Chapter 3 - Taxidermy and Taboo: Sex and Perversions

Summary

Taxidermy can invite tender thinking about the fragility of bodies, human and nonhuman alike, and the myriad ways we can be beautifully, or monstrously, made and unmade under the hands of another. As novelist Kristen Arnett, in an essay for Hazlitt, writes:

I’ve thought about taxidermy the way I’ve thought about my own body. A site of violence, a thing I’ve curated, tended, flesh that other people have touched and marveled at, an organism hollowed out, rubbed, constructed with purpose. Taxidermy is queering; it is an othering, and that is also me, a thing queered up and fucked up and positioned with intent. (“The Year in Taxidermy” n.pag.)

Speaking to the violence and curation of her body, the ways her body has been touched and “fucked up,” a body that is both heimlich and unheimlich to herself, Arnett teases out the intimacies—the pleasures and the pains—and identifications between taxidermy and herself.

While it is possible to imagine taxidermy being included among those “pleasurable practices” that Stacey Alaimo suggests “may open up the human self to forms of kinship and interconnection with nonhuman nature” (Exposed 30), it is even easier to imagine the darker underbelly of this exposure. Indeed, what Gothic horror's treatment of taxidermy reveals is the polymorphous perversity within taxidermy, offering us a view of the dark side of kinship and corporeal horrors of interconnection, a dark side that becomes visible in the material encounter with taxidermy.

This chapter interrogates taxidermy's affinity in Gothic horror with the taboo, with the horror of dark desires that ought not to be there but that nevertheless remain. Many twentieth- and twenty-first century Gothic texts show a tendency to depict those with a taste for taxidermy as perverts, that is, those looking to bypass the demands of the external world (the reality principle, as Freud puts it). In Alice Munro's short story, “Vandals,” an example of the Southern Ontario Gothic, taxidermy becomes aligned with pedophilia; in Norma Lazo's short story “The Taxidermist (The Father)” (2003) a taxidermist father sexually abuses his own daughter; and a similar specter of incest and cycles of abuse haunt Kate Mosse's Gothic historical novel The Taxidermist's Daughter (2014).