Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights
Lewis Carroll’s Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasies Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) provide plenty of fictional reformulations of the Victorians’ ambiguous relationship with animals. The vanishing and reappearing Cheshire C...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2018-12-01
|
| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3909 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1832581262110359552 |
|---|---|
| author | Anna Kérchy |
| author_facet | Anna Kérchy |
| author_sort | Anna Kérchy |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Lewis Carroll’s Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasies Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) provide plenty of fictional reformulations of the Victorians’ ambiguous relationship with animals. The vanishing and reappearing Cheshire Cat represents language that is ideologically manipulative and poetically subversive and distinguishes the speaking human subject from animals (Lecercle 1994); the Caucus Race led by the Dodo Bird is an absurd rehearsal of the Darwinian evolutionary theory’s competitive struggle for survival (Lovell-Smith 2007), while the dormouse in the teapot evokes how the ownership of certain animals could indicate class belonging (Ritvo 1987). These animals embody a curious otherness radically incompatible with the picara’s human self gradually destabilized by Alice’s numerous shape-shiftings which elicit her misidentification as a flower, a serpent, and a mythical beast. Carroll’s own description of his heroine with positive animal attributes, ‘loving as a dog’ and ‘gentle as a fawn’ (1887) resonates with an ethical agenda outlined in his novels starting out from the multidimensional interspecies relationship that conceives of difference in a non-dualistic, posthumanist deconstructive, Derridean (2008) way. Focusing on pragmatic, political stakes of Victorian animal allegory I unveil in the Alice tales references to Carroll’s support of animal rights, including his anti-vivisectionist commitment explicitly spelt out in his pamphlets and gaining fictional manifestations in his seemingly apolitical fantasies. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-c0390a1eeea64f49ae84b786f514dbbc |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2018-12-01 |
| publisher | Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| spelling | doaj-art-c0390a1eeea64f49ae84b786f514dbbc2025-01-30T10:22:06ZengPresses Universitaires de la MéditerranéeCahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens0220-56102271-61492018-12-018810.4000/cve.3909Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal RightsAnna KérchyLewis Carroll’s Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasies Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) provide plenty of fictional reformulations of the Victorians’ ambiguous relationship with animals. The vanishing and reappearing Cheshire Cat represents language that is ideologically manipulative and poetically subversive and distinguishes the speaking human subject from animals (Lecercle 1994); the Caucus Race led by the Dodo Bird is an absurd rehearsal of the Darwinian evolutionary theory’s competitive struggle for survival (Lovell-Smith 2007), while the dormouse in the teapot evokes how the ownership of certain animals could indicate class belonging (Ritvo 1987). These animals embody a curious otherness radically incompatible with the picara’s human self gradually destabilized by Alice’s numerous shape-shiftings which elicit her misidentification as a flower, a serpent, and a mythical beast. Carroll’s own description of his heroine with positive animal attributes, ‘loving as a dog’ and ‘gentle as a fawn’ (1887) resonates with an ethical agenda outlined in his novels starting out from the multidimensional interspecies relationship that conceives of difference in a non-dualistic, posthumanist deconstructive, Derridean (2008) way. Focusing on pragmatic, political stakes of Victorian animal allegory I unveil in the Alice tales references to Carroll’s support of animal rights, including his anti-vivisectionist commitment explicitly spelt out in his pamphlets and gaining fictional manifestations in his seemingly apolitical fantasies.https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3909non-anthropocentric ethicsVictorian animal rightsCarroll (Lewis)Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandanti-vivisectionalismenvironmental philosophy |
| spellingShingle | Anna Kérchy Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens non-anthropocentric ethics Victorian animal rights Carroll (Lewis) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland anti-vivisectionalism environmental philosophy |
| title | Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights |
| title_full | Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights |
| title_fullStr | Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights |
| title_full_unstemmed | Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights |
| title_short | Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights |
| title_sort | alice s non anthropocentric ethics lewis carroll as a defender of animal rights |
| topic | non-anthropocentric ethics Victorian animal rights Carroll (Lewis) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland anti-vivisectionalism environmental philosophy |
| url | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3909 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT annakerchy alicesnonanthropocentricethicslewiscarrollasadefenderofanimalrights |