“Objection to Roast Chicken”¹: Feminist-Vegan Incidents in Daphne du Maurier’s “The Chamois” and “The Blue Lenses”

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Du Maurier, “Fairy Tale” 94.

² In her 1990 study, Adams uses the word “vegetarian,” but in her more recent publication, Protest Kitchen (2018), she uses the more accurate term “vegan” to encompass the exploitation of other animals in all its guises. Thus, I redefine Adams’s term as “vegan incidents.” The word “vegan” had been in use fifteen years before du Maurier published “The Chamois” and “The Blue Lenses.”

³ Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of nausea as a physical reaction to existential crisis – explored in his novel, Nausea (1938) – is evocative of Nietzsche’s lifelong interest in nausea, which du Maurier quotes in her novel, The Flight of the Falcon (1965).

⁴ Davies details the nausea-inducing cruelty inflicted upon hens.

⁵ Unlike vegan incidents thus far, this reference to honey is, of course, a “vegetarian,” not a “vegan” incident.

⁶ Friedan claims to encounter women who feel that their dissatisfaction is shameful and are oftentimes dismissed as ungrateful for the privileged life they lead (8, 13).

⁷ Giobbi also refers to “the cage of conventions” (81) and “the steel cage” (89).

⁸ O’Farrell explains that the “rest cure” was “a controversial treatment that [Dr Silas] Weir Mitchell pioneered” (x), which advocated bed confinement, isolation, and strict abstention from intellectual pursuits.

⁹ As outlined by Showalter, these procedures were considered ideal treatments for women, “judged to have less need of their brains … housewives can be seen as excellent candidates on these terms” (207).

¹⁰ Du Maurier revealed to her publisher, Victor Gollancz, that “The Blue Lenses” “reflected her view of the world” (Forster 299).

¹¹ This play on the word “shock” appears five times in “The Blue Lenses:” pp. 44, 46, 68, and twice on p. 73.

¹² The thalamus is related to the eye; it is “the part of the brain at which a nerve originates or appears to originate. Now spec. the optic thalamus” (“Thalamus”).

¹³ Adams’s discussion of the “long-established Draize test [which] involves dripping [chemicals with unknown consequences] into rabbits’ eyes” (Neither Man nor Beast 42) invokes the scientific view that women and nonhuman animals’ sight is disposable.