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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Black Beauty, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Horse Care, Abuse, and Neglect
Class, Transportation, and Victorian England
Good, Evil, and Power
Dignity and Religion
Summary
Analysis
Ginger and Black Beauty have some racing blood in them, so they aren’t the standard tall carriage breed. Because of this, they’re used for riding as well—and anyway, Squire Gordon dislikes horses and people that can only do one thing. Black Beauty loves riding, as Mrs. Gordon often chooses him. Squire Gordon rides Ginger, while Miss Flora and Miss Jessie ride Merrylegs and Sir Oliver. Black Beauty believes Mrs. Gordon prefers him because his mouth is still tender and soft. Ginger is envious that Black Beauty gets to carry her and blames her hard mouth on her earlier poor treatment. But Sir Oliver encourages Ginger to be proud that she can carry Squire Gordon.
Keep in mind that in the Victorian era, ladies rode sidesaddle, a position that offers much less security than riding astride. So riding a horse with a soft mouth, like Black Beauty, may seem like the safer option for Mrs. Gordon, since she won’t have to worry about not being able to control her horse. The fact that Sir Oliver sometimes carries one of the young ladies shows how essential equine transport is. Recall that Sir Oliver is retired; this suggests that he’s never completely retired and must always be ready for light work.
Themes
Literary Devices
Black Beauty has wondered for a long time how Sir Oliver lost his tail—his is only six inches long, and there’s only some hair. One time in the orchard, Black Beauty asks what accident Sir Oliver suffered. Fiercely, Sir Oliver says it was no accident—it was cut off when he was a young horse. It was extremely painful, having his beautiful tail taken was an indignity, and worst of all, now he can’t whisk flies off his body. Fortunately, they’ve stopped doing it now. Ginger asks why they did it, and Sir Oliver spits that it was all for fashion. Every well-bred young horse had their tail cut off when Sir Oliver was young. He suggests it’s as if God didn’t know what is most beautiful—and the most useful.
Black Beauty’s naivete shines through here when he assumes that Sir Oliver must’ve lost his tail in an accident. It doesn’t occur to him that a person would’ve cut it off on purpose. Then, Sir Oliver introduces the idea that a horse’s body is the way it is because God intended it to be that way—and that it’s wrong for people to go against what God intended and modify an animal’s appearance. God, Sir Oliver suggests, knew what would make a horse look the best and be the most useful, and yet he suggests that people sometimes decide they know better than God.
Themes
Ginger suggests it’s the same with the bearing reins, and Sir Oliver agrees. He says fashion is “one of the wickedest things in the world.” He notes that they do the same thing to dogs, cutting their tails off or cutting their ears into sharp points. Sir Oliver tells Ginger and Black Beauty about his dear terrier friend, Skye, who had five puppies in his stall. Just as the puppies’ eyes started to open, people took them—and they came back bloody, without ears and missing parts of their tails. They healed, of course, but Sir Oliver notes that they’d go the rest of their lives without the flap of their ear designed to protect their inner ear from injury. Sir Oliver suggests that humans start cutting their children’s noses and ears; it’s just as absurd. He asks what right people have to “disfigure” animals.
Fashion, Sir Oliver and Ginger suggest, is evil because it doesn’t take into account what God intended animals should look like or how they should move. In their understanding, bearing reins and docking horses’ and dogs’ tails is cruel and serves no purpose—it “disfigures” an animal, and it doesn’t even make the animal more beautiful. The story of Skye’s puppies being “disfigured” like this seems designed to elicit sympathy from readers, since the victims in this case are small, innocent, sympathetic puppies, animals that are in every way incapable of advocating for themselves.
Themes
Black Beauty finds that what Sir Oliver says makes him feel bitter toward men for the first time. Ginger says men are “brutes and blockheads.” Just then, Merrylegs wanders up from the apple tree and insists that “blockhead” is a bad word. Ginger says bad words exist to describe bad things, and she tells Merrylegs what Sir Oliver said. Sadly, Merrylegs says he's seen dogs abused like that before—but he doesn’t think it’s right to speak badly of men here, where the horses have such good care.
Though the horses seem to feel pretty secure at Birtwick, Merrylegs suggests that they’re jeopardizing their security by speaking ill of what some men do to their animals. Behaving well, according to Merrylegs, may mean accepting kind treatment when a horse experiences it and turning the other way when bad things happen to other horses. This speaks to the horses’ powerlessness.
Themes
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To change the subject, Black Beauty asks what the purpose of blinkers is. Sir Oliver says they’re useless, but Justice explains that in theory, they keep horses from spooking and causing accidents. When Black Beauty asks why ladies’ riding horses don’t wear blinkers then, Justice says it’s the fashion. Supposedly, horses would be so afraid of seeing the cart behind them that they’d run from it—though riding horses see carts all the time and are just fine. He adds that if horses could see everything, they’d be much less afraid of things. With blinkers, they only see parts of things and can’t understand them.
Justice is a good-tempered horse who tries to understand people’s logic, an important element to this conversation. But also important is that the horses suggest that people aren’t actually all that good at coming up with effective safety measures—when one thinks about how horses regularly interact with carts and don’t spook, it starts to seem silly to think that a horse would ever be afraid of a cart. Moreover, Justice acknowledges that blinkers can actually make a horse less safe, as the horse is then less able to interpret their environment. People may be in charge, this passage suggests, but this doesn’t mean everything they do to horses makes sense.
Themes
Sir Oliver says blinkers are actually dangerous. He shares a story of a fatal cart accident that only occurred because the blinkered horses couldn’t see a pond. Ginger snaps that men should just order foals to be born with their eyes in the middle of their heads, since humans think they can do better than God. At this, Merrylegs says that he believes John doesn’t approve of blinkers. But he suggests they all cheer up and go eat some of the fallen apples.
Ginger is being facetious when she suggests humans insist that foals be born with forward-facing eyes, but she crystallizes one of the novel’s big ideas: that people are, perhaps, getting too full of themselves and are essentially trying to play God when they try to change how an animal looks or moves. The horses all suggest that, left to their own devices, they’re very good at keeping themselves and people safe—but they’re not always left to their own devices, and everyone suffers for it.
Themes
Literary Devices
