She did not understand the fun of shooting birds

In her novels and private correspondence, the gap was narrowed. What was human became animal and what was animal became human.

Image credit: The Hogarth Press

Since the first cave paintings, humanity has used animal imagery to understand the world around them. Critic John Berger posited that “it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.” While not provable, the plausibility of that theory underscores the deep relationship literature has on other creatures.

What’s surprising then is how literary and philosophical circles have consistently dismissed the study of animals on their own terms and have instead insisted on a metaphysical distinction that always has humans in a dominant position. Drawing on religious frameworks like the Christian Great Chain of Being, many attempted to locate human existence within a spectrum bookended by animal kind and divinity. Man served God and animals served man. Some even feared acknowledging that humans and animals shared a foundation. Martin Heidegger warned this risked humans “collapsing back into [their] animal substrate."

By the turn of the 20th century, modernist writers like Virginia Woolf were beginning to find this conception incompatible with the world they witnessed. The outbreak and continued aftershocks of the Great War, alongside a growing naturalist and evolutionary conception of human nature taught Woolf that humans were fragile and much more like animals than previously thought.

In her novels and private correspondence, the gap was narrowed. What was human became animal and what was animal became human. Woolf was one of the first in the English canon to not use animals as mere symbols or representations of human life but made sense of them on their own terms, accounting for their own material and experiential reality.

Woolf was a lifelong pacifist and anti-war activist. Attending a Labour Party conference in Brighton discussing British intervention after the outbreak of war in 1914, her friend Hermione Lee wrote “she watched in horror as the arguments for pacifism and non-resistance were overridden.” Even more outspoken by the 1930s, she opposed economic punishments being laid on Italy for their invasion of Abyssinia, recording a meeting with Aldous Huxley in her diary, “We walked round Ktn [sic] Gardens yesterday discussing politics. Aldous refuses to sign the latest manifesto because it approves sanctions. He’s a pacifist. So am I.”

She became surrounded by constant death and human suffering. By 1914, she had already lost her mother Julia, her father Leslie, her brother Thonby, and now she had to witness bodies piling up by the thousands and families all around her experiencing the same pain. Humanity became expendable and almost futile.

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf begins to put deaths in brackets, glossing over them as if she was reading from the lists local officials churned through:

[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

For Woolf, this overwhelming fragility became a frame through which she would then see in the animal world. What was increasingly happening to young men in the trenches was happening to creatures all around her.

In her essay ‘The Death of the Moth,’ Woolf painstakingly details a moth falling from a windowsill:

It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew had any chance against death.

When humans were reduced to the state of moths, Woolf was compelled to consider their suffering as deserving of empathy and attention. How small or seemingly insignificant a creature was no longer became enough to dismiss it when death felt so universal, its experience so fundamental to all living creatures.

While writing her novels, Woolf began to realise that even the most mundane actions were dependent on the abhorrent treatment of animals. Describing Macalister’s son preparing a fishing line in Lighthouse, Woolf writes: “Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait the hook with. The mutilated body (it was still alive) was thrown back into the sea.” 

Woolf was one of the first to describe what Shakespeare realised centuries earlier in King Lear, "Like flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; They kill us for their sport." Perhaps we should step to the side when we notice a group of ants.

Animals, to Woolf, didn’t just deserve empathy because they could suffer and die. She also increasingly viewed the relationships and affections they developed as akin or even purer than the feelings between people. Fascinatingly, in her marriage and novels animals often stand in for the love that human society doesn’t allow.

In Mrs Dalloway, Richard Dalloway’s fragile masculinity and workaholic lifestyle means he is often unable to openly express his feelings for his wife Clarissa. Woolf describes him as “a man who cared only for dogs.” When boxed in by a society that wants Richard to bury his emotions, he finds an escape and solace with a creature who is not bound by the same rules. In a letter to Woolf, her husband Leonard expressed that well when he wrote:

If you really understand an animal so that he gets to trust you completely and, within his limits, understands you, there grows up between you affection of a purity and simplicity which seems to me peculiarly satisfactory.

Virginia and Leonard even compared themselves to animals as a way to avoid the direct sentimentality they both often rejected. In one exchange overflowing with innuendo Woolf wrote to her husband, “the Mandrill' [species of monkey] wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest plumage and invites you to an exhibition.” She would even sign letters “Yr. Mandrill” among other species. Nothing says you think animals and humans are on the same plane more than inviting them into your most intimate conversations.

When shooting birds in Lighthouse Jasper is asked by his mother, “Don’t you think they mind…having their wings broken?” He responds in a way almost every boy at the time would have:

Why did he want to shoot poor old Joseph and Mary? He shuffled a little on the stairs, and felt rebuked, but not seriously, for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds; that they did not feel; and being his mother, she lived away in another division of the world.

With Jasper, Woolf identifies the cognitive dissonance in all of us. Deep down, we know animals feel, and even Jasper will name the birds he is about to kill. However, because we are so dependent on a world where a clear line exists separating human and animal, any admission to the contrary is deeply uncomfortable.

If anything, Woolf’s work demonstrates that rethinking the gap between human and animal is not just morally necessary but can also be emotionally liberating.