Book review: Black Beauty
Black Beauty, by Anne Sewell, is a classic. I read it two-chapters-a-night to my 7 year old daughter, who was delighted. It follows a hallowed tradition of presenting some of the most awful and wrenching life events to the reader and passing it off as appropriate fare for children. Sort of like Old Yeller. You know what I mean. But Black Beauty doesn't die at the end of the book, even if he is old and turned out to pasture.
I say 'he' because in the book the horse is male. But at the beginning I asked my daughter if she wanted Black Beauty to be a girl horse or a boy horse. She said girl. This was followed by a convoluted effort to genderswap the characters, which really opened my eyes to things. Had I done a 100% swap, there would have been hardly a speaking male left in the book, because nearly every character in the text is male. Random horses in a field are all uniformly male (colts). Hacks are male. Cart horses are male. Hunting horses are male. Hounds are male. People in the street are male. Cab drivers are male. Doctors are male. People who work on the road are male. Toll booth attendants are male. Everyone is fucking male except for the female relations of lords, wives, widows, and the occasional little daughter - all of whom have limited on screen appearances. Do you see how the females are uniformly defined by the man they are related to?
Genderswapping also resulted in ridiculous subversions, like where the lord begged his lady to show restraint and be 'fair', and was then cavalierly rebuffed by the lady who rode off to do whatever the hell she wanted to do, leaving her simpering husband to pine after her. Another was in how I turned the only prominent female character of the book (Ginger, a high strung mare who had been badly treated by a previous owner, and becomes friends with Black Beauty) into a male. Suddenly all those high maintenance traits looked incredibly assholish without the excuse that she was a highborn lady and therefore entitled to act out.
The underlying message of the book is how people need to be kind to animals. Sewell portrays them as thinking and feeling creatures who don't deserve the mistreatment humans give them. (Not that I think 'deserving' ever had anything to do with it.) It was a seminal work for the animal welfare movement and has been described as the most influential anti-cruelty book of all time.
It's tough to argue with someone who espouses love, but nevertheless I've always found the book a bit too sentimental. Here's a quote from the end of the book: ".... there is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham...."
-Black Beauty, Chapter 13, last paragraph.
True, yes, but ... it always rubbed me the wrong way. My daughter loved it, but she's a lot more soft-hearted than I am.
I say 'he' because in the book the horse is male. But at the beginning I asked my daughter if she wanted Black Beauty to be a girl horse or a boy horse. She said girl. This was followed by a convoluted effort to genderswap the characters, which really opened my eyes to things. Had I done a 100% swap, there would have been hardly a speaking male left in the book, because nearly every character in the text is male. Random horses in a field are all uniformly male (colts). Hacks are male. Cart horses are male. Hunting horses are male. Hounds are male. People in the street are male. Cab drivers are male. Doctors are male. People who work on the road are male. Toll booth attendants are male. Everyone is fucking male except for the female relations of lords, wives, widows, and the occasional little daughter - all of whom have limited on screen appearances. Do you see how the females are uniformly defined by the man they are related to?
Genderswapping also resulted in ridiculous subversions, like where the lord begged his lady to show restraint and be 'fair', and was then cavalierly rebuffed by the lady who rode off to do whatever the hell she wanted to do, leaving her simpering husband to pine after her. Another was in how I turned the only prominent female character of the book (Ginger, a high strung mare who had been badly treated by a previous owner, and becomes friends with Black Beauty) into a male. Suddenly all those high maintenance traits looked incredibly assholish without the excuse that she was a highborn lady and therefore entitled to act out.
The underlying message of the book is how people need to be kind to animals. Sewell portrays them as thinking and feeling creatures who don't deserve the mistreatment humans give them. (Not that I think 'deserving' ever had anything to do with it.) It was a seminal work for the animal welfare movement and has been described as the most influential anti-cruelty book of all time.
It's tough to argue with someone who espouses love, but nevertheless I've always found the book a bit too sentimental. Here's a quote from the end of the book: ".... there is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham...."
-Black Beauty, Chapter 13, last paragraph.
True, yes, but ... it always rubbed me the wrong way. My daughter loved it, but she's a lot more soft-hearted than I am.