Paralytic Animation: The Anthropomorphic Taxidermy of Walter Potter

This essay examines taxidermist Walter Potter's tableaux of preserved animals in anthropomorphic poses. While easily dismissed as kitsch, these works collapse the distance between the corporeal and figurative, illuminating our understanding of Victorian bodies and the techniques used to represent them. This essay reads two of Potter's tableaux as simultaneously a tribute to nature and a violation of it: they are limit cases of an ekphrastic compulsion to bring the object of narration before the reader. The bodies they contain are, borrowing Dickens's phrase, "paralytically animated," a state they share with the bodies preserved by Mr. Venus, Our Mutual Friend's taxidermist. Examining Venus's and Potter's overlapping features helps us to better understand the novel's worrying of the boundaries between literal and figurative, living and dead.