Taxidermy Is a Metaphor for Our Time

At some point this summer, I opened my eyes, and taxidermy was everywhere. On the first page of Ocean Vuong’s poetic new novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a buck’s head hangs over the soda machine at a Virginia rest stop, its black glass eyes embodying “a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying.” A friend forwarded me a trailer for a documentary, “Stuffed,” about the “craft, technique, and obsession” that informs “the world of modern taxidermy,” with its bro-ey enthusiasts and feminist millennials. Another friend directed me to Instagram’s #taxidermy hashtag, which is flourishing like nightshade. What was once a curio—a relic of hobbyists and museums—had found, it seemed, new life.

The latest data point is “Mostly Dead Things,” the début novel by Kristen Arnett, which, in June, became the first title from the Portland-based publisher Tin House to reach the New York Times best-seller list. The book follows Jessa-Lynn Morton, a queer taxidermist who is grieving her father’s suicide. She is also grieving the sudden departure of Brynn, her lover and her brother’s wife. Brynn, who grew up with the Mortons, in central Florida, was cruel and irresistible; when she runs off, leaving behind two children and her heartbroken husband, Jessa-Lynn tries to suppress the pain, remembering that her father “was always proudest when I refused to show weakness.” Arnett’s quirky setup—a sibling love triangle, dead animals—might have heralded a twee, put-a-bird-on-it story, but the writing is subtle and meditative, with the tactile weight of dense fur.

Prentice Morton, Jessa-Lynn’s father, was also a taxidermist, and taxidermy is how his closed-off, hard-drinking daughter expresses her longing for him. As the new proprietor of his shop, she replicates his techniques and tends to his prized creations. Jessa-Lynn, whose last name, from the Latin mortis, echoes the family’s calling, does not seek simply to preserve her father by carrying on his work; she is also, in a way, stuffing herself into his skin. Taxidermy is her mourning ritual, an attempt to suspend her father, like one of his mounted deer, between life and death.

It’s a moving theme, if not a new one. Taxidermy, or the practice of mounting animal pelts and arranging them in poses, has a quiet, curious life in fiction. Something about it seems to flick the literary imagination, perhaps because it proves a potent metaphor for art. Fiction often attempts to capture reality without being coldly mimetic; taxidermy reveals the stakes of that project. A skin, like a character on the page, is manipulated, adjusted so as to evoke life. But it never fully succeeds, and this gives the stuffed creature a primal, spooky gravity—an aura of emptiness so staggering that the onlooker feels at risk. A taxidermied animal conveys a particular truth with terrible efficiency: when we try to possess things forever, we lose them.

And yet the traditional taxidermy tale, the form that Vuong invokes and Arnett turns inside out, tends to provoke horror, not sadness. Its emphasis falls on the folly of killing the thing that you wish would endure; terror burgeons in the gap between what was desired and what was achieved. In “The Landlady,” a short story by Roald Dahl that originally appeared in The New Yorker, in 1959, a seventeen-year-old named Billy Weaver is murdered and taxidermied by an older woman running a bed and breakfast. Billy enters the inn on a whim, charmed by a cute dachshund that he sees, through the window, curled up by the hearth. The proprietor strikes Billy as sweet, if a touch batty, and he accepts her invitation to tea. Their conversation turns to two handsome boys who stayed at the inn prior to Billy’s arrival; the old woman mentions that these boys never left. The tea tastes a bit like the landlady smells: herbal, bitter. After Billy realizes that the dachshund is stuffed, the story ends, with his host beaming creepily at him and poison seeping through his limbs.

The tale is classic Dahl: spry and delicately ghoulish. The awfulness of the uncanny dog takes center stage. “He put out a hand and touched it gently on the top of its back,” Dahl writes. “The back was hard and cold, and when he pushed the hair to one side with his fingers, he could see the skin underneath, greyish-black and dry and perfectly preserved.” The story’s dread has a gendered quality. Billy, vigorously male but innocent enough to require a caregiver, longs to work in business, where all the men seem “fantastically brisk.” The woman, meanwhile, acts maternal—her peculiar hobby perhaps belongs among the domestic crafts—but bestows a facsimile of life instead of the real thing. Taxidermy, and by extension, art, does not come off well in Dahl’s story; it scans as sterile motherhood. The landlady remains a cipher, and yet a faint aspect of loss haloes her. At one point, Billy speculates that she probably had a son killed in the war.

Taxidermy arose, in Egypt, out of the belief that spirits in the afterlife would only recognize the dead if they were realistically preserved. The technique's heyday came in the Victorian era, as biologists studied stuffed creatures, and the general public, in museums and private homes, appreciated their aesthetic qualities. These specimens inspired a sense of wonder—before the advent of photography, many Westerners would never otherwise see, for instance, a lion or a parrot—but their popularity also reflected the casual cruelty of the past, when less value was placed on both human and animal life. In an England of mass hangings, what was the shooting and skinning of one gazelle?

Now the art has evolved; modern practitioners prefer materials that are ethically sourced—either recycled or culled from animals that have died of natural causes—and the “rogue taxidermy” movement, which was founded in 2004, reimagines corpses as sculptures rather than as trophies or representations of nature. But the form still has a tinge of kitsch, its extravagant morbidity shading into camp or humor. The work of the artist Damien Hirst captures taxidermy’s hard-to-place, melodramatic eeriness: “Away from the Flock,” from 1994, shows a lamb immersed in a tank of formaldehyde solution, its cuddly body somehow transformed by the pulsing, otherworldly blue of the chemical. In interviews, Hirst spoke of his work’s “tragic beauty,” the way it distilled “that failure of trying so hard to do something that you destroy the thing that you’re trying to preserve.”

