Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography As an Eighteenth-Century Omnivore's

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as an Eighteenth-Century Omnivore’s Dilemma Dana Medoro University of Manitoba

Custom makes killing, handling, and feeding upon flesh and blood, without distinction, so easy and familiar unto mankind. And the same is to be under- stood of men killing and oppressing those of their own kind. […] If men have but Power and Custom on their side, they think all is well. Thomas Tryon (1634–1703)

My refusing to eat Flesh occasioned an Inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my Singularity. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

lthough Benjamin Franklin tried his hand at virtually every intel- Alectual pursuit the eighteenth century had to offer—from scientific inven- tion and music to politics and philosophy—he always referred to himself as the “printer of Philadelphia.” And although he died a rich and internation- ally renowned man, he paints a vivid picture of himself in the early pages of The Autobiography as a half-starved runaway stuffing bread into his mouth as he wanders through Philadelphia looking for somewhere to sleep. Having just escaped his violent brother, to whom he had been indentured as a printer’s apprentice, Franklin sets into motion what he came to stand for in and beyond the revolutionary era: the promise of a self-made man, free from tyranny and caste. Keeping a sense of this promise or potential

ESC 36.4 (December 2010): 91–107 at the surface of his recollections, he skilfully crafts his autobiography according to a philosophy of character as something made, broken down, and reassembled, like a composed form of moveable type in a printing Dana Medoro is press. Unfinished and open to revision—he repeatedly describes his mis- Associate Professor of takes and infidelities, for instance, as errata, a printer’s idiom—Franklin American Literature also comes to us in a famously incomplete manuscript, broken off at key and Culture in the points in the narrative and posthumously published. All of these rup- Department of English, tures notwithstanding, a progression of overdetermined analogies con- Film, and Theatre at the necting meat and violence moves across Franklin’s self-presentation. In University of Manitoba. addition, the powerfully articulated, influential vegetarian philosophies of the eighteenth century align these analogies with the main currents of Enlightenment thought: not only its theories of rational self-creation and governance (versus aristocratic inheritance) but also its repudiation of tyranny over other beings, human and animal. From Locke, Rousseau, and Buffon to Adam Smith and Voltaire, the foremost thinkers of Franklin’s time grappled with or at least addressed the use of animals for food in one way or another, raising questions about human cruelty, economic efficiency, and social hierarchy.1 In Tristram Stuart’s words: Vegetarianism circled the full gamut of eighteenth-century society.[...] People connected their food with morality and they had mechanisms for dealing with the theological con- text of sympathy and the health impacts of meat. In the era before the French Revolution, the landscape was already dot- ted with wild men seeking for a union with nature, which the Romantics would take to new extremes. From the anatomical observations of the scientists to the social anthropology of the Rousseauists, man’s nature herbivore or carnivore had become a central preoccupation of European culture. (255) These intellectual movements also contributed to the period’s revival of interest in Pythagoras, the mythical Greek founder of ascetic vegetarianism and exponent of the doctrine of animal souls.2 It is Pythagoreanism, as I will ultimately argue, that underlies the rituals of self-improvement and 1 In Thoughts Concerning Education(1692), for instance, John Locke critiques the custom of “eating too much flesh” and of misleading children into it (quoted in Stuart 145). Stuart’s Bloodless Revolution also includes discussions of Rousseau, Buffon, Smith, and Voltaire, among others, showing how far-reaching the issue of meat eating was. See in particular Stuart’s chapter 20, subtitled “Voltaire’s Hindu Prophet.” 2 For a thorough background on the revival of Pythagoreanism in the eighteenth century, see Stuart’s Bloodless Revolution. See also Colin Spencer’s The Heretic’s

