From the horse's mouth: On Talking Horses in BLACK BEAUTY

Thought Bubble. III

Hello, fellow ghost reader!

Welcome back to my Substack!

You may have been expecting Part II of my exploration of literary headlessness, and rather sooner than this piece graces your inbox. Alas, I have been waylaid by some plague this past week and did not possess strength enough to finish it on time. Woe is me! (At least it has provided the opportunity to catch up on my reading - I’m currently working my way through some Elizabethen theatre, can you tell?)

Never fear, I am recovering and hope to release it at some point this coming week, just in time for Halloween! But I thought in the meantime I could share this extract from a presentation I gave during my Master’s degree on talking horses in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. It’s a bit rough and ready (the presentation wasn’t marked, and at least ¼ of it was written on the day while the girl before me on the program was giving her talk), but I still find the subject matter fascinating and I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts should you give it a read!

I hope you enjoy it!

A ghost reader 👻

tw: this piece contains references to animal cruelty

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Ginger and Beauty; taken from the 1994 adaption.

[This presentation examines the point of contact between human and horse, which takes place in the horse's mouth and its ability to speak. This is certainly true for the reader because obviously we’re being told this story by a horse (Beauty himself), but I think this remains true within the narrative as well. I also want to (sort of) suggest that the book doesn’t depict a conflict between beast and man, but the connection between the two in the polemic discourse between the temporal - and specifically corporeal - and the spiritual] 

So what is the horse in this text? And how does it function? 

For starters I think it’s interesting that, very often, discourse around the book praises it for its apparent verisimilitude. Now, I’m not necessarily going to disagree with this, but I do think that such an assessment really glosses over the book’s main narrative feature which is that horses can talk, at least to one another, and to us, the reader.

Here are the in-universe rules of horse-speak in Black Beauty:

1. Beauty talks to us.

2. Horses talk to other horses.

3. They’re not speaking some kind of horse dialect - we know they speak English because they fluently understand human discourse and are able to engage with it (although not verbally).

4. There are also civilised or even moralised aspects to horse speak, and more broadly the horse's mouth, as it takes on social manners: They say things like ‘how do you do?’, and suggest that the use of one's mouth can be impolite, for example when beauty moves into the stall next to Merrylegs and Merrylegs says ‘I hope you are good-tempered; I do not like anyone next door who bites’. 

5. Crucially, horses cannot talk to humans. This is a point which is laboured on a number of occasions, most notably when the carter, Jakes, is chastised for using check-reins on Beauty by a lady who says ‘we call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words’.

6. Horses cannot talk to other animals. Although Beauty sees other animals he never speaks with them. So presumably only dogs speak to other dogs; rabbits to other rabbits etc. Therefore, identity only takes place where language can be constructed - a horse is a horse because it speaks to other horses. Only humans are able to communicate universally and be understood, and this is what sets them apart from the animal kingdom.

I’ll expand on some of this later, but for now I think it's important to acknowledge that the point of separation between humans and Horses in this book doesn't lie in the ability to speak but the ability to speak to humans.

But, in order to understand the importance of the speaking horse, we must first understand the the horse as a purely corporeal form.

To do so, we must understand that Black Beauty is a book which perfectly demonstrates Derrida’s ‘beast and sovereign’ theory, according to which, the beast becomes the sovereign through the act of devourment of the other (that is, through the mouth) and vice versa, which Derrida posits, essentially makes them the same. Essentially, the beast consumes the sovereign and becomes the sovereign himself; the sovereign consumes the beast and exposes his own carnivorous bestial nature. Black Beauty demonstrates time and time again that the ownership of a horse, and the ways in which its body is used, can transform even the lowliest of men into a master, and that the necessity of the master is dangerous and degrading for the horse even potentially when the master is good. Fundamentally, the various means by which the horse is ‘consumed’ for capital gain renders the consumer both beasts and masters.

