Wed 15 Oct ∞ Permalink

Can’t stop the reading list, 15.

15. Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

The complex and contradictory relationship between humans and nonhuman animals in the Victorian era is not terribly different from the present one.  It might rightly be said that evolutionary biology of that period did more to shape and problematize contemporary thinking about those relationships than did any other scientific pronouncement.  At least it brought with it serious thinking about our treatment of other species and this seminal anthropomorphic text.  Black Beauty competently, if not fully, characterizes the tension especially extant in the human-horse relationship in which humans treat Beauty simultaneously as animal, pet, and utility.