92 | Medoro abstinence from meat that are mapped out in The Autobiography, and it is Enlightenment philosophy, with its anti-aristocratic foundations, that in turn links those rituals to Franklin’s representation of the American War of Independence. Franklin conceptually pairs the British domination of colonial America with the hierarchical authority of humans over other animals, powerfully leveling both at one point when he reckons with the idea that meat is the murder of a fellow being. Like the Enlightenment thinkers who contemplated Pythagorean principles—and took them seriously enough to either borrow or reject them3— Franklin incorporates them into political and personal re-compositions of his character and country. In other words, he takes the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis into a secular way of understanding or ratio- nalizing the kind of metamorphoses needed to reinvent himself as an American and a revolutionary. This idea falls in line with those of other Franklin scholars, concurring that his composite self-portrayal is one of the most interesting facets of The Autobiography; as Michael Warner puts it, “Franklin thought of his own life with the detachment with which one arranges objects, thus bringing his career under the structure of rationality […] and public involvement” (Warner 89). My main intention, however, is to ask why this career comes into being through the precepts of radical vegetarianism (persistently overlooked in Franklin scholarship) and why Franklin’s famous rationality falters before the lure of meat. The radical vegetarians of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries—Thomas Tryon and John Oswald, for instance—were sometimes sim- ilarly inconsistent, Oswald’s compassion for animals and his revolutionary zeal particularly “scary and puzzling,” according to Tristram Stuart (299). Yet, as Stuart further demonstrates, the belief in egalitarian societies, both for humans and between humans and other animals, accompanied calls to revolution at the same time that a “bloodless revolution” of vegetarianism developed as a way of articulating positions against violent governance. Franklin’s Autobiography illuminates these complicated undertows: his characterization of America’s founding or independence pairs the “bloodless diet” of the early eighteenth-century anti-aristocratic vegetarianism with justifications for the bloodshed of the war. Such analogies form part of the text’s political unconscious, for, as Edward Cahill asserts in “Benjamin

Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Tryon also published a book on Pythagoras’s “mystik philosophy.” 3 I return to this point later in this article, noting the philosophers who addressed the Pythagorean concept of animal souls or metempsychosis.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 93 Franklin’s Interiors,” The Autobiography remains fascinating and important because of such inadvertent disclosures and these disclosures accompany its “anti-luxury politics” (3)—a politics that seems inevitably to influence Franklin’s depictions of food. If Franklin’s text distinguishes the violence of the revolutionary war as a form of colonial self-defense, as a refusal to be butchered by the English, it may not be overtly intentional, but it corresponds to the representation of his vegetarianism as a form of independence from his violent brother. And while his initial reluctance to break with England can be traced to the pacifism of the Quakers with whom Franklin was associated, it is also the European Enlightenment that illuminates a complex, sometimes contradictory, politics of vegetarianism at the foundations of his revolutionary awakening. As his memories come together across the different sections of his book to reveal an aversion to violence—Franklin worked for ten years trying to prevent war with England—this aversion arises in proximity to his references to meat eating and then metamorphoses into a form of American self-assertion. In Vegetarian America: A History, authors Karen and Michael Iacobbo assert that “the recorded history of vegetarianism in the United States, scant as it has been, has usually been written about not only as an anomaly but also as a quirk of individual personalities rather than as a significant element of the past to be studied” (3). This tends to be precisely how Ben- jamin Franklin’s interest in vegetarianism is classified and recorded: as an idiosyncrasy of his famously clear-headed personality or as a momentary diversion in the progression of his career.4 Although Franklin’s refusal to eat meat as a young man often justifies his inclusion in lists of vegetarian icons, claiming him among the ranks for a time, it is left unexplored or tangentially related to the transatlantic reach of early eighteenth-century radical vegetarian writer Thomas Tryon. Such references usually appear like this: at an early age, Franklin came across Tryon’s highly influential treatise The Way to Health (first published in 1691), committed himself to its dietary ethic, and then one day succumbed (probably salivating) to the smell of fried fish and never looked back.

4 In a recent article titled “Benjamin Franklin and the Limits of Secular Society,” Nancy Glazener brushes past the matter in parenthetical haste, noting that “Franklin’s Autobiography describes his ongoing efforts to remake himself by taking on new habits (vegetarianism, for instance) and crafting his reputation (making sure as a young printer that his work was publicly visible, for instance)” (203).

