Content warnings: domestic abuse, animal abuse, extreme violence
Many proponents of traditional marriage and patriarchy advise us to look back to the good old days. J.D. Vance notoriously and nostalgically claimed in September 2020 that divorce rates in the past were much lower even when ‘these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy’. This was part of a longer speech arguing for the noxious effects of divorce on children, and claiming that the rot set in during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. In a UK context, Alena Kate Petitt, an online influencer, advised her followers to submit to their husbands ‘like it’s 1959’, and strikingly put this together with a patriotic streak: ‘it’s harnessing the best about what made Britain great’.
Historians are always tempted to counter nostalgic ranting with an apparently more rigorous approach to ‘what actually happened’. But here, it’s the nostalgia itself which is particularly interesting, because ‘twas ever thus. The most virulent defenders of patriarchy in earlier periods, too, have always been looking over their shoulders to a golden age when apparently men were men, and women were submissive. This article explores this kind of infinite regress back through the centuries, and it does so through the particular lens of the connection between abuse of women and of animals.
Recent scholarly and activist work on domestic violence has stressed that intimate partner abuse often goes hand in hand with cruelty to animals. Police are encouraged to look for early signs of domestic abuse when they are notified of cases of animal cruelty. And animal welfare charities such as the Cat Protection League are drawn into unlikely alliance with agencies like Women’s Refuge and Women’s Aid. The patterns of such abuse are wide-ranging, but three features stand out: in situations of coercive control, emotional attachments to animals are often leveraged to prevent women from leaving; cruelty to animals is often indicative of volatile and disordered personalities which actively seek to harm women; and animal abuse is sometimes used pedagogically to establish domestic hierarchies.
And this connection between animal and intimate partner abuse is so often shot through with nostalgia – as if the appeal to the good old days in any way justifies domestic violence and coercive control. If modern-day abusers of both animals and women seek inspiration in a nostalgic longing for what they believe to be gendered dynamics of the past – ‘traditional marriage’ – they might be reminded that those men to whom they look, were themselves looking backwards in a process of infinite regress.
In 1840, the popular historical novelist Harrison Ainsworth published his wildly popular novel The Tower of London. Largely forgotten now, in his own day he outsold Dickens. The book tells of the tragic downfall of Lady Jane Grey, and is tinged with nostalgia for a sixteenth-century age of romance and chivalry. In a comic interlude, one the warders of the Tower, Magog, marries the cook, Dame Placida; Magog is described as a giant, but is ruled over by his fierce and bossy wife. One day, he reaches the end of his tether, takes her to the Tower menagerie, and looses the brown bear which is kept there in order to terrify her into submission: ‘the savage denizens of the cages set up a most terrific roaring’; Magog’s amused brothers note that ‘He is about to give his dame a lesson’; ‘And above the roaring of the animals and the angry growling of Max [the bear], which Magog had provoked with a sly kick or two, was heard the loud laughter of the gigantic brethren.’ His wife is terrified – ‘“I promise,” she uttered faintly’ (chapter 19). Magog turns, and gives the bear another sharp kick.
It’s a repulsive scene, but one which is presented as setting the world to rights, and in comic vein too. The connection between abuse of animals and abuse of women is quite explicit. The cruelty to the bear is used to coerce Dame Placida, and also provides Magog with the dose of sadistic self-validation he seems to need. And the hierarchical schema on which this draws is emphatically nostalgic. The nineteenth-century Ainsworth, with his sixteenth-century setting, was inviting his Victorian readers to look to an earlier time when men knew how to control their wives. The implication is that modern nineteenth-century husbands were failing in this, and yet we now know the Victorian era to have been one of ultra-patriarchal conceptions of marriage and the role of women. This kind of patriarchal nostalgia sustained the insecurities of their present by evoking a nostalgic gaze on the past, and doing so by eliding gendered and human-animal hierarchies.
What about the sixteenth century to which Ainsworth turned his gaze? Around 1594, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew was performed for the first time. It evokes many of the motifs which Ainsworth reprised with such glee: the ‘taming’ of a woman, Katherina, by her husband, Petruchio – by extreme gaslighting and coercive cruelty – depriving her of sleep and food. But it also picked up on the animal theme, by comparing Katherina to a shrew, seen in the sixteenth century as a poisonous little creature (happily my own son’s early experience with a shrew involved nursing one back to health with a tiny pipette), a wasp, a hen, a dove and a hawk: ‘Another way I have to man my haggard,/ To make her come, and know her keeper’s call’ (Act IV, scene 1, l. 187-190). Here, the logic of violence against an animal is apparently transposed to frame abuse of a woman as pedagogical, as well as coercive: like the shrew, Katherina must learn to keep quiet.
And the play again looks backwards through time. The ‘taming’ plot itself is framed by a narrative which promises a ‘kind of history’ (Act 1, scene 1, l. 144). Violent patriarchy looks backwards, seemingly unaware that the period for which it hankers was busy looking backwards too.
There is much debate about the source of Shakespeare’s plot, but the most compelling argument suggests its oral and folkloric origins: the motif was a common one (Type 901 in the Aarne-Thompson classification system). One of the most shocking iterations of this motif is known as La mégère émasculée, a thirteenth-century old French fabliau.
In this popular and apparently comic tale from northern France, a young count marries a beautiful young woman, but is shocked to discover that his mother-in-law is ‘une feme male’ – a masculinised woman, who bosses her husband around and contradicts his every word. His father-in-law manages the situation simply always by saying the opposite of what he wants, in the knowledge that his wife will contradict him – but the young count decides that he needs to restore the true hierarchies of the past within his own marriage. Again, the tale is shot through with patriarchal nostalgia. The very era that Shakespeare was drawing on, itself perceived masculinity as under threat and in need of the inspiration of the ‘good old days’.
And the count’s ‘restoration’ of true marital hierarchy is achieved through his treatment of animals, alongside a brutal beating of his wife. When his two hunting dogs don’t manage to catch the hare he orders them to chase, he cuts their heads off, to the horror of his young wife (l. 264). When his horse stumbles, he mutilates it on the spot (l. 276). The violence is unrelenting, and its logic hyper-legible. It works physically to coerce the young wife into submission, but also to guilt-trip her through emotional blackmail. When the mother-in-law comes to stay, things reach a climax. The young count, with the help of his men, forces her to lean over with her bottom in the air, and makes two excruciating incisions in her buttocks from which he triumphantly pretends to remove a pair of bulls’ testicles (l. 452). This, he tells her, is the reason for her topsy-turvy behaviour. She is now apparently cured – and in horrific pain. The narrator gleefully concludes that ‘Dahet feme qui despit home’ – ‘damned be women who disrespect their men’ (l. 584). Animal cruelty is again transposed onto domestic abuse.
These recurrent longings for past eras of patriarchal control, moving ever backwards through the centuries, should give us pause. The persistence of the connection between abuse of animals and abuse of intimate partners lends even more urgency to calls for police and social workers to recognise these signs; and reminds us of the entanglement of different forms of abuse. And the excavation of the chain reaction of nostalgias backwards across the centuries hopefully begins to challenge some assumptions about what has changed and what hasn’t.
More than this, we might also hope that victims and survivors today can find solidarity with women of the past. Just because these misogynist nostalgias were so strident does not mean they were unchallenged. Even the appalling fabliau story of La mégère émasculée invites a set of alternative readings: the extreme levels of cruelty by the count undercut their own validity and his ultimate ‘emasculation’ of his mother-in-law is based on a fabrication, as the audience knows perfectly well that the woman did not have testicles in her buttocks. Threaded through all these stories then is buried the truth that this is, in fact, all a lie.