Recently I had occasion to ask: did Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion (1941) set me up for life as a fan of early prose fiction? When I went back to Farley’s story, which I read and loved as a child, I was struck by how familiar it felt to my adult self, who studies and teaches eighteenth-century literature.
As is the case with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, one of the eighteenth century’s most canonical titles, The Black Stallion’s fateful sea journey begins in the colonies. Young Alexander (Alec) Ramsay has spent his summer vacation in India, where his uncle is a missionary—and there Alec learns to ride. This middle-class boy cannot afford lessons in New York, where horses belong to the rich: “Rides back home would be few.” But India sets the stage for a counterfactual future. Empire surmounts the domestic limits of class.
Robinson Crusoe’s fantasy of the desert island as a space of metamorphosis plays out in compressed form in The Black Stallion, after Alec and the horse, who has boarded the ship in Saudi Arabia, survive a storm that sinks their ship. Stranded on a desert island, Alec proves resourceful. He lights a fire without matches, builds a shelter, and identifies a food source that prevents him and his horse from starving with the nerdy precision that also characterizes Defoe’s hero. “What was the stuff the biology teacher had made them eat last term in one of their experiments,” Alec wonders. “Hadn’t he called it caragheen?…Could the moss on the rocks below be it?” The stallion learns to trust the boy, and the boy, in turn, learns to ride the stallion, a feat that, in his mind, grants him ownership: “He had ridden the Black! He had conquered this wild, unbroken stallion with kindness. He felt sure that from that day on the Black was his—his alone!” Here, too, Robinson Crusoe resonates in Alec’s dream of mastery and possession over the Other—in this case, of the “blackness” of the Orient.
The story of Alexander the Great and Bucephalus likewise echoes throughout Farley’s narrative, a detail the 1979 movie adaptation makes explicit. Alec and his horse, we understand, are destined for great things. Back in America, the stallion grants Alec freedom from the constraints of everyday life—most vividly, from the world of girls and women. Henry Dailey, the trainer who teaches Alec and his horse how to race, tells the story of marriage and fatherhood thus: “We had two children—both girls; now they’re married. Somehow I’ve always missed not having a boy—someone like you, son, who loved horses.” Alec notes that “Mother isn’t interested in races” and transforms the domestic economy that pays the allowance he uses to feed his horse into a space of masculine enterprise: “Alec had never known there was so much to be done around a house—and his father hadn’t missed up on a thing. The front and back porch gleamed with new paint….” And so it goes, until the black stallion, with Alec on his back, faces off against two other stallions, fights, races, and wins.
Reading The Black Stallion now, I’m struck by how well the narrative works as a realist novel and how closely it adheres to the fantasies of imperial masculinity and modern domesticity that the eighteenth-century novel helped to shape. But I’m also struck by the novel’s romance, a romance that allowed the girl reader I was to skip the lessons on offer in favor of a very different subject position.
Horse Boi
horse girl: a girl who…will look down on you because you are not a horse. ~ Urban Dictionary
“Did other fellows dream of horses the way he did?” Alec asks. I can’t speak for the fellows, but girls have shared Alec’s dreams since, well, seemingly forever—an attachment that has lurked in the Western unconscious from the moment the Amazons attacked Hercules’s army on horseback. The earliest memory I attach to The Black Stallion belongs to my first year of elementary school. I’m six or seven, standing on the small hill in the middle of the school playground. I’m neighing and stamping my feet, tossing my hair impatiently. I’m gathering my strength to gallop down the hill.
This memory predates my reading of The Black Stallion by a couple of years. But I can’t think of the girl on the hill without remembering the novel’s various descriptions of the stallion: “The wind whipped through his mane.” “The Black reared on his hind legs.” “The head was that of the wildest of all wild creatures.” Before reading The Black Stallion, somewhere, somehow, I had learned how to strike a pose on top of a hill, how to fancy myself “the wildest of all wild creatures.” After the fact, then, Farley’s story recognized a self already dreaming her best self. Let’s call that self a horse boi: dangerous and free.
