Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life

Taxidermy and the Gothic

Taxidermy and the Gothic

The Horror of Still Life

Elizabeth Effinger

Anthem Press

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This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

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© Elizabeth Effinger 2024

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2024930032

ISBN-13: 978-1-83999-026-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83999-026-0 (Hbk)

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CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Two-Headed Kitten: The First Stitches of the Gothic

2. Taxidermy and the Horror of Being-There

3. Taxidermy and Taboo: Sex and Perversions

4. Taxidermy, Fungibility, and the Everyday Gothic Horrors of Black Life

Afterword: All Stitched Up

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

0.1 Angela Singer. Sore I. 2002–3. © Angela Singer. Image courtesy of the artist.

1.1 Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in His Museum. 1822. Image courtesy of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

1.2 Frontispiece and title page for Thomas Brown’s The Taxidermist’s Manual.

1.3 E. Jones. Walton Hall with Waterton and Some of His Animals. Image courtesy of Wakefield Museums & Castles, Wakefield Council.

1.4 William Hogarth. Hudibras Beats Sidrophel and His Man Whacum. Etching and engraving for Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, February 1726. Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

1.5 Unknown artist. The Quacks. Engraving, 1783. Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

1.6 About Taxidermy—1. The Principles Laid Down, Fun Magazine. 36.915 (22 Nov. 1882, p. 216).

1.7 About Taxidermy—4. An Unappreciated Triumph, Fun Magazine 36.917 (6 Dec. 1882, p. 238).

2.1 Caravaggio. Rest on the Flight into Egypt. c.1597. Galleria Doria Pamphilj. HIP/Art Resource.

2.2 Screenshots from Psycho (dir. Hitchcock).

2.3 Screenshot from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Hooper).

2.4 Close-up of Leatherface’s taxidermy. Screenshot from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Hooper).

2.5 Screenshot from A Classic Horror Story (dir. De Feo and Strippoli).

2.6 Elisa reflected in taxidermy’s eye. Screenshot from A Classic Horror Story (dir. De Feo and Strippoli).

2.7 Screenshot from The Outside (dir. Amirpour).

2.8 Screenshot from Evil Dead II (dir. Raimi).

2.9 Screenshot from The Outside (dir. Amirpour).

3.1 BDSM mouse from the British Academy of Taxidermy website.

3.2 Screenshot from The Cabin in the Woods (dir. Goddard).

3.3 Screenshot from Tell Me Your Secrets, episode 6 (dir. Polson).

3.4 Screenshot from Tell Me Your Secrets, episode 1 (dir. Polson).

4.1 Galápagos Island finch collected and preserved by Charles Darwin. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

4.2 Kate Clark. Little Girl. © Kate Clark. Image courtesy of the artist.

4.3 Screenshots from Get Out (dir. Peele).

4.4 Screenshots from Get Out (dir. Peele).

4.5 Screenshot from Get Out (dir. Peele).

4.6 Screenshots from Get Out (dir. Peele).

A1.1 Polly Morgan. Harbour. 2012. © Polly Morgan. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage/CARCC Ottawa 2024.

A1.2 Scott Bibus. Snapping Turtle Eating Human Eyeball. © Scott Bibus. Image courtesy of the artist.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book can be a beast of a job, although this one was especially fun, thanks in no small part to the help of many.

For financial support, thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of New Brunswick.

Much of studying taxidermy involves working with images, some of which are included in the book. Thanks to Kristen McDonald at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University and Janna King at Wakefield Museums and Castles for helping me acquire the images from their respective collections. Thanks to Scott Bibus, Kate Clark, and Angela Singer for granting permission to reproduce images of their art and for their enthusiastic responses to the book.

I’d like to thank Carol Davison, series editor, for her interest in my work and for her support over the years as it took shape, and Jebaslin Hephzibah at Anthem. I greatly appreciate the thoughtful feedback from the anonymous reviewers that helped strengthen this book.

The love and support of family and friends kept me stitched together as I worked on the book. Thanks to Helen Bruder and Harriet Fender for showing me badly stuffed badgers and their ilk in the Cotswolds and to Jeffrey Simpson and Suzanne Caines for the rollicking taxidermy-spotting tours and fun times together in East London. Cheers to Mary and Ed Effinger, Christopher Effinger and Melanie Abbott, and to Michelle Coupal and Kishanie Jayasundera for continual support, and to Mum Corrine for gifting me a hilariously bad taxidermy calendar to help keep track of my stuffed schedule. Thanks to Priscilla and Terry Pickhaver for lovingly minding our dogs, which made the research trips possible.

