Taxidermy as EcoGothic Horror: Five Questions for Christy Tidwell
Happy Halloween to all our readers! To celebrate spooky season this year, Edge Effects decided to dive into taxidermy—the art of preserving an animal’s body by mounting or stuffing. Taxidermy can equally inspire or offend, usually based on the quality of preservation and how the specimen was obtained.
To understand more about the multifaceted practice of taxidermy and why it makes so many people uneasy, Edge Effects spoke with ecohorror scholar Christy Tidwell. We discussed taxidermy as a historically scientific museum practice, as a tangible method to showcase trophies or remember beloved pets, and as a common metaphorical image in popular culture. We were particularly interested in the inherent connections of taxidermy to ecoGothic and ecohorror genres.
Regardless of how an animal ends up taxidermied, these pieces blur the lines between life and death and remain poignant (and literal) displays of human power over animal agency. Perhaps the spookiest thing about taxidermy is forgetting to honor the life that once was.
1. What is taxidermy and why was it historically practiced?
Taxidermy is the process of arranging an animal’s skin over a mold to display it. The Greek roots of the term taxidermy reflect this method: taxis (arrangement) plus derma (skin). Taxidermy is not, then, a whole dead animal but simply its skin displayed in a way that—typically—aims to give a realistic representation of the live animal and its stance.
In the eighteenth century, taxidermied animals appeared in curiosity cabinets, arranged according to private collectors’ interests. As museums developed into the public educational settings we know now, taxidermy’s presentation shifted from a curiosity cabinet approach to using dioramas to show off taxidermied animals in replications of their habitats, giving a sense of the animal as living and ecologically situated. Curiosity cabinets and natural history museums both use taxidermy to foster learning about animals we might not otherwise see, although their methods tell quite different stories about the animals involved.
Museums no longer commission taxidermy in the way they did before the rise of photography, but they still display taxidermied animals—the Field Museum in Chicago, for instance, has taxidermy from over a hundred years ago on display. Newly created taxidermy in the twenty first century is more likely to take the form of hunting trophies, pet memorials, and contemporary visual art.
2. Why might humans want to preserve an animal’s body? For scientific order, allegory, remembrance…?
Rachel Poliquin outlines and discusses seven distinct reasons that humans might choose to preserve an animal’s body through taxidermy: wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance. These distinct but sometimes overlapping ways of understanding taxidermy and our human uses for it highlight our drive to acknowledge the beauty of animals, to use animals to think about who we are as humans, and to remember “the beast [who] is no more.”
To my mind, these narratives reflect two human ways of relating to nonhuman animals: connection and control. Humans’ attempts to connect with other-than-humans emerge today through many cultural forms, including cat memes, stuffed animal toys, nature documentaries, fiction about animals (from the tragic to the uplifting), and even the current Moo Deng obsession. We want to see animals, to understand them, to love them, to admire them.
Taxidermy also contains this urge to connect across species. This urge to connect may be most apparent in the example of taxidermied pets, which reflect a wish to keep the loved animal nearby forever, but other types of taxidermy emphasize connection, too. Taxidermists aim to “animate the inanimate,” and this animation creates the sense of a creature we can connect with. Some taxidermists discuss their work as a relationship between the animal’s body and the maker, which may be harsh or tender depending on the approach.
Adele Morse, the creator of an internet-famous piece of taxidermy often called Stoner Fox, similarly describes the appeal of taxidermy in terms of connection. She describes visiting the Cardiff museum as a child and feeling a closeness to the animal she could never feel in real life. This experience highlights both what drew her to taxidermy and how museum taxidermy can be appealing to people who desire the experience of being with animals in the wild.
For those who don’t create taxidermy, the experience is different but often still anchored in connection. Think about going to a natural history museum and seeing the taxidermied animals on display there. The giraffe leaning down to drink from the (fake) water, the polar bear standing majestically, or the muskrats building their den (as in Carl Akeley’s 1890 display for the Milwaukee Public Museum, the first habitat diorama) all seem almost as if they will move and return your gaze. Caught in lifelike poses, the animals in these displays give us a chance to see a portion of their lives, as imagined by humans.
Further, their three-dimensional, material forms call out for touch. When else could you possibly come close enough to pet a polar bear? To be clear, you should not pet the taxidermied animals, both for their sake and for yours—toxic chemicals like arsenic or mercury may well be a part of the preservation process—but the impulse is hard to deny.
Taxidermy’s horror is located in the fact that this was done to an animal, a living creature who could feel and think and experience.
Of course, taxidermy’s animation is an illusion, since what we are trying so desperately to connect with is dead and unable to reciprocate. Our attempts at connection therefore rely on our control of the animal. We decide which animals’ bodies we want to preserve in this way, what position they will be placed in, what they will be surrounded by, and how we will interact with them. In this way, taxidermied animals are “dead but not gone,” still available to our gaze and to our desires.
Because taxidermied animals are, in a way, stuck in immortality and now cannot dictate their intimacy, taxidermy has an “unsettling voyeuristic element.” For some, this control of the nonhuman world is part of taxidermy’s appeal. The feeling of pleasure derived from control is foregrounded most obviously in trophy mounts, but it is present in all forms of taxidermy—whether we want to admit it or not.
3. How is taxidermy connected to the Gothic horror genre?
Taxidermy and the Gothic overlap in so many ways—their relationship to death and the past, their category confusions, their uncanniness—that discussions of taxidermy not explicitly mentioning its Gothic nature seem odd to me. Beyond its appearance in horror movies, which I will return to, taxidermy shares one of the central concerns of the Gothic: its preoccupation with the past. By attempting to preserve the past through corporeality, both Gothic texts and the art of taxidermy practice “grotesque preservation.”
Across a variety of fields including museum studies, history, and art, the language used to describe taxidermy is also consistently Gothic: taxidermied mounts are “intended to be ‘resurrections,’ as close to life as possible”; taxidermy offers opportunities for “reanimating the inanimate” and “practicing necromancy through naturalism”; and taxidermied animals are “a kind of abomination, in that they are like zombies, animated corpses, and yet they are exquisite in their artifice.”
And in its grotesquerie and its liminality, taxidermy incorporates an inherently Gothic category confusion—a hallmark of horror—in multiple ways. Confusion about what a taxidermied animal actually is marks taxidermy as monstrous, as the fear in horror is about the way that monsters are “cognitively threatening” and ultimately challenges a culture’s way of thinking. This category confusion creates a sense of uncanniness, another key element of horror and the Gothic.
More specifically, I see taxidermy as ecoGothic and ecohorrific. Its category confusions and uncanniness are fascinating, but they do not necessarily address the animal at the heart of taxidermy. Taxidermy, after all, does not exist without the dead animal. This reliance on animal death is true of many objects, but taxidermy is even more reliant on it because taxidermy is a presentation of the dead animal, not just a behind-the-scenes use of it.
Taxidermied animals presented in groups prompts yet another kind of horrified response. In Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer presents a scene in which the protagonist comes across a room full of taxidermy: a “midden of taxidermy,” “a great mound of snuffed-out lives,” “a mountain of dead animals.” Her reaction to this room reflects the horror of not just a lone taxidermied animal but a mass of them: “Some sights make the brain rebel, make a soul want to hide from itself.”
Our attempts at connection therefore rely on our control of the animal.
Even in the context of a habitat diorama—rather than a storage facility—so many taxidermied animals seen all at once can be overwhelming and signals the power to objectify. Taxidermy collections can be de-individualizing, treating animals as a mass rather than as individuals whose lives are deserving of dignity. This loss of individual value and status is its own kind of horror.
4. Taxidermy makes a lot of folks uneasy. Why might this be? How does its macabre preservation/destruction surface in its popular representation?
Taxidermy’s categorical instability, uncanniness, and reliance on death are central to the discomfort some feel. Although popular representations of taxidermy vary tremendously (from comic effect in movies like Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls [1995] to matter-of-fact display in hunting stores like Cabela’s), I find myself particularly fascinated by the way taxidermy recurs in horror film.
Sometimes taxidermy in horror film is directly related to the plot, but it is quite often simply part of the background, its significance left to be interpreted by the audience. In horror, taxidermy might be used to indicate that the taxidermist himself is sinister (see Norman Bates in Psycho [1960], surrounded by his taxidermied birds), to mark the setting as outside of the protagonists’ or victims’ typical civilized environment (this recurs in many horror films, from Night of the Living Dead [1968] to Cabin in the Woods [2012]), to create a sense of absurd uncanniness through the liveliness of the taxidermied animal (see Evil Dead II [1987]), or to connect taxidermied dead animals to environmental harms like pollution (see Frogs [1972]).
These varied uses reinforce the sense of taxidermy as multivalent, not able to simply represent one meaning or anxiety. At the same time, they share the sense of taxidermy as unsettling because of its liminality and the animal death inherent to the form.
Taxidermied animals in horror film are things that reflect elements of character and setting, but they carry more conceptual and emotional weight than a piece of furniture. They are, category confusion notwithstanding, not alive. However, their former aliveness—an aliveness that more starkly reveals its current deadness—and our perception and perhaps our desire to see this trace gives taxidermy its meaning and complicates our responses to it. Taxidermy is human-created, but its status as a previously living being must matter.
One type of horror present within taxidermy, then, goes beyond the killing involved in creating it or the death itself, to the epistemic violence of forgetting that killing and the centrality of animal death. Viewers can be made uneasy by reminders of this killing and death, as seen in responses to Angela Singer’s de-taxidermy projects, which highlight the violence of taxidermy. But facing the taxidermied animal and having those processes thoroughly ignored or erased can also be a source of uneasiness.
For some people, the horror of taxidermy emerges from their imagined experience in the animal’s place: “the feeling of being disemboweled, of being evacuated, of being stuffed and mounted, rendered frozen, immobile, and placed on display, to be alive in death, to be unblinkingly stuck, to be radically transformed, to feel a scream stuck in one’s throat, to be in stasis forever.”
For me, taxidermy is both fascinating and horrifying, but it’s not the proximity of death and dead bodies that I find disturbing, and the horror of taxidermy is not about the sense of my own death or potential for being stuffed. Instead, taxidermy’s horror is located in the fact that this was done to an animal, a living creature who could feel and think and experience. I do not need to imagine myself into the animal’s place; it’s bad enough that the animal is in this position.
5. Do you have a favorite example of taxidermy in pop culture that you’d recommend to Edge Effects readers?
The musical-horror short film “Stuffed” is a fun addition to representations of taxidermy in pop culture. Directed by Theo Rhys, with music by Joss Holden-Rea, this film was featured at SXSW in 2021 and tells quite a different story of taxidermy.
A taxidermist (Alison FitzJohn) wants to move on in her practice from animals to humans and seeks a person willing to be taxidermied. One man (Anthony Young), afraid of aging, volunteers, and the film follows their relationship throughout the process. Although I’m primarily interested in animal taxidermy, which “Stuffed” does not spend much time on, the film raises interesting questions about the lines we draw between human and nonhuman—why taxidermy animals but not humans?—as well as about the feelings we have about taxidermy in general.
Featured image: Diorama at the Powell-Cotton Museum of Quex Park in Kent, England. Photo by Acabashi, 2016.
Interview questions written by Managing Editor Bri Meyer.
Christy Tidwell is a Professor of English and Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Her research and teaching primarily address speculative fiction, environmental studies, and gender studies. She often works with animal studies, disability studies, and science studies as well. Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “Eleven Ecohorror Films to Creep You Out” (October 2018). Contact.
You must be logged in to post a comment.