Altruism and Agriculture: The Ethics of Fictional Farmyards

Abstract

This Creative Writing thesis comprises a creative and a critical component. The critical component, "An Arrant Traitor to His Defenceless Sheep": Farmyard Ethics in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, examines the work of this canonical Victorian author. Hardy's work is often characterised by biophilia, and the animal life represented in his fiction is complex, nuanced, and ideologically loaded. Scholars have long been fascinated by Hardy's animals and their meanings in his works (West, Kreilkamp, Cohn, Sumpter, Levine, Beer, Sherman, Carroll, Martell, Fischler). While wild creatures and domestic pets in Hardy's novels have received ample critical attention, livestock have been registered by only a few scholars. The thesis uses a theoretical approach from Animal Studies, an interdisciplinary project aimed at interrogating human-animal relations, as well as extensive existing research on Hardy's fiction. It asks how an author so invested in animal welfare depicts an industry so founded upon animal exploitation, which is fundamental to Hardy's landscape. To answer this question, the thesis examines three novels central to Hardy's oeuvre that are characterised by their agricultural content. These are Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). I argue that Hardy's depiction of livestock animals is best understood as displaying two competing discourses, one humanitarian in nature and the other utilitarian, and that the unreconciled contradictions of these competing discourses creates a lingering tension. This tension has the effect of creating a shocking and visceral experience of the farm which provokes further consideration of animal issues like carnism. Reading Hardy's novels in this way opens up understandings of Hardy's conceptions of human-animal relations and exposes the masterful literary techniques used in expressing them. The thesis also illuminates Victorian animal rights discourses, sets out their continuing implications today, and even more crucially, highlights the influential role that fiction can take in animal welfare discussions. The creative and critical components are united in their desire to explore how fiction can grapple with the inherent ethical paradoxes of traditional animal farming. Where Green Limbs Grow depicts a rural community centred around animal farming. In the fictional hamlet of Westhill, newcomer Charlotte watches her farmer neighbours naming their animals and also consuming them, assisting in the birth of calves and dragging them from their mothers, sees their gentleness and their duplicity. Charlotte struggles to reconcile these components of the farmer's role whilst simultaneously grappling with new realisations about her own animality. Show more