Moreover, there is potential within the text for this dynamic to also be reversed. [I have lost the quote I used to demonstrate this (if anyone recognises the essay/author, please comment below), but basically it argued that:] although the horse is subject to human will, the horse in the human imagination still takes on a dangerous presence as something which the human has close physical contact with, and which poses a constant physical risk to the human should control be lost since the horse is big, powerful and fast-moving. Certainly that threat is present in Black Beauty. It often references the dangers  that come from a horse being spooked, and, circling back to the focus on the mouth, there's a lot of emphasis especially early on in the text of the capacity of the horse to bite or snap.

However, this doesn’t accurately represent the horse in this book which takes great pains to tell us that the ‘dangerous horse’ is very much a man-made creation. Beauty is constantly reminding us that the threat horses present is only present if the human counterpart does something wrong, and the horses would not be dangerous to humans if they weren't mistreated. Ginger, who is notorious for biting, only does so because she has been mistreated, and desists biting when her master is kind to her. Furthermore, a lot of the time the horses demonstrate unaccountable levels of patience when dealing with careless or dangerous humans, such as when Merrylegs simply stands on his hind legs and lets the annoying kids slide safely off his back when he’s tired of playing, rather than bucking or kicking. 

My point is that, for literal beasts, they’re not very beastly, and in fact all kind of uncivilised, irrational, or uncontrollable nature we associate with the beast is pretty much exclusively displayed by humans. In this way then, Sewell’s text upholds the beast/sovereign paradigm, but exclusively within the human body, transforming the human pursuit of fashion and capital into acts of predation through which their own humanity is devoured.

So where does that leave the horse - if it’s not human and not a beast then what is it?  

Well, if the beast and the sovereign meet at the point at which they devour one another, then the horse comes to be the evidence of the metaphorically devoured human body, thrown into grotesque abstraction by its separation from humanity in its animal form. Essentially, the body of the horse is for Victorian society, what the painting is for Dorian Grey: not a horse at all, but a horrifying and uncanny representation of humanity wrought on the whipped, exhausted body of the mistreated horse. From this perspective, the ability of the horse to speak, and particularly their concern for human manners and politeness, becomes deeply troubling as it is reduced to a parody of the human.

This links to the text's representation of the paradoxical occupation of the horse in Victorian society as both a status symbol and a beast of burden. At almost all points in his life, we are roughly aware of Beauty’s monetary worth and what that means for the person paying for him, which the text uses to comment on class structures.

But the more important thing, I think, is the effect this has on the construction of the body of the horse in the text, which is now figured as a product and which performs various services for its human owner, aligning it with the Victorian reliance on industrial machinery, but which we also understand to some degree as resembling humanity in that technology represents the diversion of the human from the beast. Essentially, the body of the horse figures as an automaton in the book. The text utilises the societal construction of the horse to inform the function of its body in the same way as machinery is built for purpose, while also imbuing it with the power to mimic humanity, to some degree, through speech. As such, the figure of the suffering horse also very obviously could be extrapolated onto human bodies marginalised by Victorian society: Beauty’s story line mirrors slave narratives; Ginger embodies a lot of oppressive gender politics of the time.

If we focus entirely on the corporeal textual presence, the horse is not a horse at all, but a post-human, post-biological dystopian depiction of a society in which only an elite, privileged class are able to universally communicate, while the horse's mouth is only utilised as a dispassionate means of fuelling production - the ability to speak, nothing more than a tragic by-product of the advancement of human civilisation. However, the horse is not just presented as a body in this text, it’s also a mind - capable of thought and reason - and this is also explored through the ability to speak, and specifically in its role as narrator of a moral tale. 

