Nature is described as if it is unconcerned with humanity, as if there is nothing in it for people to appeal to, which seems consistent with the modern worldview. As Mrs. Ramsay puts her youngest children to bed, Woolf writes “she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air…” Nature’s apparent indifference can be compared to humanity’s philosophical disdain for itself, reflected in Mr. Bankes’s thoughts: “Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species?”
To the Lighthouse – 9
The idea of being ranked amongst animals brings to mind the Great Chain of Being, or the notion that all sentient beings–and, indeed, all substances on earth–are part of a hierarchy that spans from basic minerals, at the bottom, to God, who is at the top. While normally people would be situated above animals in this scheme, however, Douglass notes that he and the other enslaved black people are “ranked with horses, sheep and swine.” In the article “‘The Great Chain of Being Come Undone’ Linking Blackness and Animal Studies,” Calista McRae discusses several studies that address the overlap between depictions of blackness and depictions of animality.