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chapter 4 toy fish Small ‹shes have taken so de‹nite a place in the home that a living-room without an aquarium is almost as desolate as a ‹reside without a cat . . . Unlike most animals in captivity, ‹shes do not return their owner’s affection, and it is therefore possible to enjoy them while they live and refrain from mourning when they die. —ida m. mellen, Fishes in the Home I amputated that yellow angel[‹sh]’s ‹n and I gave it mouth-tomouth . Don’t tell me that ‹sh doesn’t know I saved its life. —paula, attendee at the 2006 International Marine Aquarium Conference The gulf between Ida’s and Paula’s views of home aquarium ‹sh is, in one sense, historical. Mellen, one of the few female public ‹gures in the early American hobby and professional aquarist at the New York Aquarium from 1916 to 1929, is, in many ways, heir to a Gossean strategy of representing one’s personal specimens through behavioral sketches, as protocharacters, in contrast to Henry Butler’s “happy family” and Arthur Edwards’s affectionate pet “Minny.” Paula, a very self-aware and articulate critic of the incipient sexism in the still male-dominated hobby almost eighty years after Mellen’s book, adheres to an increasingly re‹ned and expansive view of pet keeping; from this perspective, boa constrictors, tarantulas, rats, and, of course, ‹sh are every bit as much “companion species” as the family cat lounging by the ‹replace and are every bit as worthy of mourning.1 This gulf is also conceptual, centering less on evolving standards of pet keeping and more on the nature of ‹sh as beings. On the one hand, ‹sh are both animals and the equivalent of plants or objects in terms of their relational potential . On the other, the yellow angel is not only as fully animal as the family cat but also worthy of lifesaving intervention and potentially aware of and grateful for it. The formulation used as the title of this chapter was coined 125 by Mellen herself. It spans these historical and conceptual gulfs and points to the larger, equivocal nature of ‹sh as pets, sites of deep attraction and attachment yet still “it” toys, other in their animality in ways more explicit than dogs or cats or even their aquatic neighbors dolphins and whales. This queer alterity is key to understanding the theatricality, relationality, and rhetorical elasticity so central to the aquarium’s popularity. Speci‹cally, ‹shes’ ambiguous animality enables them to serve as surrogates for negotiating otherness , including gender, race, and geography, in unique ways, as discussed in chapters 5 and 6. This chapter examines the conceptual and representational potency of aquarium ‹sh as another core component of the tank’s rhetorical utility. It begins with a theoretically informed discussion of ‹shes’ animality. Simply put, are ‹sh “animals” in the same ways dogs, cats, and cows are? This is not just a rhetorical question. It vexed early aquarium viewers who didn’t always know what they should be looking at or how to interpret what they saw. As discussed in previous chapters, Henry Butler and others needed to supply the plots and landscapes, from melodrama to the garden, to render them intelligible as objects of spectatorship different from their dead kin in the market. Further, ‹sh push up against the limits of critical animal studies, which is generally more concerned with mammals.2 Not only are mammals biologically closer to us, but in aesthetic and behavioral terms, they are all veritable charismatic megafauna in comparison to aquarium ‹sh. Early aquarists were also keenly interested in the limits of and possibilities in ‹sh animality, particularly in their relational potential. What could they know or feel? What affective bene‹ts could they offer to their caretakers? Next, this chapter turns to three key tropes that recur in aquarium hobbyist texts and particularly in aquarium advertising and humor: ‹sh as people, the ‹sh as captive, and the ‹sh as food. All three tropes offer insights into ‹sh as surrogates used to negotiate and sometimes expose modern anxieties. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the processes that individualize ‹sh, using as examples two relative celebrities, “Snoz” and “Blanche,” who help answer the question, “How can one love a ‹sh?” zooesis and feeling with fish Animals are good to think with, as Aesop’s fables and the Muppets attest. They are even better to feel with: consider the ‹lm Marley and Me; Knut...

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