Violation of Animal Rights: Anthropocentric Domination in Sewell’s Black Beauty

Abstract

This research focuses on the study of the writer’s advocacy of animal rights and her concern for the ecological betterment in Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty. The narrator has criticized the anthropocentric domination of the horses and ecology by self-centered Victorian Englishmen in the novel. The writer has given voice to the horse named Black Beauty and exposed the horrific and harsh treatment of the horses by the mankind from the perspective of the animals. The horses are sold, resold, abused, and used as the commodities; they are tormented by the human expectations that they need to be as efficient as the steam engines. The horses show resistance kicking their owners whenever the suffering is unbearable at the risk of their life. The animal commodities have great role to play in the production of anthropocentric histories of which the mankind is solely responsible. Sewell has criticized this man-centered attitude and has advocated for the harmonious world in which the animals are treated as equally important entities like human beings making her novel a manifesto of animal rights and brilliant piece of environmentalist discourse.