Finding Necrophilia in Meat Eating: Mary Daly’s Evolving Femveg Perspective

Mary Daly’s books, like her life, are populated with animals. From William Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger burning bright”¹ on the dedication page of Beyond God the Father to her cat coauthors of the Cat/egorical Appendix to Pure Lust,² from the cow who jumped over the moon in Outercourse,³ and all the animals who joined her (and Mary) there: frogs, tigers, seals, emus, elephants, canaries, raccoons, wolves, whales, bears, bats, squirrels, birds, and trillions of insects. From the gorillas, like Dian Fossey, hacked to death, and discussed in the Wickedary,⁴ from Dolly the Sheep, transgenic pigs, and whales and dolphins in Quintessence,⁵ to the Irish setter and Emily the Cow who was about to be “murdered” (Mary’s words) and escaped from a slaughterhouse in Amazon Grace.⁶ Besides the clover blossom,⁷ the famous hedge,⁸ the lilac bush,⁹ and the dandelions she felt connections to, there are a large number of animals with whom she had friendly connections as she was growing up.

Mary was friends with and inspired by twentieth-century feminist literary scholar Andrée Collard. She wrote the foreword to Collard’s Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth in 1988. Collard, Daly writes, “really cared what happened to any bird or beetle that crossed her path.”¹⁰

Daly refers to the process of camouflaging “cruelty [against animals] with reversals and soul-killing banality.” Knowing what happens to animals means getting involved. For many years, she served on the board of Feminists for Animals Rights.

By the time of Outercourse, she was citing Animal Factories by Jim Mason and Peter Singer.¹¹ Regarding the cow who jumped over the moon, she remarked that the cow was “seen by some foolish farmer as basically no more than an udder and a breeder, perhaps as a large package of potential hamburger.”¹² Mary had not only feline but also bovine familiars.

As opposed to “gynocide and biocide,” the “taming and killing of women and animals and all life,”¹³ and especially necrophilia—which I believe operates whenever someone eats a dead animal—Daly believed in biophilia and Be-ing. Biophilia: “the Original Lust for Life that is at the core of all Elemental E-motion; Pure Lust which is the Nemesis of patrarichy, the Necrophilic State.”¹⁴

She also wrote: “All Wild creatures and Other realities participate in Being. By which I mean ‘Ultimate/Intimate Reality, the constantly Unfolding Verb of Verbs which is intransitive, having no object that limits its dynamism.’ . . . The Shock of meeting Be-ing is simple and direct. It is absolutely surprising and joyous. It is Self-transformative and changes Everything.”¹⁵

Mary and I had a great beginning, a gulf of many years, and then a fascinating time of conversation and mutual critique in the 1990s. My evolving feminist-veganism and her evolving biophilic philosophy bumped up against each other at times. Usually, at least in the beginning, she had the last word.

I moved to Boston to study with Mary in 1974. She would later write about the 1970s that “the connections between the expropriation of animal life and the imprisonment of women in the patriarchal State of Possession were not as clear to me—or to any of us—as they would subsequently become.”¹⁶ But I’d like to argue that the trajectory of Mary Daly’s thought proves an important point of radical feminist theory: radical feminist theory is the logical home for decentering humans and expanding our vision to including other than humans. In other words, it makes sense that feminists like Collard and I sought out Mary, and that Mary was supportive of these ideas.

I became a vegetarian the week that I moved to the Boston area. I also began attending Mary’s Feminist Ethics class, which taught me how to think and theorize about women’s inequality. That fall, mulling over the readings for her class and those I was doing independently, and living in the midst of the Boston-Cambridge...