Pigs

Abstract

Abstract Pigs’ natural adaptability, intelligence, affection, cleanliness, cohabitation with humans, and ability to convert almost anything into fat-storing calories contributed to the survival of the eighteenth-century peasantry under restricted civil and agricultural rights. Nevertheless, the Irish were racialized as pigs in English discourse dating back to the medieval era, and especially throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal famously deconstructs this racial and colonial similitude between pig body and Irish body, exposing the speciesist foundation of British imperialism. While the literary tradition of learned pigs in Britain ultimately affirmed human superiority over the degraded pig, the Irish language’s invocation of the pig suggests an ethos of respect, as in Scéala Mucce Meic Dathó, and poems by Aogán Ó Rathaille and anonymous eighteenth-century laments. Finally, William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1833) celebrates the subversive and satiric potentials of human–pig collaboration when an Irish peasant and his sow dupe an elite English society.