The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing by Rachel Poliquin (review)

In Erica Fudge’s 2012 essay “Renaissance Animal Things,” she proposes two terms that urge us to reconsider human relationships to animal matter: the animal-made object and the animal, made object.¹ Fudge injects this variation into the ongoing conversation on animal bodies to “remind us of the concurrent status of animals as both agents and matter” (p. 43). This insistence that animals, made object actively bear immense cultural weight is the central theme of Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo, the first in the Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series by Pennsylvania State University Press. The Breathless Zoo is a methodically organized, accessible, and comprehensive contribution to the recent surge in the study of taxidermy. Culling examples from history, science, popular culture, and art, Poliquin asserts the ways in which human desire articulates a need to preserve an animal just so, in a fixed state that captures its aesthetic presence, its size, form, or strangeness. In The Breathless Zoo, a taxidermic animal-object becomes an accidental host for human longing and a desire for connection with an idealized version of Nature. The agency of the animal, made object, as Poliquin describes, lies in its persistent and sometimes aggressive, albeit lifeless, hoisting of those desires and anxieties back onto its creators, collectors, and admirers, eliciting a visceral reaction—a “bodily knowing” that occurs during encounters with taxidermy (p. 39).

Poliquin situates Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1993) as the scaffolding upon which she constructs her study of seven “narratives of longing.”² Poliquin credits each of these narratives with being a catalyst for the necessity and perseverance of taxidermy—the practice of stretching preserved animal skins over synthetic molded armature and fashioning them into lifelike postures. These incentives are demonstrated in seven chapters. The first, “Wonder,” discusses early explorers’ collective impulse to acquire and preserve curious pieces of incomplete animals or bizarre natural anomalies—including a stone removed from a dog’s bladder, a two-headed cat, or the molted skin of a Kimono dragon—to represent the marvels of the exotic natural world. This section includes catalogs of early curio cabinets and evidence of the role of obscure animal collections in mythmaking about the unfamiliar world. These random groupings of strange preserved animal parts, according to Poliquin, represented “warehouses of raw potentiality” to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naturalists, who used modern empirical methodologies to extract knowledge about the natural world through these incomplete, or “opaque,” animal objects (p. 36). Here, Poliquin traces the beginning of systematically collecting and preserving animal parts for scientific speculation.

The author continues to structure the following chapters by anchoring narrative tropes to a particularly relevant or exemplary specimen, drawing attention to those that both illustrate the many dimensions of longing under which they were created and articulating the ways in which they serve as visual referents to which the reader can apply a thematic template. Poliquin rounds out her examples by offering complete historical, scientific, and cultural data on the animal in relation to the theme. The effect of this representational methodology is that the selected animal becomes a kind of totem for the dimension of longing it represents. Poliquin’s consistent message, that humans employ taxidermy as a conduit to nature by painstakingly recreating nature on human terms, is evident in each specimen she presents.

For example, in the chapter on “Spectacle,” the lion becomes the standard-bearer for the sublime thrill of a human encounter with a natural predator. Here, various renderings of lions demonstrate the violence not done to them in the event of their own deaths, but rather the terror they bestow on other creatures, including humans. She introduces the lion in a painting by Henri Rousseau; in an instructional rendering from a nineteenth-century taxidermy manual; in a grizzly scene of a lion mauling an agonized camel and its human rider; and in the...