Abstract
Knots of distraction and action: Animal representation in Charlotte Wood's fiction
Animaladies II, pp.12-13
Animaladies II (Wollongong, Australia, 13-Dec-2018–14-Dec-2018)
2018
Abstract
Australian author Charlotte Wood has been described as a subversive writer, challenging patriarchy, ageism and the human treatment of animals. Her novel Animal People is centrally concerned with this latter theme, and Wood has said she is 'interested in why we need animals to … be a kind of repository of all these feelings we seem unable to bestow on human beings' (Wood in Fidler 2012). At first glance, her satire of infantilising domestic pets and the converse brutality towards other species, in Animal People, is a critique of modernity's entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism, a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. But the relationship between animal representation and meaningful critique in Wood's oeuvre is problematic. Animal imagery abounds in Wood's The Natural Way of Things. Ironically, considering Wood's earlier critique of the projection of human values on animal subjects these animal images are often read as only metaphors for human experience. That is, as symbols for the degradation of the women interred in a dystopian camp (Osbourne 2015) or, alternatively, as symbols of tenderness, a relief from the horror, violence and misogyny of the rest of the textual action (Newman 2016). There lies some potential for empathy in this connection: woman and animal as allies under linked systems of oppression. The Natural Way of Things illuminates the intricately connected systems of patriarchy and speciesism, yet it is also replicates it. Wood's stance is further complicated by her cook books: carnist recipes as salve 'to nourish the soul'. This paper will examine the connected human/animal subjectivities in Wood's work as both action and distraction, a testimony to some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals.
Details
- Title
- Knots of distraction and action: Animal representation in Charlotte Wood's fiction
- Authors
- Clare Archer-Lean (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast - Faculty of Arts, Business and Law
- Publication details
- Animaladies II, pp.12-13
- Conference details
- Animaladies II (Wollongong, Australia, 13-Dec-2018–14-Dec-2018)
- Publisher
- University of Wollongong
- Date published
- 2018
- Organisation Unit
- School of Business and Creative Industries; Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Creative Industries - Legacy; Sustainability Research Cluster
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99451436902621
- Output Type
- Abstract
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