Domestication Western-Style: Fantasies of Harmony and the Violence of Plasticity in Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka

Abstract

ABSTRACT Historically, animal characters and animal-child encounters in children’s narratives have served largely metaphorical functions. More recently, scholars have become interested in exploring literary human-animal relations as interesting in and of themselves and not purely as background for promoting values and attitudes considered desirable for adolescent readers. The article proposes a reading of Mary O’Hara’s novel My Friend Flicka (O’Hara 1941) which embeds the relationship between the human protagonist and the horse in the wider stories of equine domestication and the settling of the Western frontier. In effect, while the story of Ken and Flicka is read as a metaphor – a synecdoche even – it is not a metaphor of human-human encounters but of the contradictions and ethical dilemmas inherent to the process of human-directed animal domestication in a capitalist settler colonial society. Ken’s coming of age through the story of love and loss is representative of dilemmas that humans engaged in processes of domestication have had to grapple with: Ken must come to terms with the violence of domestication. Concurrently, Flicka’s story of pain, fear, and love is read not just as the unique story of an individual horse but of the generations of equines that have been forced to adapt to an environment shaped by human dominance.