1994 Viva! founded
1997-8 JM Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
1998 ‘Flexitarian’(OED)
2000 ‘Anthropocene’(OED)
2004 Hunting Act outlaws hunting of wild mammals
2006 Animal Welfare Act concerning pets; veal crate banned in EU
2007 Critical Animal Studies founded in the US
2012 British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection renamed Cruelty Free International; battery cage banned in EU
2006-16 Estimated 350% increase of the number of vegans in the UK (‘Veganuary’ launched in 2014)
2018 Emelia Quinn and Ben Westwood, eds, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory

 

 

QUOTATIONS

 

One of three epigraphs to ‘Animals’ in Birds, Beasts and Flowers

 

‘Once, they say, he was passing by when a dog was being beaten, and he spoke this word: ‘Stop! don’t beat it! For it is the soul of a friend I recognised when I heard its voice.’

 

[Poems I: 329: Xenophanes on Pythagoras]

Cipriano to Kate on bull-fighting, Quetzalcoatl

 

‘I dislike it myself. But in Rome one does as Rome does; until the moment comes to make a change in Rome’  [italics added]

 

[Quetzalcoatl, 16]

 

 

UK Vegan Society definition of veganism

 

‘a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude – as far as is possible and practicable – all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment’

 

https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/history

 

 

Timothy Morton on the relationship between rationalism and humanism

‘We often speak of Enlightenment humanism, but the impulse of the Enlightenment, when pushed beyond a certain limit, deconstructs the centrality of the human.’

[Morton, p. 59]

 

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Enemies: A Love Story

 

‘As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right’

 

[quoted in Carol Adams]

 

 

ANIMAL WELFARE/LIBERATION ORGANISATIONS

 

The Vegan Society

 

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)

 

Viva!

 

 

 

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

Adams, Carol J., The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-vegetarian Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990)

 

Bell, Michael, Open Secrets: Literature, Education, and Authority from J-J Rousseau to J.M. Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

 

Booth, Howard J., ‘Queer Lawrence: Reading “Snake”’, Journal of DH Lawrence Studies, Vol 1., No 3 (2008), pp. 79-95

 

Coetzee, JM, and Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, Barbara Smuts, Amy Gutmann, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)

 

Doherty, Gerald, ‘“Unheard-of Becomings” in DH Lawrence’s St Mawr: A Deleuzean Reading’, Journal of DH Lawrence Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2011), pp. 184-212

 

Ebbatson, Roger, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982)

 

Griffin, Roger, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler(London: Palgrave 2007)

 

Morton, Timothy, ‘Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism’, Romanticism, 12: 1 (2006), pp. 52-61

 

Nagel, Thomas, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (October 1974), pp. 435-450

 

Neill, Crispian, ‘D.H. Lawrence and Dogs: Canines and the Critique of Civilisation’

Journal of DH Lawrence Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2015), pp. 95-118

 

Norris, Margot, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)

 

Quinn, Emelia and Ben Westwood, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

 

Sagar, Keith, ‘“Straight Oxygen”: Ted Hughes’s Debt to DH Lawrence’, Journal of DH Lawrence Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2009, pp. 71-80

 

Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation(New York: Harper Perennial), 2009 (first pub. 1975)

 

Stuart, Tristram, The Bloodless Revolution: a Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007)

 

 

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Catherine Brown