ABSTRACT
Like today’s young readers, nineteenth-century children encountered farm animals in a range of texts designed to educate, entertain, and model social norms for them. During a time of urbanization and diminished contact with real nonhuman creatures, mother hens, ducks, and geese joined cows, sows, ewes, and nanny goats in the pages of stories and rhymes intended to instruct young readers in the challenges and virtues of motherhood. These farmyard mothers are variously held up as examples of idealized, self-sacrificing nurturers; extolled for their utilitarian value as food products and producers; and critiqued or punished for their occasional refusal to meet human expectations for productivity in different forms. At the same time, texts exploring the daily realities of farmed females and their relationships with human owners and consumers foreground maternal animal exceptionalism by dwelling on the bodily products and challenging notions of human superiority on which assumptions about natural dominance were founded. Through a posthuman lens informed by Marxian and psychoanalytic literary theory, the chapter argues that these unheralded moments of resistance prefigure contemporary understandings of species interconnectedness and the breakdown of a constructed dualism between humans and other elements of creation.
