Pet Projects: Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

276 Pages·2019·3.852 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Young

PET PROJECTS
Nigel Rothfels, General Editor
Advisory Board:
Steve Baker (University of Central Lancashire)
Susan McHugh (University of New England)
Garry Marvin (Roehampton University)
Kari Weil (Wesleyan University)
Books in the Animalibus series share a fascination with the status and the role of
animals in human life. Crossing the humanities and the social sciences to include
work in history, anthropology, social and cultural geography, environmental stud-
ies, and literary and art criticism, these books ask what thinking about nonhuman
animals can teach us about human cultures, about what it means to be human, and
about how that meaning might shift across times and places.
Other titles in the series:
Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Marcus Baynes-Rock, Among the Bone
Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in
Harar
Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and
Paul Youngquist, eds., Gorgeous Beasts: Monica Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur:
Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and
English Horsemanship
Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader, and
Adam Dodd, eds., Animals on Display: Heather Swan, Where Honeybees Thrive:
The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Stories from the Field
Natural History
Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld, eds.,
Ann-Janine Morey, Picturing Dogs, Performing Animals: History, Agency,
Seeing Ourselves: Vintage American Theater
Photographs
J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals:
Mary Sanders Pollock, Storytelling Apes: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy,
Primatology Narratives Past and Future 1870–1914
Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden
Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth- Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches
Century Britain of Time
Dick Blau and Nigel Rothfels, Elephant
House
Pet Projects
Animal Fiction and Taxidermy
in the Nineteenth-Century Archive
ELIZABETH YOUNG
The Pennsylvania State University Press
University Park, Pennsylvania
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Copyright © 2019
Publication Data The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Names: Young, Elizabeth, 1964– author. Printed in the United States of America
Title: Pet projects : animal fiction and Published by The Pennsylvania
taxidermy in the nineteenth-century State University Press,
archive / Elizabeth Young. University Park, PA 16802-1003
Other titles: Animalibus.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania The Pennsylvania State University Press is
: The Pennsylvania State University a member of the Association of University
Press, [2019] | Series: Animalibus : of Presses.
animals and creatures | Includes bibli-
ographical references and index. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania
Summary: “An analysis of how animals State University Press to use acid-free
were represented in the nineteenth paper. Publications on uncoated stock
century in fiction, taxidermy, and other satisfy the minimum requirements
media, threaded together with the of American National Standard for
author’s reflections on animal illness Information Sciences—Permanence of
and on the field of animal studies”— Paper for Printed Library Material,
Provided by publisher. ansi z39.48-1992.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028824 | ISBN
9780271084947 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Saunders, Marshall,
1861–1947—Criticism and interpreta-
tion. | Saunders, Marshall, 1861–1947.
Beautiful Joe. | Animals in litera-
ture—History—19th century. | Dogs in
literature—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC PN56.A64 Y68 2019 |
DDC 809.93362—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov
/2019028824
Contents
List of Illustrations
vii
Introduction
1
CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 5
First-Dog Voice Literary Taxidermy CanLit
15 81 165
CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 4
His Master’s Voice Mounting and
47 Mourning
127
Coda
203
Acknowledgments
223
Notes
225
Index
259

Illustrations
1. Beautiful Joe, Phoenix Edition cover 6 20. Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Passenger
Pigeon 132
2. Beautiful Joe, frontispiece 35
21. Woman and dog in White Dog 140
3. Beautiful Joe, illustration of Joe 40
22. Charles Livingston Bull, Beautiful
4. Beautiful Joe, illustration of Billy 43
Joe’s Paradise, frontispiece 152
5. Francis Barraud, His Master’s Voice 49
23. Charles Livingston Bull, Beautiful
6. Jay Rial’s Ideal Uncle Tom’s Cabin 67 Joe’s Paradise, illustration of
journey 153
7. Charles Moore, Birmingham, Alabama
Policemen Use Police Dogs During 24. “I’m Lost” poster in Wendy and
Civil Rights Demonstrations 74 Lucy 159
8. Man and dog in White Dog 77 25. Woman and dog in Wendy and
Lucy 162
9. Natural History Museum at Tring,
Gallery 6 85 26. Henry James Morgan, Marshall
Saunders entry, Types of Canadian
10. Natural History Museum at Tring, dog Women and of Women Who Are or
postcard 88 Have Been Connected to Canada 172
11. Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (St. 27. Nina Katchadourian, My Pets 184
Bernhard) 91
28. Beautiful Joe postcard 207
12. Nina Katchadourian, Chloe 92
29. Gunter Neumann, Margaret Marshall
13. Eugene S. M. Haines, The Saunders monument, Beautiful Joe
Taxidermists’ After-Dinner Dream 98 Park 209
14. William T. Hornaday, “Manikin for 30. Beautiful Joe dog cairn, Beautiful Joe
Tiger—First Stage” and “Manikin for Park 211
Tiger—Completed” 105
31. Gunter Neumann, Beautiful Joe mon-
15. John N. Hyde, The Cruelties of ument, Beautiful Joe Park 212
Fashion 110
32. Gunter Neumann, Beautiful Joe
16. Martha Maxwell, In the monument, Beautiful Joe Park, side
Workroom 115 view 213
17. Parlor taxidermy in Psycho 117 33. Lucius Hyde, Birds of Mary Lyon’s
Time parlor dome 217
18. Birds in playground in The Birds 119
34. James Gehrt, Canada Warbler 218
19. Candida Lacey, Booth Museum of
Natural History, Brighton 126 35. Sara Angelucci, Aviary (Female
Passenger Pigeon/extinct) 220

