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D.H. Lawrence: Proto-Vegan?5/18/2021 D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) lived in a cultural environment of modernism which included much orthorexic, pacifist, Christian, spiritualist and/or zoophile vegetarianism – yet he never so much as experimented with vegetarianism. During the mid-1920s, when he lived on a ranch in New Mexico, he kept chickens and a cow. He beheaded a broody chicken, shot a porcupine, and severely beat a pet dog, whilst in states of rage. And yet, amongst British modernist writers, he has perhaps the strongest claim to be considered a proto-vegan. My paper will consider the reasons for this judgment, and how the conflicts between those elements of him that may be considered proto-vegan, and those that are sometimes unthinkingly, sometimes consciously and deliberately, carnist, are manifested. Lawrence is not only becoming a major focus of ecocritical studies (witness the title of the 2019 annual University of Nanterre International D.H. Lawrence Conference: ‘Lawrence and the Anticipation of the Ecocritical Turn’), but has long been at the forefront of animal studies in the field of modernist literature – witness Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia University Press, 2009) and Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2018). However, there is as yet no article, as far as I am aware, on Lawrence as anticipating veganism, and written from an explicitly vegan perspective. This paper will exhibit my work in progress towards such an article. The elements that I will be focusing on as proto-vegan include: Lawrence’s attention and empathetic leaps towards animal subjectivity; his consciousness of the limits of human comprehension of animals, and critiques of anthropomorphism; his conception of a flat ontology of all ‘living’ beings (including plants and certain inorganic objects); his conception of a hierarchy in which individuals are exalted by the vividness of their being, not the category of being to which they belong; his sympathy for suffering animals (for example a dog with its nose full of porcupine quills); his revulsion from spectacular animal cruelty (for example the bullfight at the opening of The Plumed Serpent); his rejection of supposedly- masculine displays of control over animals such as bull-fighting or bird hunting as in fact effeminate; his hostility to the intermingling of the organic with the mechanical (he died soon before the take-off period for factory farming, but would certainly have condemned it); his condemnation of the sense of entitlement of humans who live unthinkingly at animals’ expense; his attraction towards vegetarian food as something ‘clean’; and his imaginative construction of a future utopia (in ‘Autobiographical Fragment’) where humans walk around naked, live in peace, and are vegetarians. Lawrence is a notoriously self-contradictory writer. Contrasting attitudes towards animals sometimes manifest themselves cleanly between different works; but very often they are found within the same work, and by analysing the places of interface between these attitudes a light may be shed on analogous states of conflict that exist within many sensitive and thoughtful non-vegans today. Strategies for addressing and helping to resolve such states of conflict may therefore be suggested. Catherine Brown(New College of the Humanities at Northeastern, London) Comments are closed.
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