‘Irishness’ and the Equine Animal in Anne McCaffrey’s the Lady: A Novel

Abstract

ABSTRACT National identities may be one of the most problematic aspects of Irish history, in part because they can hardly be detached from the symbolic instrumentalisation of more-than-human animals. In the case of ‘Irishness’, one of the animals most commonly chosen for such human purpose is the Irish horse. I contend that the horse as a symbol for the (re)negotiation of ‘Irishness’ might be spotted in Anne McCaffrey’s The Lady, set in the 1970 Ireland. Here, the author explores how the human protagonist, an Anglo-Irish girl, interacts with several equine animals and copes with the death of her first pony. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to find evidence of how horses and ponies are used to ease anxieties about hybrid identities related to humanness and Irishness, and, on the other hand, whether and to what extent the human protagonist’s accident with her pony character involves an ethical encounter with the nonhuman Other that helps her to resist anthropocentric uses of nonhuman animals.