Jane Austen would be cheering him on]
Purely by chance, the revival this week of discussion in Janeites and Austen-L about the slavery subtext of Mansfield Park coincides with a real life, modern, intentional echoing of the 1772 Somerset case (aka the Mansfield case, because decided by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield aka William Murray) involving the dawn of legal rights for another class of oppressed individuals.
To
wit, it is my privilege to report to you today the fruition of longstanding
efforts by my good friend, Steve Wise, THE
world's leading animal rights lawyer, and how his quest relates to the theme of
servitude and denial of natural rights in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
That Steve
is the world’s leading animal rights lawyer probably sounds like the gross exaggeration
of a partial friend, but when you read this article which will be the cover
story of this coming Sunday NY Times Magazine....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/the-rights-of-man-and-beast.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/the-rights-of-man-and-beast.html?_r=0
…and watch
this mini-documentary…
…and
go to this Facebook page….
..you
will see that i am just being factual about my buddy. And he is my buddy, as it
so happens, because of the slavery subtext of Mansfield Park, so in a sense, Jane Austen introduced us!
Steve
and I became friends in July 2006, because he had just published a nonfiction book
called Though the Heavens May Fall a
few months earlier....
http://books.google.com/books?id=aKjO79hoAnUC&pg=PP3&dq=THough+the+heavens+may+fall&hl=en&sa=X&ei=InNaU4mJMsK-sQSU9oGoCg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA
http://books.google.com/books?id=aKjO79hoAnUC&pg=PP3&dq=THough+the+heavens+may+fall&hl=en&sa=X&ei=InNaU4mJMsK-sQSU9oGoCg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA
...in which he recounted the fascinating, dramatic history of the Somerset/Mansfield case, which, as we’ve been discussing here, was the first great judicial decision that declared slavery illegal on English soil, even though, hypocritically, it did not ban slavery in the English colonies! But it was the beginning of the end of that mass slavery, even though the slave trade didn’t end till 1808, and the actual colonial slavery didn’t end till decades later still. The abolitionists, led by the charismatic Clarkson and many others, never flagged in their high goal.
Anyway,
I reached out to Steve personally because I was in the summer of 2006 first intensively
researching the slavery subtext of MP. After reading Margaret Kirkham’s speculation
(in her way-ahead-of-its-time book, Jane
Austen, Feminism & Fiction) that the title “MANSFIELD Park” was chosen
by JA because of that 1772 case, I naturally wanted to learn more about the circumstances
of the case, and Steve’s was the best book among those I found on the topic. And
then I noticed in the jacket flap that Steve just happened to live 15 minutes
away from me in Broward County, Florida, so I found his phone number, reached
out, and we became great ftf friends, and still are!
Anyway, that’s all background to my post today. As the above linked NY Times Magazine article indicates, Steve is now an overnight sensation after 20 years of hard work creating the Nonhuman Rights Project....
http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/
Anyway, that’s all background to my post today. As the above linked NY Times Magazine article indicates, Steve is now an overnight sensation after 20 years of hard work creating the Nonhuman Rights Project....
http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/
…and
he has all along been acutely aware of the history behind his forward-thinking
quest for certain nonhuman animals (such as cetaceans, higher primates, and
elephants) to be granted legal personhood.
Although
Steve is not a Janeite (I’ve been working on him since 2006, and he has
recently begun to read Pride & Prejudice,
so there’s hope for him still!), his approach is very Austenian in its profound
grasp of the decisive importance of subjective point of view in determining
perception of “reality”.
I.e.,
just as, in 1772, it seemed “obvious” to most white Europeans that enslavement
of black Africans in American colonies was one normal and appropriate foundation
for the English economy, so too does it seem “obvious” today to most human
beings that the complete denial of rights to sentient highly evolved nonhuman
animals is not a problem, as long as those animals are not subject to extreme physical
abuse.
Steve
recognizes that he is looking for a massive paradigm shift in moral thinking, a
leap perhaps even bigger than the one that took a major step forward in 1772 in
England, which caught JA’s eye.
And
how exactly does this relate to Jane Austen’s novels? Discussions in these
groups about abolitionism in JA’s era often turn to questions of what seemed
normal and moral to ordinary people of that time, in terms of whether slavery
was a profound evil that needed to be eliminated.
I
firmly agree with Diane Reynolds that it is inconceivable that Jane Austen thought
slavery was a good thing, or even a necessary evil—that would make her a kind
of split personality sociopath, who could be extremely sensitive to the rights
of people in one context, and yet oblivious to their rights in others. That’s
not the Jane Austen I know.
What
I do believe is that JA was appalled at colonial slavery, and its genocidal
horrors, but she was also outraged at the way that women’s legal and moral
rights were for the most part utterly ignored and trivialized in her society.
That she was outraged at the latter does NOT mean that she equated the magnitude
of the evil between the systematic but lower grade abuse of millions of Englishwomen
in everyday life, and the murderous exploitation of millions of African slaves
on plantations. She knew the difference, but her particular cause was women’s
rights, and she knew it was a worthy one, especially because there were not
many public figures advocating for freeing women
from their insidiously invisible form
of servitude to men.
Steve
at one point in one of his interviews was asked why animal rights are so
important in a world where so many human
rights are still being trampled in many parts of the world. And his answer is
that he is appalled at those human rights abuses, but there are already many advocates
for those human victims, but there has never been an effective, motivated, well
organized, legally sophisticated campaign in human history to defend the rights
of nonhuman animals, and that is HIS chosen task.
And
back to Jane Austen for another round---as Patricia Rozema so brilliantly put
it after she made her groundbreaking version of Mansfield Park in 1999, this novel is above all a multifaceted
meditation of every shade and nuance of servitude in human social relations, in
particular the hypocrisy of those like Sir Thomas Bertram, who pride themselves
on their moral rectitude and superiority, even as they are rotten to the moral core
under the surface.
And,
in that regard, I have long believed that Fanny Price is in part a
representation of the biracial Dido
Elizabeth Belle (who by the way is the subject of a new independent film, Belle), the great niece of Lord
Mansfield depicted in this famous Zoffany painting along with her cousin, a
woman whom JA met and talked to at Godmersham…..
..and
that Lord Mansfield was therefore represented by Sir Thomas Bertram. This illustrates
that even the man who was capable of doing good on a mass scale (although, as
Steve’s book recounts, Lord Mansfield waffled for a long time before rendering
that decision), was also in his personal life a kind of hypocrite who did not
fully embrace the implications of his own, famous legal decision. I.e., he
treated his white great niece differently than his biracial great niece. And
that is quintessential Austen ironical territory, the rationalizations that
people make to justify moral inconsistencies in their own behavior and
attitudes.
And finally,
apropos animal rights, we all know that JA, having grown up in the countryside,
was well acquainted with all manner of domesticated animals, and she often
compared women to beasts of burden, most notably her beloved niece, Anna Austen
Lefroy, whom she famously referred to as a “poor animal” because she was
pregnant for the second time in as many years since getting married.
I believe
that JA would have been a supporter of my friend’s project, had it been in
process during her lifetime. The sad truth of human history is that these moral
paradigm shifts seem to always be long overdue and painful. It has taken two
centuries for many of the changes regarding women’s rights, that JA clearly
yearned for, to be significantly implemented. And even in 2014, there is still
a LONG way to go before we reach true gender equality.
I
sure hope Steve does not have to wait 2 centuries for his great dream to become
real.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
onTwitter