Thanks to my children, Lucy and Libby, who kept me from getting too stuffy. Thanks to my four-legged favorites, Langley (Big Baby) and Shirley (Tiny Terror), who both helped and hindered the writing of this book, and who may one day find themselves taxidermied.

And a final thanks to my wife, Vicky Simpson, who read through the entire manuscript and provided thoughtful feedback, suffered by my side through many taxidermy-filled horror films, and always keeps our little (living) zoo happy and humming. This book is dedicated to her.

INTRODUCTION

Writing in 1753 to his friend Horace Mann, an incredulous-sounding Horace Walpole, the soon-to-be-father of the Gothic, shared the surprising ways he was spending his time:

You will scarce guess how I employ my time; chiefly at present in the guardianship of embryos and cockleshells. Sir Hans Sloane is dead, and has made me one of the trustees to his museum, which is to be offered for twenty thousand pounds to the King, the Parliament, the royal acadamies [sic] of Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and Madrid. He valued it at fourscore thousand, and so would anybody who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese! […] You may believe that those, who think money the most valuable of all curiosities, will not be purchasers. (358–59)

Walpole was entrusted with safeguarding the taxidermy specimens belonging to the collection of the late Sir Hans Sloane. Yet taxidermy is absent from Walpole’s own fantasy Gothic house-cum-museum, Strawberry Hill, particularly surprising given his professional proximity to stuffed hippopotamuses, one-eared sharks, and freakishly large spiders and his view of museums as hospitals for unique singularities including Monstrous births, hermaphrodites, petrifactions (Walpole, Fugitive Pieces 49). Walpole also had a penchant for collecting items we might consider the sister arts and objects of taxidermy, including wax models, books on embalming, objects made from animal hides (e.g., shields made from rhinoceros skin), and prints that depict taxidermy. While taxidermy is a strange absence at Strawberry Hill, in the Gothic tradition that Walpole would go on to inspire, taxidermy’s uncanny presence—from its origins to our present day—looms large.¹

One need only grab the remote to find evidence of taxidermy’s ubiquitous presence in Gothic horror: in hallmark horror films like Psycho, Evil Dead (I and II), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1 and 2), and Silence of the Lambs to the more recent Friday the 13th, The Cabin in the Woods, Taxidermia, Get Out, and A Classic Horror Story; in television and streaming series like Penny Dreadful, Bates Motel, Tell Me Your Secrets, and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities; and even in horror video games like Heavy Rain Chronicles: Episode 1—The Taxidermist and Taxidermy. Let’s look a little closer at a few of these examples. In the ­­genre-defining horror film Psycho (1960), a stuffed menagerie of taxidermied birds lines the walls of the Bates Motel office, perched above and behind the climactic conversations between Norman and Marion. In Friday the 13th (2009), Lawrence’s late-night attempt to masturbate in the living room is thwarted when he becomes aware of a large moose mount. In The Cabin in the Woods (2011), a snarly looking wolf mount gets French-kissed by blonde bombshell Jules in a kinky game of Truth or Dare. In the horror drama television series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), the seductive, secretive, and supernatural main character Vanessa Ives (who begins as a medium and eventually becomes the Mother of Evil) practices taxidermy as a child (Season 1), and falls in love with Dracula amidst a taxidermy-stuffed museum of natural history, filmed at the Natural Museum of Ireland, known as the Dead Zoo (Season 3). In the Amazon Prime series Tell Me Your Secrets (2021), multiple forms of negative encounters between characters, ranging from disappointing to dangerous and deadly, take place against the backdrop of taxidermy. In the metahorror film A Classic Horror Story (2021), gory, horrific violence takes place under the seemingly watchful glassy eyes of a stuffed stag mount. And, in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Outside, part of Netflix’s horror anthology Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), Stacey, a bank-teller by day and amateur taxidermist by night misuses her taxidermy skills to murderous ends.

Even if we change the channel and flip to the news, taxidermy’s affinities with Gothic horror are found there too. True crime’s connections with taxidermy are strikingly serial: Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Monster, was fascinated with taxidermy and dissecting animals before going on to murder and dismember seventeen men; Charles Albright, the Texas Eyeball Killer, was similarly obsessed with and trained in taxidermy as a child, a practice that informed the type of trophy that he kept from his killings as souvenirs: his victims’ eyeballs. Still to this day, as I write this, a story about a sadistic Wisconsin nurse scavenging a patient’s body parts for her family’s taxidermy business has just made international headlines: Nurse accused of amputating man’s foot for her family’s taxidermy shop (The Washington Post, Nov 8, 2022). When it comes to our contemporary imagination, taxidermy’s footholds (pardon the pun) in Gothic horror are clear to see.

Taxidermy, taxi (to arrange) and dermis (skin), meaning the arrangement of skin, refers to the art or craft of preparing and preserving the skins of animals and stuffing and mounting them to give the appearance of the living animal. Flesh and organs are removed, and although sometimes the interior of a specimen contains the animal’s bones to help recreate a lifelike shape, it is most often filled with foreign materials: wire, wood, Styrofoam, resin, plaster, or clay. Recreating the lifelikeness of the once living animal is the intended realist aesthetic of most taxidermy that line the walls of our own interiors, as hunting trophies or objects of natural history—in our homes, galleries, and museums (and cabinets of curiosities before that), retail stores, and even pubs and restaurants. In response to these breathless zoos, as Rachel Poliquin describes them, we often respond to taxidermy with a mixture of wonder, awe, sadness, and sometimes also ugly feelings, to borrow Sianne Ngai’s term for feelings like disgust, anxiety, or even horror, particularly in Gothic horror texts where the encounter is uncanny and unsettling.

This book tells the story of the collusion between the Gothic and taxidermy, how the Gothic (or rather Gothic horror) in its myriad formations and deformations, as a tradition, aesthetic, and mode, has been since its origins quietly serving as a nebulous guardian over taxidermy. The problem this book identifies is that taxidermy’s collusion with Gothic horror is omnipresent in a range of texts but overlooked in Gothic criticism. Critical scholarship on taxidermy, including representations of taxidermy in popular literature have been increasing in the last decade, with the appearance of exciting new books (e.g., Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo [2012], Giovanni Aloi’s Speculative Taxidermy [2018], Elizabeth Young’s Pet Projects [2019]), and a special journal issue of Configurations dedicated to the topic (ed. Bezan and McHugh 2019). And yet, few scholars are thinking about it in terms of Gothic horror. Thus, the Gothic tradition and a certain Gothic sensibility largely remain blind spots when thinking about taxidermy. This book works to redress this gap.

Imagine this book plotted like a Wunderkammer (German for room of wonder), those sixteenth-century European cabinets of curiosities that collected wonderful, odd, exotic natural, and cultural objects and served as the precursor to the modern museum. The first door you open affords a view of the entwined origins of discourses of the Gothic and taxidermy in the long nineteenth century, their curious points of contact, including shared narrative and rhetorical strategies and investments. This leads you to the second door that opens into a larger space, in which you will be confronted with the dizzying array of taxidermy in present-day Gothic horror, affording a view of how these discourses continue to be stuffed by one another. It is my hope that you will as Kirk does in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) run eagerly toward this room of taxidermy and begin to see it awry (although I hope you won’t lose your head in the same fashion as Kirk does).

Taxidermy and the Gothic share some of the same categorical vexations, as I will soon unpack in greater detail. What is it? is a question we ask of them both. The Gothic is notoriously difficult to define. From origins with fifth-century Visigoths, to an eighteenth-century phenomenon in architecture and literature that appears like a counterfeit medievalism, to a mode that extends to all contemporary arts, especially music, film, and fashion—the Gothic, or simply Gothic as it is sometimes called (there is no critical consensus here either) is remarkably protean and slippery, a powerful shapeshifter. Likewise, taxidermy has at its undead heart the ontological impossibility of reconciling itself as being alive or dead, animal or object. Moreover, as I aim to show, both are discourses deeply invested in the uncanny and the counterfeit.

