SOURCE: “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women's Fiction,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 231-62.

In the following essay, Scholtmeijer provides a feminist reading of animals in literature written by women.

Contextualizing the Problem

In her introduction to Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Ursula Le Guin raises the issue of talking animals in literature and conceives of the alienation of the Other in the following superb analogy:

In literature as in “real life,” women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is … the foundation of language, the Father Tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all these non-men who won't learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking...