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Chapter 6
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
One day when Ginger and Black Beauty are alone on a Sunday afternoon, Ginger asks about Black Beauty’s upbringing and his breaking in. When he’s done telling her, she sighs that she might have a better temper if she’d been brought up like him. Now, though, she doesn’t think she’ll ever have a good temper. She explains that nobody has ever been kind to her. She was separated from her mother as soon as she was weaned and put with colts who didn’t like her. The man who cared for the young horses made sure they had food and shelter, but he wasn’t warm. Ginger says boys threw rocks at the young horses, and the horses soon decided people were enemies.
As Ginger tells Black Beauty her life story, she makes the case that her early experiences with people have permanently colored her perception of them: she’ll never fully recover and become as good and yielding to a person’s will as Black Beauty is. This is sad for Ginger, but it also makes an important point to readers: that people who deal with horses (and young horses especially) have an immense responsibility to start them out right and teach them that people are good and kind. If they fail, they’ll harm a horse for life.
Themes
Ginger continues that she and her fellow young horses had lots of fun—until it was time for breaking in. Several men came to catch her. They cornered her, held her nose shut, and wrenched her mouth open to put the bit and bridle on her. Then, she says, one dragged her forward while the other man whipped her. She had no opportunity to figure out what they wanted; they forced her to do everything. It was terrible to stand in a stall all day—and without any kindness, it was even worse.
Again, Ginger’s story shows the consequences of not approaching a young horse kindly or with respect. Ginger’s early training revolved around forcing her to do things and making her afraid of people by causing her pain. Recall that Black Beauty was given the chance to look at things and choose to do what his master wanted. That, the novel suggests, led to his good behavior, while being taught with force and pain has led to Ginger’s temper.
Themes
Literary Devices
Ginger muses that had the older master, Mr. Ryder, trained her, things might’ve been different. But he put his son Samson in charge, and Samson took pride in the fact that horses couldn’t throw him. Ginger says she knew instantly that Samson just wanted to turn her into an “obedient piece of horse-flesh.” She stamps her foot angrily before continuing. If she misbehaved, Samson would run her around on a long line until she was exhausted. One morning, after being worked hard, Samson came for her again with a new bit. He jerked on her mouth as soon as he mounted—and the new bit was so painful that Ginger reared and kicked. She says they fought for a while and though Samson made her bleed with his whip and spurs, she eventually threw him off.
That Samson wanted to make Ginger an “obedient piece of horse-flesh” is a telling turn of phrase. He doesn’t want her to be a horse, with thoughts and feelings of her own—he wants her to be a beast of burden with no personality and no spark. And he tries to beat out her personality with whips, sharp bits, spurs, and working her to exhaustion. This begins to situate painful training aids like sharp bits and spurs as accoutrements of a poor, abusive horseperson. The fact that Ginger then goes on to throw Samson despite the painful equipment he uses on her also suggests that the painful equipment doesn’t work, at least not on a horse as spirited as Ginger.
Themes
Continuing, Ginger says she ran to the far side of the field and stood there for hours in the hot sun. Nobody came for her to offer her water or attend to her bleeding flanks. At sundown, Mr. Ryder came out with some oats and noticed her injuries. When he led Ginger back to the barn, she put her ears back at Samson—and Mr. Ryder told Samson that a “bad-tempered man will never make a good-tempered horse.” Mr. Ryder cleaned Ginger’s sides himself and gave her bran mash, since the hay hurt her bleeding mouth. Once she was healed, Ginger says, another man—a kind one—continued her training.
Note that while nobody comes for Ginger for hours, Ginger also doesn’t return to the stable on her own—she hasn’t learned that people are there to help her, so it never occurs to her to willingly put herself close to them. Mr. Ryder’s insistence that bad-tempered men make bad-tempered horses is another grim warning to any readers hoping to train a horse. It reinforces the novel’s insistence that horses won’t turn out well if one is cruel to them.
Themes
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