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Can’t stop the reading list, 11.

11. Sue Coe, Pit’s Letter

I stumbled on this picture book—based on Sue Coe’s 1999 installment The Pit: The Tragical Tale of the Rise and Fall of a Vivisector—while researching William Hogarth’s 1751 engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty.  Pit’s Letter is a pastiche of Hogarth’s work, which dramatically illustrates how cruelty toward other animals swiftly and insidiously transforms into cruelty toward other humans.

Coe’s 28 images are accompanied by an epistolary essay written from a dog to his beloved boy, Pat Watson.  After being separated from Pit, Pat, like Hogarth’s Tom, engages in (what seems to be) arguably cruel behavior, like pulling the wings off a moth and, later, unarguably cruel behavior, like sexually harassing a mentally impaired girl.  As for Tom, for Pat, pulling the wings off that moth was the gateway drug that led him to enact much crueler behavior toward animals and people—he becomes a vivisectionist who is finally publicly dissected himself.  This story, like much of Coe’s work, foregrounds the contemporary tension between human cruelty toward nonhuman animals and that toward marginalized groups of humans, and the slippage between the two that authorizes both.

Image via Graphic Witness