Abstract
“The Vegan Viewer in the Circum-Polar World” examines, in unprecedented detail, The Diana and Chase in the Arctic, a canvas by the little-known, early-nineteenth-century marine painter, James Wheldon, part of a local Hull School of painters focused upon depictions of Arctic whaling. The chapter contextualizes the iconography and materiality of the canvas within a broader discussion of the humanimal tragedy of Victorian whale hunting, as conceptualized, for the first time, by a specifically ethical vegan viewer, pondering not only how various animals are represented in the image, but might have contributed to its painting in the first place. The chapter concludes by pondering questions of violence: what kinds we, as vegans, must tolerate, and which we might find ourselves drawn to.
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Notes
- 1.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Oxford, 1988), p. 402.
- 2.
For more on Hull as the centre of long-nineteenth-century whaling, see Arthur G. Credland, The Hull Whaling Trade: An Arctic Enterprise (Hull, 1995); and on the broader context of whaling in Britain in the period, Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade (Hamden, 1978). For more on the Hull School of painters, see Credland, Marine Painting in Hull Through Three Centuries (Hull, 1993), and Martha Cattell, “The Hull School of Whale Painting,” in Jason Edwards, ed. Turner and the Whale (London, 2017).
- 3.
As discussed in the introduction to this volume, the question of human exceptionalism is a vexed one within current conceptualizations of veganism.
- 4.
The tide is turning regarding the status of British Folk Art. For a significant reappraisal, see Ruth Kenny, Jeff McMillan, and Martin Myrone (eds.), British Folk Art (London, 2014).
- 5.
For more on Wheldon, see Credland, Marine Painting in Hull, p. 107.
- 6.
For more on the ways that animals are rendered into “absent referents” within scholarly discourse, see Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (London, 1990). The status of description is currently a hotly contested field in cultural studies. For landmark interventions in this debate, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations (Fall 2009): 1–21; and Heather Love, “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–391. For more on the importance of surface-level engagements in critical animal studies, see Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art (Minneapolis, 2011).
- 7.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996). For the original account of the black Atlantic, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993). For what might be at stake in making such a dreaded comparison between whaling and slavery, in a combined critical race and critical animal studies frame, see Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York, 1996). See also John Akomfrah’s 2016 installation, Vertigo Sea, whose three-screen projection explores both the potential parallels and overlaps between Atlantic whaling and slavery, as well as the current European refugee crisis, the experience of the Vietnamese boat people, and the dropping of political prisoners into the South Atlantic by the Chilean Junta.
- 8.
Conceptualizations of tragedy, in both literary and theatrical terms, from classical antiquity onwards, have centred on human protagonists. I use the term “tragedy” self-consciously here, to raise the status of the deaths of animals from an interchangeable, quotidian event that can easily be ignored or forgotten, to a singular event with memorable emotional and ethical significance.
- 9.
I specify ethical vegan viewers here, so as not to generalize vegan viewers as a single category, and to differentiate, from the start, an ethical vegan perspective from, say, a vegan-for-health viewer’s response. Vegan-for-the-environment viewers are likely to represent different spectators again, given the complex relationship between the end of Atlantic whaling in the nineteenth century and the emergence of our fossil fuel cultures. In so doing, I seek to respond to Laura Wright’s conceptualizations of vegan identity as importantly performative, and, like Wright , desire to “disrupt the homogenous notion of what it means to be vegan” (The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (Athens, 2016), p. 23).
- 10.
John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London, 2009).
- 11.
Arthur G. Credland, Marine Painting in Hull (Hull, 1993); Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain (New Haven and London, 2007); and Russell A. Potter, Arctic Spectacle: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (Seattle, 2007). For a further synoptic account, see Louise Lippincott and Andreas Bluhm, Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900 (London, 2005).
- 12.
For more on Turner’s whaling pictures, see Barry Venning, “Turner’s Whaling Subjects,” Burlington Magazine 127 (1985): 75–83; Robert K. Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens, 1992); and Edwards (ed.) Turner and the Whale. For more on metropolitan marine painting in the long eighteenth century, see Eleanor Hughes, ed. Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting (New Haven, 2016).
- 13.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), p. 22. There has been much debate about the race , class , and gender assumptions of contemporary vegan identity, given the claim that “70 percent of U.S. vegans are white and female” (Wright , Vegan Studies Project, p. 31), leading to the widespread critique that “Western” veganism is a product of developed-world privilege, and its capitalist networks of consumption, with surprisingly little argument back that, if so, then veganism is a first world responsibility. For further debate, see A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan: Black Vegans Speak on Food, Idenity, Health, and Society, (New York, 2009).
- 14.
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 22.
- 15.
Credland, Marine Painting, p. 107.
- 16.
