Brigid Brophy’s Pro-animal Forms

Abstract

This essay discusses two linked aspects of Brigid Brophy’s work as a pro-animal writer of literature. These are her determined usurpation of the human hierarchy and prestige that permit violence toward animal life, and her concomitant reliance on the potential of literary-formal creativity to prosecute it. I trace these elements in the text that contain the majority of Brophy’s literary-fictional writing about animals, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973), discussing the short novel in the form of a conte philosophique which goes by that title, and a number of short pro-animal fables that are collected with it. Drawing on archival materials, the discussion situates Brophy’s literary practice in the context of her influential journalism, essays, artworks made with Maureen Duffy, her work in support of early animal rights authors, and a recently discovered 1972 Open University interview on the topic of animal rights. A broader aim of the essay is thereby properly to recognize Brophy’s significance in the literary history of contemporary writing that challenges anthropocentric attitudes towards animals. Women’s writing is where one must look first for this development, in the work of key figures such as Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Patricia Highsmith, Ursula Le Guin, and Alice Walker. Yet, within the literary wing of the academic field of animal studies, which has burgeoned over the last fifteen years or so by discussing such figures, Brophy’s work has been almost entirely forgotten.

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