Annotations - William Dean Howells, "Turkeys Turning the Tables" (1892)

Christmas Eve, 1900

Recall that the story begins on Christmas morning, 1886. The little girl's misunderstanding of the correct date, fourteen years later, contributes a further complication to the narrative structure. Rather than closing the narrative frame, which opened on 25 December 1886, the jump forward in time creates an anachronism of the kind made famous by Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1819), who slept for twenty years and missed the US War of Independence. In a certain respect, the little girl can be said to have missed the turkeys' "War of Independence." Screenshot_20221207_for-social-media.pngCertainly, like Rip Van Winkle, she discovers a world that has drastically changed: for her, the turkeys have killed and eaten all the humans, leaving her the last of her kind. This revelation renders her receptive to entering a debate with the turkeys concerning the ethics of flesh-eating.

This temporal narrative strategy highlights the formal interchange between 1) the world of the father and daughter in the narrative frame and 2) that of the little girl and the turkeys in the embedded dream narrative. In the dream world, which functions on the principle of possibility rather than probability, animals are possessed of sentience and the rights that sentience grants. The external world of the father's storytelling, however, operates according to the anthropocentric and carnist principles of human superiority and animal inferiority. The final closure of the narrative frame, and the father's revelation that while the "other little girl" never again ate turkeys because she replaced them with geese, is entirely consistent with the carnist laws of that external narratorial reality.

IMAGE CREDIT:

Screenshot. Deborah Madsen, 5 December 2022. “Turkeys Turning the Tables.” William Dean Howells, Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told to Children. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893. 37.