Empathy and Moral Instruction-The Problem of Animals

            Mary Wollstonecraft’s Stories and William Hayley’s Ballads, at least in the excerpts assigned for this week, seem strikingly preoccupied with the redemptive or didactic potential to be found in the death (or at least maiming) of animals.  The hierarchy set out in Wollstonecraft’s narrative by Mrs. Mason that children are responsible for animals only because they are subordinate to “men” seems to provide a partial explanation for this rather disturbing trend, as does the long tradition of animal fables on which both authors are no doubt explicitly building.  However, the notion that children can seemingly only learn the correct “treatment of animals” by witnessing the consequences of violence either in person, as with the characters in Wollstonecraft’s stories, or (more to the point here) in fairly explicit narrative form, as readers of those stories remains troubling.  The fact that many of these animals are figured in the accompanying illustrations (often on the brink of death, at least in Blake’s illustrations for Hayley) to each work strengthens the notion that an emphasis is being placed on representations of animal death and pain.  Of course, there is arguably a marked difference between the two works: in Wollstonecraft, the child (as narratively embodied by the young, “vulgarly” educated Mary and Caroline) is meant to witness suffering and empathetically suffer along with the creature, as with the maimed birds, or suffer along with the human whose empathic ties to animals have been severed (as in the story of “crazy Robin”).  Human cruelty is contrasted to extreme human empathy, but the animals remain creatures in their own right.  Hayley’s animals symbolize loyalty or malice, but they only serve to facilitate the formation or preservation of human relationships.  I would like to further unpack what the framing narrative mechanism of the unruly children in Wollstonecraft does in contrast to the poetic structure of Hayley’s ballads, particularly in terms of the empathetic requirements of this type of didactic work, though I haven’t yet come up with any insightful comments (clearly).