The White Bone: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide?

The White Bone: Crossing the Human-Animal Divide?

Linda Vance, from Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations

Crafting narratives that will give voice to animals and make humans care about them in appropriate ways is no easy task. We want to avoid anthropomorphizing animals even though that has proven itself an effective tactic for mobilizing public sympathy toward them. We need to be faithful to their stories, not our own. The goal is not to make us care more about animals because they are like us, but to care about them because they are themselves. (185)

Graham Huggan, from “’Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives”

- Gowdy articulates “resistance to authoritarian habits of thought and value-systems, connecting these clearly to the dominating practices of imperialist and/or neocolonialist regimes …” (701)
- The White Bone “confronts the impossible task of making animals speak without humans speaking for them … converting them from passive objects for human use into self-willed ‘ecological subjects’ (term borrowed from Dobson)” (714)


Sample Reviews (emphases mine):

Amazon.com Review
“Alas, this is a book heavy with omens and slaughter, and Gowdy makes each elephant so individual, so conscious, that their separate fates are impossible to bear ... As the devastation increases, and her characters fail, and fail again, to find the magical white bone that should lead them to safety, the novel becomes a litany of pain and death. The only success is Barbara Gowdy's, in getting so thoroughly under the skin of her elephantine protagonists.”

Publishers Weekly Review
“In this novel … [Gowdy] has chosen to inhabit the minds of a series of elephants in African desert country, and despite her great skill and the colossal effort of imaginative empathy it must have entailed, her book is hard going. For a start, as in one of those vast generational sagas … There is a great deal of interesting elephant lore, about the nature of their fabulous memory, their scenting and tracking skills, their eating, drinking and fornicating habits. Without being overly anthropomorphic, Gowdy manages to individualize a number of them as having human-scale emotions, even humor …”


Discussion Questions

1. Gowdy carefully researched African elephants for The White Bone (see the acknowledgements section, p. 329 in my edition), supposedly to make it “realistic.” But is this book really about elephants? It reads like a narrative about a tribal human society, replete with magical thinking. And often like a satire of human beliefs, behavior, vices, religion etc.

- evolution as the Descent (p. 7) ridicules the idea that “man” is the end point of the evolutionary process
- female vanity: She-Scares’ “youthful appearance” (p. 25)
- superstition and religion: “Mourning order” on page 13 (390 verses), Tall Time’s superstition (49)


2. To what extent is The White Bone a valid attempt at trying to imagine animal “subjectivity” or “interiority”? Or is it just an adult version of the “talking animal” story (Aesop's Fables, the speaking serpent from the Book of Genesis, or even contemporary children’s movies like Finding Nemo or Madagascar) in which animals are endowed with certain human characteristics (i.e. foxes are cunning, elephants never forget)? Gowdy clearly seems to rely on stereotypes.

3. We have been talking about the ecocritical concept of “the voice of nature” and the need to listen to this voice and/or express it. Does The White Bone succeed at all in expressing “the elephant voice” through what at times is pure fantasy? Is “the colossal effort of imaginative empathy” one of the reviews mentions the right approach to do this? How can we even begin to evaluate her effort? If escaping anthropocentric thought is impossible, then is creating imaginative inter-species connections the best way to express “the voice of nature”?

4. Aren’t there hidden dangers behind Gowdy’s anthropomorphism? Doesn’t it create the illusion that “a partnership” with elephants is possible, that they are just like us, only a little different? That nature is something we can fully grasp and relate to and, therefore, fully control?