Taxidermy is uncanny; it occupies a liminal zone between life and death, animal and object, temporalities of past and present, and spaces of the wild and domestic. That which is uncanny is the name, as Freud says drawing on Schelling, for everything that ought to have remained […] secret and hidden but has come to light (The Uncanny 224). In the case of taxidermy, the dead body which ought to have been disposed of, buried, or otherwise made to disappear instead lingers, and remains preserved and placed back inside the space of the living. Taxidermy also serves as an uncanny reminder of the past. For if the Gothic, as Allan Lloyd-Smith reminds us, trades in the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit (1), so too does taxidermy. To be sure, taxidermy has many secrets. As we will explore in Chapter 1, many nineteenth-century prints and taxidermy manuals flirt with the mystery and secrets of this quasi-magical craft. Yet taxidermy, or rather taxidermy’s history, holds still more secrets, one of which is the long and difficult relationship between black life and taxidermy, which, like taxidermy’s collusion with the Gothic, also emerges in the nineteenth century and continues to murmur within the present (as I explore in Chapter 4).

Taxidermy can be furry, feathery, or scaly, though perhaps may be best described as fuzzy—a term that not only describes a fur- or feather-covered animal but also captures something of the difficulty in perceiving, identifying, and defining it, being something that is blurred, indistinct […] imprecisely defined (OED). Sometimes the term taxidermy is used to describe any form of animal preservation, such as wet preservations, embalmed specimens that are pickled and preserved in jars; skull mounts, also known as European mounts, where only the skull and/or horns or antlers are mounted without the skin; and even the ancient Egyptians’ process of mummification. Sometimes taxidermy crosses the species boundaries and extends to include human taxidermy. While material examples of this are infrequent (taxidermy historian Pat Morris tracks only seven examples of real human taxidermy [A History of Taxidermy 88–98]), they are always to disastrous ends, such as in the well-known case of Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon whose desiccated head and clothed skeleton continue to be preserved and on display at University College London. Other times the skin of the term stretches, and taxidermy becomes a metaphor for another medium that captures and preserves its subjects in lifelike conditions, like photography, or a figure for thought, such as a sign system for colonial logic (cf. Wakeham).

A word then on what counts in this book as taxidermy and what doesn’t. As I use the term here, taxidermy is something quite specific: it is not wet preservations, not mere skulls, bones, or mounted antlers, and not mummification. Taxidermy, as taken up here, does not cross the species boundary to include examples of human taxidermy, despite being legion in contemporary horror films (e.g., Silence of the Lambs, Beyond the Darkness, Taxidermia, Stuffed, The House That Jack Built) enough to be the subject of their own book. Instead, I endeavor to stay with examples of the furry or feathery strange animal-object-thing itself and not enfold it back into the more familiar and familial forms of the human. Additionally, taxidermy here is not a mere metaphor, and I do not pursue readings that make the case for photography or film as metonyms for taxidermy. Finally, taxidermy for our purposes here also does not include what we might consider the by-products of taxidermy: designs or decor made out of animals, like fur coats, rugs, or animal furniture, such as horse hoof candlesticks, elephant stools, alligator cigar boxes (examples of Wardian Furniture, so named after the nineteenth-century London taxidermist Rowland Ward who popularized these productions)—something other studies have deftly taken up.² Instead, taxidermy throughout this book predominantly refers to a strange or fuzzy material animal-object-thing, a three-dimensional mount—furry, feathery, or scaly—that in the tradition of a hunting trophy is stuffed, mounted, and displayed in such a manner that one comes into an uncanny, unsettling encounter with it, one that horrifies us in its stuckness.

Like the term taxidermy, the term Gothic is also polysemous. And every book that wades into its murky waters inevitably begins with an acknowledgment of such. As Alexandra Warwick notes,

The tangled question of ‘what is Gothic?’ has been rehearsed by many critics. […] The arguments are well-known, but if there is any general consensus, it seems to be that Gothic is a mode rather than a genre, that it is a loose tradition and even that its defining characteristics are its mobility and continued capacity for reinvention. (quoted in Castricano 37)

