ABSTRACT
The year 1847 was a pivotal year in the history of literary feminism and animal advocacy in Britain; in this year, Anne Brontë’s first novel addressing oppressed women and exploited nonhuman animals, Agnes Grey, was published, and the Vegetarian Society, with its concern for animal welfare, was founded. The following year, when Brontë published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel centred around a woman trapped in a marriage to a bird-hunting, abusive husband, the Women’s Rights Association was founded in America. Brontë published her two novels in the context of an emerging feminist-animal advocacy insurgence in Western culture that grew out of the previous generation’s radical vegetarian and feminist politics. This chapter examines Brontë’s fiction in the light of the concomitant women’s movement and animal welfare advocacy that emerged in the 1790s – with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and a plethora of vegetarian treatises that urged better treatment of nonhuman animals – and persisted throughout the nineteenth century. An analysis of the pervasion of animal hunting, consumption, and torture in Brontë’s novels demonstrates intersections between speciesism and gendered oppression, and foregrounds the challenging questions posed by women writers and activists regarding the assumed power of men over women and humans over other animals. This chapter explores the tensions between an Enlightenment legacy of speciesism that underpins Brontë’s feminist fiction and the emergence of a feminist-vegetarian consciousness.