Wheldon would return to depict the Diana on a number of occasions. She appears in his The Diana in an Ice Dock, in The Whaler Diana, and in The Diana and Anne in the Arctic, the first and third in the Hull collections. Indeed, Wheldon’s depiction of the Diana in The Diana and Chase in the Arctic and in The Whaler Diana and The Diana and Anne in the Arctic are almost identical. For more on the Diana, see Charles Edward Smith, ed. The Nightmare Voyage of the Diana: From the Ship’s Journal of the Ship’s Surgeon Charles Edward Smith (Lerwick, 2014).
- 17.
For example, early nineteenth-century whaler William Scoresby junior’s An Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (Edinburgh, 1820) described multiple scenes of “hunting and fishing”, and how his crew of “hunters” killed “seals, sea-horses, &c in the water, and bears , foxes , deer, or whatever else they met with on land” (pp. 93, 143).
- 18.
This figure recurs in Wheldon’s Hull Whaler ‘Harmony’ also in the Hull collections. For more on the natural and cultural history of seals, see Victoria Dickenson, Seal (London, 2016).
- 19.
For more on the prints, see Stuart M. Frank, Classic Whaling Prints and their Original Sources from the Permanent Collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum (New Bedford, 2016), pp. 35, 38. Wheldon later used the same seal scene for his 1863 canvas, Warships and a Paddle Steamer off Ailsa Craig (Hull Maritime Museum).
- 20.
For more on the natural and cultural history of walruses, and pinnipeds as the supposed missing link between fish and mammals, see John and Louise Miller, Walrus (London, 2014), and Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
- 21.
For more on Ward, see the Ferens Art Gallery, John Ward of Hull, Marine Painter, 1789–1849 (Hull, 1981).
- 22.
As Heathcote Williams’s Whale Nation (1988; London, 1989) reminds us, every bone, membrane, and hollow of the whale’s body forms “part of an enormous ear,/Twenty times as sensitive as man’s”, while the sounds of whales singing led “sailors to believe,/As the sounds infiltrated through the wooden hull,/That their vessels were haunted,/By the spirits of the deep” (pp. 16, 18). For more on the natural and cultural history of the whale, see Joe Roman, Whale (London, 2006). For the longer history of the mute appeal of paintings in the context of critical animal studies, see Stephen F. Eisenmann, The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London, 2013).
- 23.
For more on Inuit experiences of the Arctic and encounters with whalers, see Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London, 2000), Dorothy Harley Eber, When the Whalers Were Up North: Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic (Boston, 1989), and Meg Boulton’s “Exploring Frozen Worlds: Inuit Art in the Hull Maritime Museum,” in Edwards (ed.), Turner and the Whale.
- 24.
The walrus on the left, especially as juxtaposed with a group of narwhals heading northwest into the picture, repeats a similar creature and configuration in Wheldon’s Hull Whaler ‘Abram’ and also in his Hull Whaler ‘Harmony’ (after William John Huggins) (1829, also in the Hull collection). The seal to the far left, diving into the water, and third from the left, also recur in both the Abram and Harmony pictures.
- 25.
David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon, and Sam Smiles (eds,), Late Turner: Painting Set Free (London, 2014), pp. 51, 170–173. For the uses of blubber in house paint, varnish, and putty, see Jackson, The British Whaling Trade, p. 56.
- 26.
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, 2010), p. xxxiv.
- 27.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, 2003), p. 1.
- 28.
Cited in Wolfe, Animal Rites, p. 11. For more on the trace, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). For related conceptual moves, see Julie Andreyev, “The Compassion Manifesto: An Ethics for Art and Design and Animals,” in Critical Perspectives on Veganism, eds., Jodey Castricano and R. Sasmum (London, 2016), pp. 155–180.
- 29.
Wolfe, citing Bruno Latour, in What is Posthumanism? p. xx; and Wolfe, Animal Rites, pp. 23, 120.
- 30.
Wright, Vegan Studies Project, p. 2. See also Wright’s account of “vegan media” (p. 140).
- 31.
While I fundamentally disagree with its pescatarian predilections and conclusions, my sensitivity to the humanimal tragedy of whaling here draws upon the compassionate evenness, regarding both fish and fishing communities, of Elspeth Probyn’s Eating the Ocean (Durham, 2016).
- 32.
For more on the Franklin expedition, see Andrew Lambert, The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin’s Tragic Quest for the North Passage (New Haven, 2009).
- 33.
We might also want to think about the varieties of violence Wheldon depicts in the painting in relation to, and as a further displacement or sublimation of, another human tragedy unfolding in the mid-to-late-1850s, the Indian Mutiny. After all, the precise date of the canvas, 1857, was the year of the rebellion in the subcontinent. Admittedly, the Indian tropics and the Circum-Polar ice are literally half a world apart, but one of the major lures of the Arctic, for the Victorians, was the hope of finding a Northwest Passage to India. Wheldon’s hunting scene and the Indian Mutiny were also united by the question of animal fat: in the picture, in the form of the mammal blubber , sought for food, light and warmth; in India, the offensive use of pig and cow fat that indigenous sepoys were required to employ to lubricate their guns, representing one of the widely-reported causes of the rebellion.
