What Is It Like to Be an Animal in Pain? The Phylogenesis of Cross-Species Sympathy in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty

How can a tailless human even begin to imagine the pain of a horse losing its tail? Literature is generally said to enable readers to imagine and thus sympathize with the pain of others. This often assumes that the physiological apparatus through which that pain is mediated is still similar enough between self and other that another’s pain remains imaginable. Writing Black Beauty in the attempt to make imaginable to human readers the pain of unimaginably different nonhumans, Anna Sewell could not afford that assumption. How did Sewell enable readers to imagine and sympathize with animal pain, at a time when the very reality of animal pain was under question? By engaging with nineteenth-century evolutionary discourse on physiological differences in tension with ancestral commonality, this essay explores the strategies behind Sewell’s attempt at cross-species sympathy. In particular, the “gradualist” model of species difference and similarity is considered alongside how the frame narrative guides the sympathetic imagination in gradations. Ultimately, this article argues that Sewell’s Black Beauty guides readerly sympathy for nonhuman pain through narrative gradations paralleling the phylogenetic gradations of the taxonomic hierarchy, a seeming hierarchy of physiological species differences eventually collapsed through the similitude-seeking processes of sympathy.