94 | Medoro For instance, in a recent biography of Franklin, The First Scientific American, Joyce Chaplin asserts that “The Tryon who converted Franklin to vegetarianism was a well-known dietary crank”; not only does she dis- miss his long-term effect upon Franklin but she also misses the work of an earlier historian who puts Franklin’s vegetarian commitment at seventeen years (75).5 Likewise, the authors of Vegetarian America only briefly cite Franklin’s endorsement of a vegetable diet, overlooking where it clashes

5 See Howard Williams’s entry on Benjamin Franklin in The Ethics of Diet—A Catena (published in 1883 and available at www.ivu.org/history/williams/index. html), in which Williams quotes an 1868 edition of Franklin’s Autobiography and notes that Franklin remained on Tryon’s diet for “about 17 years”). Tris- tram Stuart argues that “although Franklin’s commitment to vegetarianism was sporadic, […] the living example he presented became the inspiration for many vegetarians in the late eighteenth century” (Stuart 244). Stuart doesn’t go into much more detail about the extent of this inspiration, nor does he analyze The Autobiography in any depth, but he sees the effect of Tryon’s idea upon Franklin as much more tenacious than temporary.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 95 with scenes of meat eating throughout The Autobiography. In other words, they do not pursue the ways in which The Autobiography illustrates (to borrow Michael Pollan’s famous coinage) a kind of omnivore’s dilemma, What does wittily or knowingly presented by Franklin as an omnivore’s rationalization of what one eats. This is a lost possibility in the history and legitimacy of it mean for a vegetarian or Pythagorean path through American history to one of its “founding fathers,” a figure at the root of the country’s mythical self-image the war chief and powerful international emergence. I would like to take the discovery of a remarkable record by the authors to have been of Vegetarian America, which itemizes a meatless dinner Franklin once served to George Washington, as an anecdotal entryway into my argu- offered a meal ment about The Autobiography. According to the Iacobbos, this meal was documented in the Stirling Observer during the War of Independence and without meat? simply consisted of cucumbers, leeks, lettuce, bread, and cheese (2). What does it mean for the war chief to have been offered a meal without meat? Why was this meal archived at the origins of a nation now synonymous with “hamburgers and the sale of cheap animal flesh,” as the Iacobbos cuttingly remark (xi). Offering no elaboration on their finding, they leave it as a compelling anecdote, but the absence of meat on the menu seems quite significant, especially given Enlightenment positions against tyranny and luxury. For, even if we don’t know whether or not the butcher was away when Franklin prepared this dinner, we do know that the excesses of English aristocracy were represented in terms of an immoderate entitle- ment to meat. Read this way, Franklin’s meal makes a statement to General Washington about the principles of the new republic. As both Tristram Stuart and Kathryn Shevelow demonstrate, the plainness and liberty associated with proponents of vegetarianism inter- connected with the revolutionary politics of the time. The vegetable or “bloodless” diet, as it was then known, symbolically departed from the bloodthirsty ways of aristocratic customs. In Shevelow’s words: A refusal to eat meat could lend itself to a radical critique of a status quo in which some beings held life-and-death power over others, whom they exploited and whose existences they made wretched. Various types of power relationships, appar- ent both in the outposts of England’s growing empire and at home, were analogous to one another: colonial ruler to col- onized subjects, masters to slaves, the upper classes to the lower classes, humans to animals. One did not need a belief in metempsychosis to grasp these connections. (177)

96 | Medoro The influence of such a critique was more far-reaching than tenuous in Franklin’s thinking, something traceable, perhaps, to the meal he served to the future first President of the United States. And neither was it a pri- vate matter, as one further anecdote illuminates, because when Franklin’s mother was once asked about her “meat-abhorring son” she responded (alluding to Thomas Tryon’s works) that he “had read and perhaps aspired to be a ‘mad philosopher.’ ”6 Thinking of his memoirs as a guide, Franklin opens with these words: “Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World […], my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them [his life’s achievements] suitable to their own Situations, and therefore fit to be imitated” (43). As Edmund Morgan explains in the introduction to the most recent authoritative edition: Franklin’s autobiography has been admired both as repre- sentative eighteenth-century literature and as a revolutionary document belonging to a new era. Though the kind of story it tells and the unpretentious manner of telling it were unprecedented, its moralizing intent and literary mode were common enough. Readers of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Aristotle’s Ethics were familiar with lists of virtues and how to encourage them. (13)

