Red Peter's Little Lady Analysis

‘Red Peter’s Little Lady’ by Ceridwen Dovey and ‘A Report to an Academy’, by Franz Kafka, are literary works that use a variety of techniques to represent the concepts and themes of the ‘Animals, Monsters and Machines’. Over the years, animals have climbed their way into our literature and because of authors’ mastery, readers are able to think about and understand, philosophical concepts and social issues without the offense that is often expressed by audiences when writing about humans. ‘Red Peter’s Little Lady’, explores many concepts related to personhood and humanity to represent the concepts outlined throughout Animals, Monsters and Machines. This is only possible due to the appropriation and adaptation of concepts and themes from Kafka’s ‘A Report to An Academy’ which also explores personhood, otherness and the human condition.
Animals, Monsters and Machines has been conceptualised intertextually in ‘Red Peter’s Little Lady’ and ‘A Report to An Academy’ through the exploration of personhood: the social and moral term used to describe one’s level of humanity. Focusing on Red Peter, Kafka presents the audience with an animal which is

It is Red Peter and Hazel who are first to go when food becomes scarce. Just because they have been trained to be members of society, does not make them accepted, as shown in one of Red Peter’s letters to Evelyn: “The waiters in the hotel dining room started giving me looks when I come down from my rooms to eat the one meagre daily meal they still provide”. You can see how absurd Red Peter thinks this is, that the waiters criticise him, an ape, for eating food that they believe would be better off in the possession of a human. Red Peter doesn’t realise it yet, but this is the tipping point for his existence as a ‘human’ and from then on, he slowly becomes the