Features
What the Animals Have to Say
English prof says we need to read between the lines of animal-centric works from Charlotte's Web to Stuart Little
BY ANDREW VOWLES
| What we write about animals says a lot about how we treat them, says Prof. Anne Milne. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Animal weaning, mating and motherhood, transportation of food animals � and British literary texts? No, there hadn't been a conference mix-up. Among the biologists and animal and veterinary scientists on the bill at last month's first-ever research symposium hosted by U of G's Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare, there was room for insights from Prof. Anne Milne, English and Theatre Studies.
Milne has spent about a decade studying how writers � particularly 18th-century writers � depict and give voice to animals. When she learned the conference organizers were looking for speakers, she believed she had something to say. But it was hardly a one-way street.
�I also thought it was a good opportunity to learn what some agricultural people are thinking about,� she says.
At the conference, Milne discussed two literary works during her talk on �The Power of Testimony: the Speaking Animal's Plea for Understanding in a Selection of 18th- Century British Literary Texts.�
The Mouse's Petition, a poem by Anna Letitia Barbauld, is a lament by a trapped mouse to Joseph Priestley, who conducted experiments on air and oxygen. Reading excerpts from a children's book by Dorothy Kilner called The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, Milne also discussed views of children's and adults' behaviour and values.
Those works may seem removed from the hands-on topics in animal husbandry discussed by other speakers and conference attendees. But she believes people's views and treatment of animals � livestock, lab animals, pets � develop out of ideas ingrained early through cultural practices and products.
Do you think of The Wind in the Willows, The House at Pooh Corner, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web as benign storybooks for kids? Think again, says Milne, who read all those children's classics while growing up in Guelph. Nothing is just a story. �Stories have a powerful effect on who we are.�
She believes people can reveal attitudes by looking more closely at how stories, art and even products like those stuffed animals on a shelf in her office represent animals.
�The question I'm interested in is, how much do we need to listen to these kinds of representations? When humans speak for animals or use animal voices, what inaccuracies or problems come out?�
Milne says these are ethical questions that need to be considered in treating animals, as difficult as it may be for people to think about animals as �stakeholders� in their own welfare. (Other conference speakers from the College of Arts were philosophy professors Jean Harvey, who discussed animal use, and Karen Houle.)
�It's a hugely complex question,� says Milne � not just for animals but for humans as well.
She suggests that it also shades into our views of environmental issues. Do we see ourselves as a part of nature or apart from it?
�If humans separate themselves from their reality as animals, then do they also separate themselves from nature?�
Viewing literary works through an environmental lens is ecocriticism, another keen interest for Milne. She thinks there are ethical lessons in varied books, from anything by Thoreau to works by Utah naturalist-author Terry Tempest Williams to the �dystopian� Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
For Milne, thinking about the environment involves being conscious of your own place in it. Simplistically, writers and critics call that �setting,� alongside character, plot, dialogue and other elements. But it's deeper than that, she says. You develop environmental awareness through your own experience. She admires authors who can summon that sense of place in their works.
Hoping to underline that connection for Guelph students, she is developing a course for the fall that will take undergraduates on walking tours, perhaps historical walks on campus or a nature jaunt through the Arboretum. She credits Thoreau's essay Walking as part of the genesis for that idea.
She's also taught the introductory literature course called �Reading the Past� and fourth-year seminars on ecofeminism and on the animal in 18th- and 19th-century literature.
Milne arrived at U of G in early 2007 from a faculty position at McMaster University's Centre for Leadership and Learning. After growing up in Guelph, she completed three English degrees at McMaster.
She still lives in downtown Hamilton, where she's an artist and enthusiastic gallery-goer. Milne marries text and photographs for installations that often comment on the nature of art itself. Her 2004 project about the development of a downtown mall raised questions about how citizens engage in urban design and politics. That's a topic that she acknowledges resonates with her current interest in lending a voice to the voiceless.
This year, Bucknell University Press will publish a book based on Milne's PhD thesis, which looked at labour and class issues in the 1700s. Borrowing from a line by poet Ann Yearsley, the book is called Lactilla Tends Her Fav'rite Cow: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in 18th-Century British Labouring-Class Women's Poetry.
Milne smiles. �That's in keeping with 18th-century literature � they liked long titles.�
Prof. Georgia Mason, Animal and Poultry Science, says the humanities faculty brought a different perspective to the symposium.
�They are much more comfortable about asking unsettling questions like: Are we consistent in how we treat different species? If not, why not? And how much of what we do to animals is simply morally wrong?