- 34.
For more on the Arctic picturesque, see I.S. Maclaren, “The Aesthetic Map of the North,” Arctic 36, no. 2 (1985): 89–103.
- 35.
For more, see Chauncey Loomis, “The Arctic Sublime,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, eds U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 95–112; Diana Donald, “Sublime Animals: Briton Riviere’s Beyond Man’s Footsteps,” Tate Papers (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/diana-donald-sublime-animals-briton-rivieres-beyond-mans-footsteps-r1129553); and Benjamin Morgan, “After the Arctic Sublime”, New Literary History 47, no.1 (2016), pp. 1–26.
- 36.
Francis Spufford, I May be Some Time, (London: 1996), pp. 6, 61–62, 140.
- 37.
For example, Jackson documents that by 1788, the number of vessels equipped by Hull was greater than that from all the Scottish ports, and that the years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were marked by an increasing concentration of the trade in Hull. Thus, between 1800 and 1802, Hull almost doubled her involvement. By the mid-1830s, however, Hull only maintained 35–40% of the overall British fleet (The British Whaling Trade, pp. 73, 87, 130).
- 38.
For a brilliant reading of the softness of fur in the context of sentimental aesthetics, see Caroline Arscott, “Sentimentality in Victorian Painting”, in Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late-Victorian Britain, ed. Giles Waterford (London, 1994), pp. 64–81.
- 39.
For more on seal hunts , and the so-called “murder in the nursery” of baby seals each year by hunters, see Dickinson, Seal, pp. 147–152, which explores the idea of seals as “the babies of the sea” (p. 148) and their murder as “comparable to killing kittens with claw hammers” (p. 152).
- 40.
Jackson, The British Whaling Trade, pp. 144, 146–148.
- 41.
For Ahmed’s original characterization, see The Promise of Happiness (Durham, 2010), pp. 50–87. For a related notion of “spoiler vegans,” see Wright, Vegan Studies Project, p. 46.
- 42.
Richard Twine, “Vegan Killjoys at the Table—Contesting Happiness and Negotiating Relationships with Food Practices,” Societies 4 (2014): 623–639. For a related move, see Grant Juawana et al., “Lisa Simpson and Darlene Conner: Television’s Favourite Killjoys,” in Critical Perspectives on Veganism, pp. 307–329.
- 43.
Carol J. Adams, Sexual Politics, p. 13.
- 44.
Adams’s later work expressly turns to vegan issues. For more, see Carol J. Adams, Pattie Breitman, and Virginia Messina, Never Too Late to Go Vegan: The Over 50 Guide to Adopting and Thriving on a Plant-Based Diet (New York, 2014); and her foreword to Laura Wright, Vegan Studies Project, pp. xi–xix.
- 45.
Blayney Brown, Concannon, and Smiles, eds, Late Turner, pp. 51, 170–173. For more on Turner and his contemporaries’ use of spermaceti oil, see Joyce H. Townsend, Turner’s Painting Techniques (1993; London, 2007), pp. 51, 62, 78–80. For example, Townsend documents that the painter also used spermaceti in The Dawn of Christianity (The Flight Into Egypt) (1841) and almost certainly in Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters (1844); that “mixtures of beeswax and spermaceti wax” have “been found in other nineteenth-century paintings”; and that Leslie Carlyle’s “extensive studies of instruction books and manuals for oil painting have produced numerous recipes for wax-oil mediums, using both of these waxes.” For more, see Leslie Carlyle, The Artist’s Assistant: Oil Painting Instruction Manuals and Handbooks in Britain 1800 to 1900 with Reference to Selected Eighteenth-Century Sources (London, 2001), pp. 113–118, 409–410.
- 46.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, 2010), pp. 9–10.
- 47.
Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, pp. 145–146.
- 48.
Bennett, Vibrant Matter, pp. vii, ix, 120.
- 49.
Twine, “Vegan Killjoy,” p. 624.
- 50.
In raising these questions, I am mindful of Wright’s sense of vegan identity as being profoundly contradictory, with a widespread “association of veganism with terrorism” juxtaposed with a sense of veganism as a “decidedly pacifist ideology” (Vegan Studies Project, p. 40).
- 51.
For an excellent introduction to Klein, see Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London, 2001).
- 52.
Sara Salih, “Vegans on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” in The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, eds. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine (London, 2014), pp. 52–67.
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Acknowledgement
The chapter is dedicated to Diana Maltz, who had faith in it, when it needed it the most.
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Edwards, J. (2018). The Vegan Viewer in the Circum-Polar World; Or, J. H. Wheldon’s The Diana and Chase in the Arctic (1857). In: Quinn, E., Westwood, B. (eds) Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73380-7_4
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