If questions over what is Gothic or the Gothic is already a critical tangle, bringing the question of horror into the mix can produce even bigger challenges—at least for scholars looking to tease apart and isolate these bodies. However, in the spirit of working against purity (for reasons I will soon unpack), an approach influenced by Alexis Shotwell and well suited to my topic at hand, I am less interested in holding Gothic and horror apart. That said, I do use Gothic fiction to refer to a tradition that extends from Walpole with a set of familiar conventions and tropes, suggesting as I do (in Chapter 1) that there are shared formal resemblances or rhetorical strategies between early exemplars of the genre and nineteenth-century taxidermy manuals. But more often, I deploy the more affectively charged composite term and mode of Gothic horror, chosen for its emphasis on corporeality and visceral encounters, a rhetorical move that helps with the need Xavier Aldana Reyes identifies to reclaim the importance of the body to the gothic text (Body Gothic 2).³

And what a body it is! Indeed, in many iterations, some of which we will closely examine throughout this book, taxidermy is, I offer, another spectacular form of the Gothic body, which Steven Bruhm defines as that which is put on excessive display, and whose violent, vulnerable immediacy gives both […] painting and Gothic fiction their beautiful barbarity, their troublesome power (Gothic Bodies xvii). Stuffed and mounted and displayed inside homes or museums, taxidermy—the product of violence and gruesome processes—in its vulnerable, visceral immediacy stands motionless before us, as if breathlessly calling to us. It enacts and incites the very work of horror as Ann Radcliffe defined it, as that which contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates our faculties, rendering us horrified, immobilized or stuck subjects (On the Supernatural in Poetry [1826] 149–50).⁴ Thus, while Gothic horror helps keep the dimension of taxidermy’s phenomenological horror in the forefront of our imaginations, sometimes I use the Gothic as shorthand for this, and trust you to feel the word horror stuck in your throat. Asking you to feel the word horror as something stuck in your throat is to court the unpalatable, a move that (in the same spirit as this book more broadly) works against what appears to be the increasing efforts to render taxidermy more palatable.

The Abjection and Apotheosis of Taxidermy

If taxidermy enjoyed great popularity in the long nineteenth century, as will be explored more fully in the next chapter, because of advances in preservation techniques, following the First World War taxidermy experienced what Alexis Turner calls a long period of decline when for decades it was the subject of distaste and disapproval. As the backlash against the perceived persecution of wildlife continued, taxidermy was made a scapegoat, and collections were dismantled and dispersed, while saleroom prices sank to new lows (18). Although the taxidermy industry itself began to show early signs of recovery in the 1970s, with the formation of national associations dedicated to the craft, such as the American National Taxidermists Association and the British Guild of Taxidermists, taxidermy had not yet shifted in the public imagination. Arguably, we could look to the first horror film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and its enormous cultural influence (and first on-screen depiction of the murderous taxidermist trope) as a reason for this delay. According to Turner, it wasn’t until the new millennium when luxurious worlds of fashion, art, and commercial branding—major names such as Alexander McQueen, Ted Baker, Bergdorf Goodman, and Harrods, among others—began incorporating taxidermy into their art and marketing that the taste for taxidermy returned. Furthermore, we continue to see a concerted effort to purify and beautify the image of taxidermy. In the visually stunning documentary film Stuffed (2019), against the backdrop of quirky lighthearted music, a handful of taxidermists are shown to be humorous and humble nature lovers in innocent awe of animal beauty. The film, as one reviewer rightly puts it, paints a giddy portrait of taxidermists (Hansman n.pag).⁵ The overstuffed walrus at London’s Horniman Museum paints a similar picture: it has its own Twitter account @HornimanWalrus, and regularly offers anecdotes, jokes, and suggestive emojis that imbues the specimen with a larger-than-life personality. Spilling beyond museum walls, in 2022, British taxidermist duo Field and Young (Suzette Field and Eliot Young) were invited to create a taxidermy installation outside of the British Museum. Their Fox in a Box featured an ethically sourced dapper fox dressed in a suit, along with a few stuffed squirrels, making a phone call from inside an iconic red phone booth, which was filled with colorful fake flyers advertising sexual services. Viewers could eavesdrop on the fox’s call by scanning a QR code. These are a few recent charming examples from the larger trend in taxidermy’s comeback, projects that aim to distance taxidermy from any negative aesthetics, that is, from what is perceptually distressing, repellent, or painful (Berleant 158).

On the contrary, scholarly engagements with taxidermy (cf. Poliquin, Madden, Milgrom, Aloi, McHugh and Bezan, Desmond) lean more into negative aesthetics, although, as I will soon suggest, the field still does not go far enough into the dark. The overall