Abstract
Ecofeminist Carol J. Adams has argued that hierarchies of value among living creatures create the category of the subhuman: we normalize the brutalization and killing of animals and then make of the human Other an animal.1 In this essay, I want to use Ireland as a case study for exploring the ways a particular animal, the red fox, appears in the cultural products of capitalist-driven colonialism and postcolonialism. Considered one of Ireland’s 21 indigenous mammals, the fox has for centuries been hunted for sport and for fur as well as raised on fur farms in Ireland. By examining a variety of texts, including Arthur Stringer’s eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish hunting manual, The Experienced Huntsman (1714) and Somerville and Ross’s nineteenth-century fox-hunting sketches in their Irish R.M. series (1899–1915), I hope to explore how the degrading of animals is coextensive with the degrading of human Others; indeed, we can see in these Anglo-Irish texts how the constructed proximity of the indigenous Irish to animals justified the colonial use of force to subdue and contain them. Conversely, making the ideological connections between the oppression of women, the Irish, and animals, prominent nineteenth-century animal advocates from Ireland like Richard Martin of Galway, worked for both human and animal liberatory practices. I find in twentieth-century Irish poems by Geraldine Mills and Paula Meehan representations of foxes that value both the fox and the female narrators as feral and undomesticated, providing a model for the ways true human(e)ness requires that the lives of animals be acknowledged as having intrinsic worth.
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Notes
C. J. Adams (2007) ‘War on Compassion’ in J. Donovan and C. Adams (eds) The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press), 26–30.
J. Fairley (1977) ‘Introduction’ in J. Fairley (ed.) A. Stringer (1714) The Experienced Huntsman (Belfast: Blackstaff Press), 11.
A. Stringer (1714) The Experienced Huntsman (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1977), 34.
P. Waldau (2013) Animal Studies: an Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 159.
M. De Mello (2013) Animals and Society (New York: Columbia University Press), 261.
M. Bekoff (2008) The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, CA: New World Library), 2.
E. Somerville (1936) The Sweet Cry of Hounds (London: Methuen), 58.
T. Meeks and K. Green (2005) Foxhunting, a Celebration in Photographs (London: Carleton Publishing), 10.
J. Kelly (2014) Sport in Ireland, 1600–1840 (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 13.
M. Cartmill (1995) ‘Hunting and Humanity in Western Thought’ in L. Kalof and A. Fitzgerald (eds) The Animals Reader: the Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (New York: Berg, 2007), 240.
E. Munkwitz (2012) ‘Vixens and Venery: Women, Sport, and Fox-Hunting in Britain, 1860–1914’, Critical Survey, 24(1): 74.
Burn (1898) ‘Fox-Hunting’ in Frances E. Slaughter (ed.) The Sportswoman’s Library (Westminister: Archibald Constable, Co.), 22.
M. Wallen (2006) Fox (London: Reaktion Books), 105.
R. Surtees (1928) Jorrock’s Jaunts and Jollities (London: J. M. Dent).
See M. O’Connor (2010) The Female and the Species: the Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (New York: Peter Lang)
and J. A. Stevens (2007) The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross (Dublin: Irish Academic Press).
Moreover, J. A. Stevens’ (2008) ‘The Art and Politics in Somerville and Ross’s Fiction with Emphasis on their Final Collection of Stories, In Mr. Knox’s Country’ in H. Hansson (ed.) New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose (Cork: Cork University Press), 142–60, provides a thorough treatment of the fox as symbol in Somerville and Ross’s work but does not address the consequences for actual foxes of these representations.
J. Devlin (1998) ‘The End of the Hunt: Somerville and Ross’s Irish R.M.’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 24(1): 24.
G. Lewis (1987) Somerville and Ross: the World of the Irish R. M. (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 135.
E. Somerville and M. Ross (1889 and 1908, rpt. 1991) Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. and Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. (London: Everyman), 71.
C. Adams (2000) The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum), 42.
T. Flanagan (1966), ‘The Big House of Ross-Drishane’, The Kenyon Review, 28(1): 64.
E. Somerville and V. Ross (1928) The Irish R. M. Complete (London: Faber and Faber), 423.
B. Luke (2007) Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals (Urbana: U of Illinois Press), 72.
E. Somerville (1934) Notes of the Horn, Hunting Verse, Old and New (London: Peter Davies), xi.
G. Mills (2009) An Urgency of Stars (Galway: Arlen House), 24.
P. Meehan (2000) Dharmakaya (Manchester: Carcanet Press), 61.
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© 2015 Kathryn Kirkpatrick
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Kirkpatrick, K. (2015). Quick Red Foxes: Irish Women Write the Hunt. In: Kirkpatrick, K., Faragó, B. (eds) Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434807_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137434807_3
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