A horse girl might be a horse boi; I only make the distinction to mark my particular attachment to The Black Stallion, rather than, say, National Velvet, which charts the rise of a girl and her horse to race victory. Reading Farley’s novel today, I’m particularly struck by the novel’s descriptions of horse noises. No nickering or neighing for this black stallion. “Alec heard a whistle—shrill, loud, clear, unlike anything he’d ever heard before.” “Once again that piercing whistle filled the night air.” “[H]is scream was terrorizing.” When Alec takes his friends to the barn to meet the black stallion, they retreat in fear: “Henry didn’t have to urge Whiff and Bill to move out of sight…. They hurried down the driveway as the stallion screamed softly.” Having been raised in an English household where strong emotion was rarely, if ever, expressed, I can only imagine how appealing all this loud noise making might have seemed to my young self. Today, I scream softly in my head when administrative meetings drag on. Is it surprising that the text I sent to friends when I heard that Roe v. Wade had been overturned featured no words, only the scream Rhian Teasdale lets fly in “Ur Mum”?
Of the narrative itself, I don’t remember being impressed, as a child, by the island story—aside from the fact that it delivers the gift of a horse to a child who otherwise could not dream of owning one. What I do remember loving are the later scenes of nighttime training at the track: the escape from home, the quiet of the track, the solitary gallop. “[Alec] didn’t have time for games with the fellows anymore.” In my last year of high school, I had a free period on Friday mornings. If I skipped my first class, I could have the whole morning to myself. I would come to a fork in the road on my bike: one way was the barn, the other, school. More often than not, the barn proved irresistible. My earlier dreams of being a stallion had been replaced by more modest dreams of stepping out. My horse was my boi friend, the barn my island getaway.
And I hadn’t given up on the stallion completely. In the closing moments of The Black Stallion, Alec and his horse race toward the finish line: “[Alec] pulled desperately on the reins, but the stallion was once again on his own, running as he had been born to run.”
High school was when I began running and that ramped up when I was moved out of a girls’ gym class for misbehaving and placed in the boys’ class, where, as far as I can remember, all we did was run. There was one other girl in the class. Together we ran and ran. At various moments in my adult life, I have lived the solitary life of the runner, finding in the miles a singular form of self-expression. Running, I am on my own again, ignoring the reins pulling on me.
Rewilding the Island
Rereading The Black Stallion alongside Robinson Crusoe today, I can see that, in addition to their carapace of imperial masculinity and all of its attendant violence, these novels create space for the girl I was and the woman I’ve become. Recently I read a self-help book that identified me as an island: strong on independence and creativity, weak (at times) on intimacy. Crusoe puttering about on his island, doing chores, talking to his animals—this is my idea of a good time. His internal monologues, filled with irony and self-deprecation, remind me of the academic mind, always turning things over, turning on itself, in moments of solitary reflection. Alec, too, talks to himself and his horse, a lot. The horse reminds him, often, of the limits of human understanding.
The Black Stallion showcases what realism does best: blending mundane and magical thinking in narrative form, creating an imaginative space where a reader can meet a horse on an island and have him become her own—or herself. In Fiction Without Humanity, Lynn Festa shows us the eighteenth century’s interests in human/non-human engagement and hybridity. Her reading of Robinson Crusoe concludes, “What the novel gives us … is an intimation of our capacity to imagine a world from a place that is not already colonized by subjectivity.” My younger self imagines herself as a horse on Crusoe’s island. She sees through the horse’s eyes; she looks out to sea. She may let a boy share her life, but he doesn’t own her. This point of view allows me, still, to read against the grain of the novel’s darker Enlightenment legacy, to see that, indeed, there is always more than one grain to read.
Alison Conway is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the I.K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus). Her most recent publication is Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). She recently ran the New York City Marathon.