Franklin also points to a deep connection between food and philosophy, encouraging temperance in relation to meat, even if he struggles with it himself. Or perhaps his struggle is part of the message—something like acknowledging the errata of a first-draft manuscript, which he models to his readers in a brilliant form of syllepsis that establishes him in and as his book. For this reason, Pollan dismisses Franklin’s vegetarianism too quickly in The Omnivore’s Dilemma; in singling out the cod-eating scene, he frames Franklin’s lapse into meat eating as a way of trumping him: The meat eaters’ first line of defense is obvious:Why should we treat animals any more ethically than they treat one another? Ben Franklin actually tried this tack long before me. He tells in his autobiography of one day watching friends catch fish and wondering, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we may 6 Joyce Chaplin provides this anecdote (75); although she doesn’t cite the exact source, it presumably comes from one of the many biographies of Franklin listed in her notes.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 97 not eat you.” […] The great advantage of being a “reasonable creature,” Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do. (310) Even the virulent anti-animal-rights group known as the Center for Con- sumer Freedom devotes a page to this scene in The Autobiography, noting that “Franklin was never a strict vegetarian, and after this event of the fish he was an omnivore and really America’s first foodie.”7 Although it is not true that he was “never a strict vegetarian,” this issue is not entirely relevant to the network of correspondences between meat and power that develop in The Autobiography and that pit irrational forces against the rational reach of his self-image.8 It is illuminating to read The Autobiography against its perceived “structure of rationality” (as Michael Warner puts it), for this structure is never secure, especially when it comes to food: Franklin knows that rationality easily twists into rationalization, such as in the incident with the fish. Here is the scene in its entirety: I believe I have omitted mentioning that in my first Voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and hawl’d up a great many. Hitherto, I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal food; and on this Occasion, I consider’d with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had for- merly been a great Lover of Fish, and when it came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelled admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle and Inclination: Till I recollected that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their stomachs: Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient it is a thing to be a reasonable Creature since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do. (Franklin 87)

7 See www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm/h/3836-benjamin-franklin- was-not-an-animal-rights-activist. 8 “Franklin’s Autobiography returns obsessively,” writes historian Betsy Erkkila, “to the irrational compulsions of the body” (722).

98 | Medoro The diction of this passage is powerful, the words “animal food, injury, slaughter” marking each successive point. Franklin pulls no punches, either, in delivering the ethical hook that “none of them had or ever could do us any Injury” and reminding us how Tryon defines meat as the prod- The scene uct of “unprovok’d murder.” Italicizing “reasonable creature,” Franklin also encapsulates the long-standing debates about the line separating constitutes a human from animal, the creaturely jurisdiction carved at the possession of a rational mind, the seat of the soul.9 The italics emphasize the phrase powerful and sneer at it; the allusion to being reasonable becomes a sly send-up of human arrogance because he knows he has faltered. depiction of At the same time, however, the scene constitutes a powerful depiction of weighing the problem of animal food in relation to survival, which, weighing the as the book progresses, comes to encompass both biological and social exigencies. Two justifications quietly assert themselves: Franklin’s recent problem of experience of severe and frightening thirst and hunger on board the ship, and the keenly felt necessity of living among others. He says, “So I din’d animal food in upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now and then to a vegetable Diet,” indicating that inflexibility relation to runs contrary to sociability. To put it another way, if we consider that the stress of the statement lands on “with other People,” it’s the pull of survival—which, social interaction—a deep-seated fear of its loss—that is at work here too. While this may sound like a form of collusion with Franklin’s ratio- as the book nalization, I think his inclusion of such scenes of eating gesture toward complex and significant concepts. For although an “uncompromising progresses, vegetarianism,” to use historian Virginia Smith’s wording, was “the badge of [political] radicalism” against tyrannical governance over humans and comes to non-human animals, inflexibility could also be tyrannical in Franklin’s estimation, and this idea emerges in his later references to the American encompass both War of Independence.10 To reiterate the claim of my paper, which is not to settle the question of Franklin’s ethical eating but rather to illuminate it biological and