Introduction
The place is New England, Massachusetts, Northampton; the time is March
2008, spring break in my academic calendar but closer to wintry, not at all 1
summery. A summary: It is a weekday morning and I am walking my golden
retriever, Frankie, to his veterinarian, just a five-minute stroll through my
neighborhood, for his annual checkup, during which she finds a lump in his
abdomen, and a worried look crossing her kind face; as we return home, he
zigzags and collapses, disoriented, and I drive him to the small hospital here in
western Massachusetts for animal emergencies, twenty minutes north up the
highway, where he is given an abdominal ultrasound and an unfamiliar doctor
says, brusquely, “This is cancer, a large tumor is hemorrhaging, you need to go
to Tufts”—the big veterinary hospital near Worcester—“immediately”; now it
is late afternoon, now the dog is whimpering in pain, now I call a friend for
help and she comes right away and drives us an hour eastward on the turn-
pike, from which we turn off into unfamiliar central Massachusetts and are
immediately lost on country roads; now it is evening, quite dark, and finally
the hospital looms up in front of us, and we bring in Frankie, who is admitted,
stabilized, and scheduled for surgery; now we get back into the car for the long
drive back. It is the dead of night, and I am somewhere in the middle of my
own gothic landscape, holding Frankie’s collar in my hand, as if he is already
dead. He is seven.
There is more to this canine plot—not yet a funeral plot—and I will narrate
it in these pages, though a personal dog story of some shagginess will, I know,
interest some readers more than others. But the animal stories underneath,
prior, and adjacent to this personal one will be, I hope, of general interest. They
map a nineteenth-century cultural landscape—New England, old England,
North American—with some surprising views.
p For example, in the months that follow this opening scene, I return many
e
t
p times to the animal hospital in central Massachusetts; it is where the Tufts
r
o
j University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine trains its students. It
e
c
t turns out that the Tufts animal hospital was built on the site of the former
s
Grafton State Hospital, which was established in 1901 as part of the Worcester
Lunatic Hospital; the Grafton hospital was known as the “farm colony” for the
Worcester one, which means it was where the latter’s “chronic insane” lived
out their lives in agricultural and domestic pursuits. I learn about Grafton’s
history from the website of an artist, Anna Schuleit, who has meticulously
documented the interlocking histories of Massachusetts mental institutions.1
Another of these institutions is in the town where I live: the Northampton
Lunatic Hospital—later known as the Northampton State Hospital—which
was founded in 1856, riding the wave of social reform advocating better treat-
2 ment for the mentally ill. Soon, however, the institution offered less emphasis
on treatment and more on incarceration; by the 1950s, the Northampton State
Hospital had thousands of patients and few psychiatrists. This history is typi-
cal of the American asylum, as was the deinstitutionalization of Northampton
patients in the 1960s part of a national trend; the last patients were released
in 1993.2
So Tufts’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, née Grafton State
Hospital, was on the same asylum atlas as the Northampton State Hospital,
which is connected to me through several paths. I live in Northampton about
a mile from Smith College, whose fields the state hospital abuts. I teach
American literature and film at Mount Holyoke College, which is, like Smith,
historically a women’s college; they are two of the original “Seven Sisters.” And
Mount Holyoke is sibling to the state hospital by design: the seminary system
from which the college emerged bore “a marked resemblance to the structure
of asylum life.”3
The Northampton State Hospital is also in my life in an off-label way.
In 2008, when my story about Frankie starts, I see its buildings daily: they
are on the verge of redevelopment, but for now, they stand, looming and
crumbling, straight out of Gothic Central Casting. In 2000, Anna Schuleit
broadcast Bach through the speakers facing out from the empty buildings’
windows. This installation was an attempt to render the uncanny audible—in
the artist’s words, “to make the building sing.”4 Other sounds are heard there
now, especially those of dogs, because the grounds of the defunct state hos-
pital have become Northampton’s unofficial dog park; they are where I walk
Frankie most days, especially after I write. I am finishing a book entitled Black