Humans and Animals by Julie Urbanik Connie Johnston

Author:Julie Urbanik,Connie Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

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Literature, Animals in

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Narrative (story) exists in myth, fairy tales, legends, histories, and personal accounts. The appearance of animals in literature is culturally significant because literature reflects our understanding of ourselves and of society. For example, animals appear in satirical and political literature as vehicles for social commentary and change. Culture is also informed by our literature. Narrative meaning is produced and maintained though language and shared understandings in societies or cultural groups through traditions, conventions, norms, and standards. Stories not only tell us how we are, but they suggest how we should be.

Animals in literature have been used to guide human behavior in many ways. Bestiaries (animal encyclopedias popular in Medieval Europe) catalogued and illustrated real and imagined animals according to the human qualities they represented. Animal depictions and descriptions often inaccurately represented the actual animal in order to teach moral or religious lessons.

Aesop (620–564 BCE) used animals to dictate moral lessons in fables. The fable “The Hare and the Tortoise” teaches that keeping slow and steady will win a race, and the story of the shepherd boy who cried “wolf” teaches that those who habitually lie will not be believed when they tell the truth. Aesop’s fables, and many other texts, anthropomorphize (ascribe human characteristics to) animals. Anthropomorphism of animals in literature serves to distance readers from subjects that may be difficult to address directly or to make life lessons easier to learn.

The ascription of human characteristics to animals can be positive or negative. Anthropomorphized animals feature prominently in the work of Rudyard Kipling, whose stories invoke stereotypes (oversimplified but widely accepted ideas) such as that of the deceptive snake in The Jungle Book (1894) and the independent and opportunistic cat in The Cat Who Walked by Himself (1902). Wolves are portrayed as intentionally cruel, snakes as deceptive, cats as evil or magical, and rats as criminal. Cruelty, deception, and the propensity toward evil or criminal behavior are not qualities inherent to the biological or social structure of nonhuman animals. Rather, they are human socially constructed qualities (qualities created by human society).

Human qualities assigned to animals in literature can transfer back to real animals and result in fears or beliefs that strain human-animal coexistence. For example, wolves were widely detested in Europe and were eradicated from many parts of Europe by the Late Middle Ages (ca. 1500 AD), but the wolf remained a part of western culture through stories. Wolves are commonly portrayed unfavorably in fairy tales and fables such as The Three Little Pigs (1886) and Little Red Riding Hood (1812) as deceiving, lustful, or crazy. These derogatory depictions have continued to increase heightened fear of real wolves, which inhibits conservation of wolves worldwide.

Hybrid animals such as the werewolf continue to be used to represent the animal qualities of a human that are socially undesirable, such as recklessness, gluttony, and aggressiveness. These qualities threaten the stability of orderly society and are characteristics and behaviors our moral lessons teach against. Humans are animals,

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