9 For an excellent survey of this delineation between soul and body as the line social between human and animal, see Roy Porter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason, in which he writes: “The distinction between the animal and the rational soul was thus exigencies. not one of degree but of kind—it was qualitative. The animal soul was material, the rational soul immaterial, divinely implanted” (59). 10 See Smith’s Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity, in which she notes Franklin’s admiration of the eighteenth-century temperance and vegetarian philosophies. Like Shevelow and Stuart, Smith traces the rediscovery of the ascetic works of Pythagorean and Indian Vedic vegetarianism to the seventeenth-century travelers and translators who returned to England from their Eastern travels.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 99 as a striking, pervasive struggle in The Autobiography: it is the framework of the eighteenth-century vegetarian movements, missing from previous scholarship on the text, that often bears directly upon Franklin’s fraught representation both of what he eats and how he wants to be seen. Thus, given this framework, Franklin’s allusions to food interconnect with his compressed defense of going to war in The Autobiography. Not- ing that he had once been utterly committed to peace, Franklin recounts his negotiations with England in a way that subtly replicates the nego- tiation between himself and his “master Tryon” to dine upon cod. He asserts, “The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would have been no need of Troops from England; of course the subsequent Pretense for Taxing America, and the bloody Contest it occasioned, would have been avoided” (Franklin 146). In the taxation issue historically characterized as a rapacious consuming of colonial America, Franklin turns his fish-eating logic against the English. With the term “bloody Contest” signaling a complete departure from the “bloodless diet,” but made within the same (bloody) frame of reference, Franklin stretches the ethics of vegetarian rebelliousness into this anti- imperialist position. Betsy Erkkila brilliantly puts it this way: “While the American Revolution is not present as part of the manifest content of Franklin’s narrative, it is present as the political or narrative unconscious of Franklin’s ‘Life’—as a scene of social crisis, bloody contest, and challenge to traditional structures of authority in family, society, and state” (726). The visceral reference to the war as bloody, moreover, at once points to the bodies torn up by it and to the rhetoric of blood prevalent in Frank- lin’s time. The word “blood” is repeated, for instance, throughout Tryon’s books, his condemnation of meat-eating cast as the tyrannically spilled blood of animals: Remember that all Beasts are not only endued with senses equal with Man, but also with all kinds of Passions as Love, Hate, Wrath, and the like, which their Flesh and Blood is not freed from, for in the Blood consists the high Life of every Creature, therefore the Illuminated Prophet Moses Com- manded that it should not be eaten, because the more noble human Nature should not partake [in] Killing and Eating the Flesh and Blood of Beasts. (“Of Moyst Airs,” Monthly Obser- vations) According to Joyce Chaplin, the power of blood as a metaphor would have captivated both Tryon and Franklin, given their admiration of Wil- liam Harvey’s work on the circulatory system. “Harvey’s was no ordinary

100 | Medoro circulating fluid,” she argues, “Blood was equated with life: no blood, no life—at least for humans and other animals. Blood also signified power: blood money, blood sacrifice, blood oath” (78). That Franklin saw the Eng- lish imperial policies as a form of devouring also finds proof in his satirical 1773 publication “Rules by which a Great Empire may be reduced to a Small One,” in which he describes the tax collectors as living off the colonists’ “sweat and blood” and the empire itself as a cake, nibbled away at its edges (quoted in Sparks 387). In addition, given the food riots of 1774, in which the colonists joined together in what were called non-consumption pacts and trade boycotts of English food, colonial self-assertion was enacted in eating choices: treachery and patriotism were defined at the dinner table. “In food riots,” writes Barbara Smith, “Americans […] asserted that they were part of the wider struggle against Britain and on behalf of American liberty” (Smith 31). This was the zeitgeist shaping larger correspondences— the audible echoes of which occur in Franklin’s book—between vegetarianism and nonconformity, food and bloodshed, loyalty and its limits. Franklin repeatedly foregrounds his commitment to civic duty throughout The Autobiography, negotiating where, as Chaplin puts it, “his comprehension of the human body fit into larger conceptions of human society” (76). This commitment and what we might see as the omnivorous pull of it really come into focus against a fascinating anecdote in the book about a woman who “lived in a garret in her house [in] a most retired manner” (Franklin 53). He writes: In a Garret of her House there lived a Maiden Lady of 70 in the most retired manner, […] who had given all her Estate to charitable Uses, reserving only Twelve Pounds a Year to live on, and […] living herself on Water-gruel only and using no Fire but to boil it. […] She look’d pale, but was never sick, and I give it as an another Instance on how small an Income Life and Health may be supported. (53)

