Racism, speciesism, and capricious hospitality: on rats, mice, and caterpillars in Wass, Mészöly, and Barbauld

Abstract This paper seeks to outline the chances and limits of hospitality with a focus on texts featuring animals (rodents and insects) that are considered pestilent or parasitical from a human perspective. The first half of the argument discusses and compares two modern Hungarian short stories (Albert Wass’s “Conquest of Rats” and Miklós Mészöly’s “Report on Five Mice”) in their divergent efforts to draw hierarchized demarcations either within the human race, or between humans and animals. While Wass’s fable personifies rats not just to satirically caricature a social group within human society but also to support a racist ideology, Mészöly’s naturalistic narrative clearly refrains from any degree of personification and merely represents individual mice as symbols (specimen) of a general “mouseness.” In the second half, the paper examines two English romantic poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (“The Mouse’s Petition” and “The Caterpillar”) both to offer a sentimentalist context for the previous works and, more importantly, to outline a hospitality that might escape the pitfalls of either racism or speciesism. Barbauld’s poems neither refrain from speaking to, or giving voice to, the animal in order to uphold a speciesist prejudice, nor use these gestures as a rhetorical means to set up a racist hierarchy. Instead, they stage hospitality both as an instance of mercy or compassion toward the nonhuman migrant or wanderer and as a contingent (“capricious”) decision born out of the encounter between two singularities.