So, to go back to the in-universe rules for horse-speak, one of its implications - probably the most important for defining the horse in this text - is that the decision to have a horse as the narrator necessitates a strange dynamic whereby all of important narrative exposition concerning the text’s human presence has to happen in and around the stables (with the occasional exception when Beauty is working directly within human society). Obviously, this is for our benefit because Beauty can’t leave the stables at will to venture forth into society and eavesdrop on their narratively pertinent conversations. The only conversations that Beauty hears, and is able to relay to us, have to happen in or around the stables where Beauty spends most of his time. However, it’s often pretty tenuous that this would be the case. For example, in chapter 18 when Beauty is woken in the middle of the night to summon the doctor to save Mrs. Gordon’s life. This is how the scene plays out: the stable bell goes, which wakes up John (the coachman); John goes up to the house, presumably to be told that Mrs. Gordon is ill and he needs to go and get the doctor; John comes back to the stables alone, followed by a squire, who there gives John the note to give to the doctor, and expresses through dialogue with John that it is for the sake of Mrs. Gordon's life. Could they not have given John the letter at the house? What is even the point of him even going up to the house if not to get the letter? Is it all that natural to express that Mrs Gordon is ill moments after having come back from the house where he was presumably already told this? 

The only explanation for the decision to have the scene unfold in this way is that Beauty can’t know what is being said up at the house, thus the conversation must be drawn back to the stables. This is, of course, a purely logistical decision, however, it is interesting to me that the resulting effect is the construction of a world in which the characters’ compulsion to discourse equally compels them to return to the stable in order to enact that discourse.

This is significant for a few reasons. First being that, once again, the horse’s mouth is emphasised as the locus for human, animal and narrative discourse. Second, it also kind of aligns these scenes of dialogue within the stable with religious practice. I’m thinking particularly of the practice of Quaker prayer. If you are unfamiliar, Quaker belief does not support preaching and worship doesn’t rely on the leadership of a minister. Instead, practitioners will sit in silence and anyone might stand up and speak if they feel moved to do so). This mirrors the highly didactic nature of the text. Beauty doesn’t waste time undiscerningly relating his day to day life - each individual chapter holds some kind of moral lesson, and is made into its own mini fable. Sewell was a Quaker herself, and, although I don’t know to what extent religious coding of the construction of the stable for the purpose of dialogue was intentional, I think it’s interesting that the moral tenets of the text, more or less, begin and end in the stable.

I think this could be related to how, by and large, good humans engage with the horse in the stable, and bad characters don’t, mainly engaging by proxy through their paid subordinates who relate the details of their lives in proximity to the horses. Beauty only hears about the ignorant views of the earl and his wife through their groom, for example.

The stable functions as a liminal space - attached to the domestic sphere, but not quite part of it; housing animals and located in nature, but not being natural itself; a place of industry for the horses and the people employed there, but an industry which is only necessary to support the more important industry of Victorian transport which takes place away from the stable. It’s the space that manifests in between all the spheres in which the humans must orient themselves, and it’s also the space where the horse primarily exists. As I mentioned before, ultimately the horse is subject to the will of its master, and the book demonstrates how it is the body of the horse upon which the consequences of this will is rendered and must reconcile itself to - lacking the ability to verbally express itself, relying on the knowledge and the intuition of its master for its very existence, and passing silent judgement on them.

As such, the horse, through its discourse, represents the soul which must be at all times considered and protected against degradation. Therefore, the horse-narrator is a paradoxical figure - fundamentally a physical tool for the use and advancement of human society, and also the means by which such advancement might be ruined, or at least not worth it. And here we might divert on a little theological tangent, because if the horse is a representation of the soul - responsible the salvation or damnation of humanity and presumably able to commune with God on such matters - as the audience for this communication, can we conclude that we are God? Or, since horses can only talk to other horses (and Beauty is speaking to us) should we conclude that we are a horse? Is God a horse? Verified horse-girl, Anna Sewell, probably thought so. Are we that horse god? Maybe.

This is, I admit, a rather silly thought-experiment, but one I think it’s worthwhile pondering since, as we have seen, this is a text in which the boundaries between horse and human are in a perpetual state of collapse and metamorphoses. Ultimately, I think that this is a text in which we as the reader are forced to confront both the beast and the sovereign within ourselves and ask ourselves whether they are just.