Although Franklin is always clear that his is not a saint’s story, he here inserts an ideal of ascetic commitment into the tale, one he himself might have followed had he not heeded the call of public life. It is not just the small income that forms the crux of this paradigm; it is also that little bit of water gruel, which Franklin centres within his brief account of an ordered and admirable life. Intimating that a completely meatless life seems possible for him only in isolation from others, he remains drawn to its austerity and resolve. In fact, Franklin recounts time and again in

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 101 The Autobiography moments of social withdrawal in order to re-evaluate his relationship to food, fasting, and self-control. The struggle practically structures the narrative. For instance, the tone of his statement, “So I din’d upon Cod,” has a finality to it that seems to sound the end of his commitment to the vegetable diet. But this is quickly overturned on the very next page when he challenges a friend to “the Condition of Adopting the Doctrine of using no Animal Food […] neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl” (89). Franklin then reflects upon the dare, using it to illustrate his point that quitting meat can be done quickly, as well as to make a point about the kind of gluttony his friend demonstrates. “I went on pleasingly,” he notes, “but poor Keimer suffer’d grievously, tir’d of the Project, long’d for the Flesh Pots of Egypt, and order’d a roast Pig. He invited me and two Women to dine with him, but it being brought too soon upon table, he could not resist the Temptation, and ate it all up before we came” (89). The biblical image of “the Flesh Pots of Egypt” also comes directly from Tryon, indicating the reach of his influence upon Franklin’s thinking and word choices: “We hanker so much after the Flesh-pots. As long as men were partakers of and followers of the true knowledge of God’s works […], Herbs and Fruits were in as great esteem as Flesh is now” (“Of Flesh,” The Way to Health). Thus setting up his carnivorous friend to con- trast his own self-control, Franklin recapitulates the idea that the vegetable diet is the righteous though difficult path. And he slides this idea into close proximity with references to books he admires: Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1723), the most famous section of which notes, “I have often thought if it was not for this tyranny which custom usurps over us, that men of any tolerable good-nature could never be reconcil’d to the killing of so many animals for their daily food” (Mandeville 187); Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the chapter “On Diet” which outlines the ruinous effects of different varieties of animal flesh upon the body; and Pythagoras’s Golden Verses, which exhorts, “But abstain thou from the meats, which we have forbidden in the purifications and deliverance of the soul.”11 Throughout his book, Franklin makes repeated references to the virtue of bread and vegetables, reproduces a complete list of soldiers’ rations, recalls a satisfying cracker-and-anchovy dinner, and includes, in its entirety, a temperance chart, replete with an epigraph from Tryon, all of which come after an opening statement that he never paid much atten- tion to food in his life: “If ask’d, I can scarce tell, a few hours after dinner,

11 For the complete list of Pythagoras’s Golden Verses, see www.sacred-texts.com. See also Rod Preece’s sections on Pythagoras in his Sins of the Flesh.

102 | Medoro what I dined upon” (11). This is a rhetorical trick of advancing something important as though nothing is at stake, and it is only five pages later that he describes his striking conversion to Thomas Tryon’s vegetarian principles: “When about 16 years of age, I happened to meet with a book, written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it.… My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency and I was frequently chid for my singularity” (63). This refusal is momentous, a personal declaration of independence by a man famous for signing the national one, and it’s a refusal that frees up his money to buy books on philosophy, from Pythagoras to Locke. Franklin lists his access to these figures in relation to his abstention from meat; what he gains from them follows from Tryon. He also signals his stance within a revolutionary spirit; the fact of his having been “chid” for his dietary nonconformity gestures toward concepts surrounding the liberty of conscience and the violence of hierarchical power. The rejection of the human/animal hierarchy exposed analogous imbalances, such as masters and slaves, and the implication seems not to have been lost on Franklin’s brother, to whom Franklin was indentured as a printer’s apprentice. The chiding that Franklin receives from his brother is also profoundly significant because it generates associations, throughout The Autobiog- raphy, among meat-eating, violence, sovereignty, and print. “My brother was Passionate,” he explains, “and had often beaten me” (69). An asterisk follows: “Note: I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that stuck to me thro’ my whole life” (69). The terminology here, cast in terms of a printer’s impression, recurs when Franklin describes his brother’s behav- iour as the “impression of resentment, for [which] the blows his passion too often urg’d him to bestow upon me.” Delineating himself as and in a book for others to read, he is here a page on which this impression struck, making him very alert to the power bound up with writing, where print converges on embodiment in conferring and denying power. Moreover, it is as though Franklin sees the impressions made by his brother and by his “Master Tryon” in comparable terms: as making a claim on him that he never really shakes. In fact, in a kind of repetition- compulsion of his beatings, Franklin later conceives of a plan for a virtu- ous scheme of moral perfection that he outlines in a little blank book, “on which line and its proper column I might mark by a little black Spot every Fault I found upon Examination to have committed respecting that Virtue upon that Day” (152). If the page reveals how he is disfigured by faults, then it becomes a form of disciplinary trial. Tellingly, it is his struggle with

