Afrem Alshamani

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The personification of animals – An anthropomorphic analysis

The general view of animals and humans is that they are separate from one another in terms of
looks and behaviour. Yet, different cultures would still depict creatures with both human and
animal characteristics throughout time. Interestingly, these characteristics went from being
mostly about appearance and specific traits or attributes such as courage, they came to evolve
in more modern literature and media to something more complex and perhaps abstract.
Animals became more humanlike in terms of personality such as the character of The
Cheshire cat in the popular children’s novel by Lewis Carroll called Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865). The process of inserting humanlike features, emotions or actions onto
animals is described as anthropomorphism. The way anthropomorphism is used and described
can vary largely based on the literature, however in this essay my goal is to understand how
anthropomorphism is used in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) and where it stands in
term of the discourse of anthropomorphism.

The novel Watership Down (1972) is about a group of talking rabbits that decide to leave their
old home in search for a new home. The novel is therefore also another rendition of the old
and well-established literary tradition of using animals to tell a story. Furthermore, the fact
that the rabbits speak acts as the first sign of the anthropomorphic nature of the novel
followed by the fact that the rabbits seem to dream as well as is shown in the quote “Oh,
Hazel! I was dreaming. It was dreadful. You were there. We were sitting on water, going
down a great, deep stream, and then I realized we were on a board--like that board in the
field--all white and covered with black lines.” (Adams 2005, 13). The rabbits in the story are
therefore very humanlike in their speech and language. With that in mind it seems correct to
call the rabbits anthropomorphic as the meaning of the word is the human personification of
non-human animals. However, there is a difference between many of the stories that are of
anthropomorphic nature and the story of Watership Down. Mainly, that the story of Watership
Down still tells the story of the rabbits and keep the behaviour of rabbits relatively intact. The
rabbits do not act like humans besides their speech as is shown when the rabbits instead are
described as nibbling and crouching, “When Hazel and Fiver reached the floor of the hollow
they found Blackberry wailing for them, crouching on the peat and nibbling at a few brown
stalks of sedge grass.” (Adams 2005, 47).

Adams’ novel is different in the sense that it takes a route where the human is non-centric
rather, the animal or beast is his own creature with intelligence and emotions but different
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from humans in the sense that the human experience really is not the same as the experiences
of a rabbit, What Adams does is that he only uses human-like devices such as the English
language and reactions to explain the experience of the rabbits through a human lens. This
differs from the general way of writing anthropomorphic characters where the animal
characters usually show off mostly human-like experiences and feelings, almost as though
they are humans wearing an animal costume. Such an example can be seen is Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis (1915) where the character of Gregor Samsa one day starts to transform into
vermin that inhabits disgusting attributes. However, he is still a human originally and much of
his personality remains as mostly human. The interesting part is the transition, or the
“metamorphosis” of Gregor because he is a literal human turning into a non-human and thus,
the anthropomorphic features are in a way written backwards, it is not an animal with human
features but rather, a human with animal features. And therefore, the anthropomorphic feature
is also backwards written as it becomes about a human looking out through an animal lens
rather than the opposite which is presented in the passage “Gregor’s small limbs buzzed as the
time for eating had come. His wounds must, in any case, have already healed completely. He
felt no handicap on that score. He was astonished at that and thought about it, how more than
a month ago he had cut his finger slightly with a knife and how this wound had hurt enough
even the day before yesterday” (Kafka 2014, 26). This shows that there is a direct comparison
of human and animal life in Kafka’s novel and in that sense, it also taking another route from
the contemporary traditional way of writing anthropomorphic animal characters.

Where Kafka’s and Adams’ story do share similarities is that in Kafka’s story, Gregor does
show a bit about the experience of the animal he becomes meaning that even though making a
direct comparison of animal and human he then also explains the animal perspective as much
as possible just like the story of the rabbits by Adams “Am I now going to be less sensitive,’
he thought, already sucking greedily on the cheese, which had strongly attracted him right
away, more than all the other foods.” (Kafka 2014, 26). Meaning that he writes about how his
life is based also on his physical attributes but nonetheless, the creature in this case is still
mostly half and half whilst the rabbits in Watership Down are acting as rabbits throughout.
Furthermore, there is another aspect to Watership Down that makes it somewhat unique, the
fact that the rabbits in the story themselves try a form of anthropomorphism that does not
include the human element, an example of this is when Hazel, tries to understand the actions
and thought of Kehaar, who is not a rabbit but a bird. “Hazel felt at a loss. What exactly was
he to understand from this? Kehaar was not a rabbit. Whatever the Big Water was like, it must
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be worse than this and Kehaar was used to it. He never said much in any case and what he did
say was always restricted to the simplest, since he spoke no Lapine.” (Adams 2005, 283),’.
This shows that the rabbits are trying some form of anthropomorphism but instead of trying to
see Kehaar with human features, they try to understand him through a rabbit perspective.
What this means is that the story shies away from the regular anthropocentric storytelling.
Weitzenfeld & Joy (2014) argues that humans in general take a humancentric view of the
world, meaning that the human is the centre of most things by arguing that “For several
millennia, humans - at least those of Western cultures - have assumed a staunch
anthropocentric orientation, the effect of positioning humans as the center of meaning, value,
knowledge, and action.” (Weitzfeld & Joy 2014, 4). Furthermore, they argue that the idea of
anthropocentrism has its roots in the humanist belief system where the idea the common
belief is that the human is above animal beings and thus making the world centred around the
human. (Weitzenfeld & Joy 2014, 5). Therefore, in that regard, Watership Down strays away
from the humanist belief.

Watership Down rather takes the route of posthumanism where much of the belief that
animals and humans are at different levels in term of power has been reinterpreted. According
to posthumanism, animals and humans are separate, but the terms of animals and humans are
essentially flawed. Species are separate from one another and thus, to compare animals and
humans as if animals are on group and animals another group is not the way to look at things.
Humans are animals and should be addressed as different species, such as other species are
different from each other. Basically, posthumanism belief is that there should be a critical
view of the ethnocentric or anthropocentric belief when it comes to the discussion of animal
studies. As Wolfe (2009) writes in Human, All Too Human: "Animal Studies" and the
Humanities: “the human/animal distinction is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. How could a
simple (or even highly refined) binary distinction approach doing justice to the complex
ethical and ontological matters at stake here?” (Wolfe 2009,572).

In conclusion, despite being written from the view of the rabbits and in some ways personify
the animals, Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down cannot fully be explained as a story with
anthropomorphic characters. At least, it cannot claim to be a story about anthropocentric
characters though, it was not intended to be as such. Rather the point of Adams’ novel is to
take the posthuman view when writing the story. Meaning that he intended it to be about how
it is to be a rabbit and how their life would look like instead of it being about some hybrid of a
human and rabbit. Essentially, he removes the human from the character of the rabbit which
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deviates from the traditional writing where the animal usually has some human qualities to it,
as shown by Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

References
 Adams, R. (2005). Watership Down, Simon and Schuster.
 Kafka, F. (2014). The Metamorphosis [Elektronisk resurs]. Anncona Media.
 Weitzenfeld, A., & Joy, M. (2014). An Overview of Anthropocentrism, Humanism, and
Speciesism in Critical Animal Theory. Counterpoints, 448, 3–27.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/42982375
 Wolfe, C. (2009). Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities. PMLA,
124(2), 564–575. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614299