ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the domestication of human and nonhuman bodies in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, his Grooms and Companions: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877), considering how moral discourses are narrated through sentimental fi ction and melodrama. The didactic narrative of Black Beauty off ers a “humanizing” tale, an instructional discourse meant to guide individual self-improvement, in this case, improvement in the behavior of master toward servant, human or nonhuman. There is a tension in Black Beauty between its call for change and the narrative’s grounding in liberal humanist values, which uphold social and species hierarchies. While addressing inequalities and unjust treatment for disadvantaged groups, Black Beauty remains circumscribed within the ontological diff erences upon which these inequalities and injustices are based. This chapter traces how the sentimental and melodramatic narrative of Black Beauty appeals to readers, positioning humans as actors in redemption stories that enforce economic, social, and political relationships of privilege among humans and human dominion over nonhuman beings. I argue that this same sentimentality and its ontological implications characterize many contemporary animal rights and animal welfare discourses, which, while working to ameliorate the often inhumane conditions under which animals live in contemporary industrialized societies, remain grounded in a humanist model of species diff erence and a hierarchical logic of relationality that perpetuates social inequalities.