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 103 “Temperance” that Franklin puts at the top of the list. “Eat not to dullness, for that is a token of Gluttony”—these are Tryon’s words in his series of aphorisms published as The Knowledge of A Man’s Selfin 1704. Increasingly finding the pages covered in marks, the erasing of which wears holes in his pages as he starts each new day, Franklin decides upon a memo book of ivory leaves, “the marks I could easily wipe with a wet sponge” (154). The image of the ivory is remarkable; not only does it call to mind Locke’s tabula rasa, one of the only philosophers whom Franklin directly names in The Autobiography, but it also plays into what Franklin is trying to work out with soul/body dualism of the human creature, that reasonable animal who is forever navigating its bodily hungers. In The Autobiography, the soul seems to be a kind of blank page, written on and erased throughout one lifetime and possibly across many lifetimes, for, while he does mention Locke by name once in his list of influences, he names Pythagoras several times and credits his Golden Verses for the structure of his own plan for moral perfection. Franklin thus collaborates in the Enlightenment revival of this ancient figure, credited for founding

104 | Medoro a strict vegetarian society, for creating rituals of self-improvement, and for introducing into Western philosophy Eastern beliefs about metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls. Franklin’s Pythagorean self-scrutiny can be placed alongside the For Franklin, eighteenth-century controversies over the possession and composition of the soul—whether animals were endowed with or deprived of a soul, or something whether humans alone could draw on its supposed perfection—and what the immortality of its substance actually meant. The widespread influence immaterial, of the Pythagorean doctrine that animals possessed souls reached into the vegetarian and animal-protection movements of the Enlightenment era, some form of as well as into philosophical treatises on the subject of human and animal minds. Both Voltaire and Hume directly address metempsychosis, for energy, persisted example, the former to claim that it was “not absurd; everything in nature is resurrection”; the latter to state that it was entirely absurd, a concept as separate arising from fears of death. Although Franklin does not mention it in The Autobiography, he met with both Voltaire and Hume, and his beliefs appear from the flux of to fall somewhere in between them—in line more with naturalist Charles Bonnet’s, who said, “all is metamorphosis in the world,” and less with materiality. Hume’s fearlessness about death as annihilation (quoted in Harrison 158). For Franklin, something immaterial, some form of energy, persisted as separate from the flux of materiality. Everything aboutThe Autobiography seems bound up with the possibility of metamorphosis: the fact that he composed his manuscript down the right side of the page so that he could make revisions and additions along the left side; the repeated summons in the book to transform as new ideas present themselves; the sense that an apprentice Pythagorean is at work, attempting to adapt the principles of Pythagoras’s strict discipline to the exigencies of eighteenth-century revolutionary America. On the very first page his life story, Franklin notes that upon looking back, he liked his life and “should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantages Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first” (Franklin 43). And although he later notes that “such a Repetition is not to be Expected” (44), he develops his tale with a view to the ways in which future readers will animate its principles. He may not come back as a second edition, but some form of his energy will effect, to use a word he himself employs, a “Transmigration” (48). In the tombstone inscription he imagines for himself and includes on the second page of The Autobiography, he casts himself as enduring beyond the grave, both as animal food and as food for thought.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography | 105 The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms, But the work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended by the Author. (44) He also brings the spirit or ideals of Pythagoras with him, in spite of the fact that the most recent authorized version of The Autobiography provides bibliographical paragraphs for every name he mentions, except his. This omission belies a kind of repression of the way in which one of America’s “founding fathers” traces the revolution within his way of life—and by extension, within America itself—to the philosophy of vegetarianism or pythagoreanism at the centre of eighteenth-century intellectual life.

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