《野性的呼喚》及《白牙》中人與動物間之特殊情誼： 以動物權利觀點讀傑克倫敦

Abstract

As we know that English and American literature are tightly linked to Western thoughts, such as Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, gay, lesbian and queer theories in the modern time; it seems that thinkers nowadays try to break away the berries between differences, care for the minority and seek for equality for all. Like Marxism tries to deal with the class differences, post-colonialism tries to deal with the race differences, feminism tries to seek women’s rights and gay, lesbian, and queer theories remind us to respect whose sexual orientation are different to majority and seek for their rights as well. Around the 70s, there is another new trend that appeals to expand people’s concerns to not only mankind but also other animals. This paper aims to borrow the theories of Animal Rights to read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang. This paper started with the brief introduction of animal rights debates and arguments in Western history, followed by the main approaches, several modern thinkers’ theories of animal rights: Peter Singer’s “equal consideration of interest”, Tom Regan’s “subject-of-a-life”, Nel Noddings’s “caring” and Mary Ann Warren’s “weak animal rights”. I used those modern thinkers’ approaches to read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang, and found that the theories could be regarded as several levels. According to the possible acceptability, we can arrange them from the lowest and the easiest to achieve level to the highest and the most ideal level: Noddings’s “caring”, Warren’s “weak animal rights”, Regan’s “subject-of-a-life” and Singer’s equal consideration of interest. Through reading Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang and the protagonists Buck’s and White Fang’s relationship and bonding with humans and their masters, I also found that although London’s concerns about animals and their rights could be constantly found in these two stories, the two novels can only achieve the first two basic levels of animal rights theories that I employed in this paper.