Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first
extended study of the Gothic's collusion with taxidermy. It tells the
story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden
ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared
rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities.
It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture,
including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts. Like
late Victorian Walter Potter's infamous taxidermied two-headed kitten,
the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched
together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a
sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new
dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that
aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror (e.g.,
anxiety, hesitation, disgust) and the unsettling aesthetics,
experiences, and pleasures that come with it. Over the course of four
chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy's
uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts, surprisingly overlooked
in most criticism, is a driving force in generating fear. The core
argument of the book is that taxidermy embodies the phenomenological
horror of stuckness, of being there. Taxidermy often sits, presiding
over characters in critical moments in Gothic texts, sometimes
foreshadowing their own fate (as in the case of Norman Bates's mother in
Psycho, or the protagonist in Roald Dahl's short story "The Landlady"),
but most frequently taxidermy works to amplify the affect of horror,
generating anxiety over what will be forever preserved and never
escaped: the violence of life. Key texts examined in this book are
nineteenth-century taxidermy manuals and specimens, including the
anthropomorphic work by notorious taxidermists Walter Potter and Charles
Waterton; contemporary artistic taxidermy, with a focus on the shocking
work by Scott Bibus, Kate Clark, and Mothmeister; literary works, by
authors such as H.G. Wells, Alice Munro, and Claudia Rankine; and horror
film and tele-series, with a focus on Get Out (2017), The Cabin in
the Woods (2011), and Tell Me Your Secrets (2021). In short,
taxidermy's imbrication with the Gothic is more than skin deep: these
are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions,
the uncanny, and the counterfeit. This book will help carve new
scholarly directions in the bodies of Gothic and horror studies, animal
studies, and art history and visual culture.