The most famous example of literary taxidermy is a study in such failure. In 1959, the same year that The New Yorker ran “The Landlady,” Robert Bloch published a thriller called “Psycho.” The novel features a disturbed man, Norman Bates, in the thrall of his mother, with whom he runs a motel. Bloch presents the old woman as domineering and codependent, even murderous—she may be responsible for two slayings that occur in their establishment. But Norman turns out to be the villain—and a taxidermist. Years ago, after his mother took a lover, he poisoned her in a jealous rage, made it look like a suicide, and mummified her. Norman, who is revealed to have dissociative identity disorder, committed the murders; he puts on his mother’s clothes, speaks in her voice, and unleashes violence on her behalf. Becoming Mrs. Bates is one way for Norman to hold onto her; taxidermying her is another.

Here, as in “The Landlady,” and as in the unending death of Vuong’s buck, taxidermy reverses the course of nature. But “Psycho” opens up new, grotesque seams in the trope. The act of preserving a corpse implies fetishization, an unseemly privileging of the physical. It highlights Norman’s weirdly attentive, eroticized relationship to his mother’s body. He has the same worshipful connection to her shawls and jewelry, which he drapes over himself like a second skin. And so taxidermy provides a metaphor for his cross-dressing, the way he slips out of his identity and assumes another’s. In “Psycho,” taxidermy evokes a world in which the self is unmoored and fluid. Gender in particular becomes aqueous, a cast of mind. If “The Landlady” expresses a quiet anxiety about women, “Psycho” is panicking about masculinity. Taxidermy, with its must and gamey sexuality, is the skeleton on which that panic hangs.

Jessa-Lynn Morton, like Norman Bates, must become her parent. She must take over her father’s business, pay off his debts, and provide for her family. And yet Arnett, rather than using taxidermy to sensationalize this process, presents the craft as a moving testament to what art cannot do. It cannot turn Jessa-Lynn into Prentice or bring him back. It cannot mend the relationship between her brother, Milo, and his father, or between either of the Morton siblings and Brynn. Even Jessa-Lynn’s best work, a glorious trio of peacocks, shines “like pyrite,” Arnett writes. Seeking the wealth of eternity, the taxidermist’s hands only ever clutch at fool’s gold.

But taxidermy can, Arnett argues, bring us closer to life. Most taxidermy stories hold their animals at a remove, framing them as either pedagogical—fodder for exhibition—or perverse. Arnett, transposing the metaphor out of the horror genre, closes the distance between viewer and viewed. She takes taxidermy seriously as a craft, not just as a device; she makes it real and intimate. There is her narrator, caring for a frayed seam in ways that she cannot care for herself. There is the body of a rabbit, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide in the garage, honored and painstakingly restored. “We pieced together life from the remnants of death,” Jessa-Lynn says, introducing her trade. This idea, of using imagination to restore some fraction of a lost wholeness, is accentuated by Jessa-Lynn’s mother, who processes her husband’s suicide by deconstructing his specimens and reconstituting them as X-rated sculptures. In one instance, a water buffalo, Christmas lights dangling from a gash in its belly, dons S & M gear.

Here, taxidermy becomes a way to instantiate our relationship to bodies—both our own and those of others. Much of this has to do with Arnett’s approach to the “between-ness” of a stuffed creature, the way it evokes both life and the lifelike. The book meditates on the liminal, and even Jessa-Lynn’s queerness—her body’s fluidity in relation to others—is linked to her profession. “Taxidermy is queering,” Arnett, who identifies as a lesbian, wrote, in Hazlitt. “It is an othering, and that is also me, a thing queered up and fucked up and positioned with intent.” In “Psycho,” taxidermy promised a reprieve from gender binaries, the signifiers of which might be picked up or put aside like one of Mrs. Bates’s shawls. But Bloch used taxidermy to hint at sexual deviance; “Mostly Dead Things” rescues the craft’s physicality, infusing its attention to the body with a this-worldly sensuousness. The “glinting red maw” of a bear’s mouth is of a piece with Brynn’s remembered lips. In bed with a new lover, Jessa-Lynn watches the woman’s finger tracing “a line from my face down the naked center of my body. ‘Where’s your seam?’ Finger tickling, searching. ‘Where do you crawl out?’ ”

Arnett’s interest in the carnality of taxidermy, the extent to which it depends on touch, flows in part from her belief that the physical is political. Being gay neither traumatizes nor defines Jessa-Lynn, but to move through the world as a queer woman—to undergo, in Arnett’s phrase, “an othering”—might be to know a visceral sense of wrongness, similar to the unease a mounted animal inspires. One thinks of “Citizen: An American Lyric,” the book-length poem, from 2014, by Claudia Rankine. Rankine intersperses lines of text with images that conjure black history and myth. One such image is a photograph of “Little Girl,” a sculpture, by Kate Clark, that places a human face on the taxidermied form of a baby caribou. The hybrid creature stares from the page, at once pathetic and powerful—she is young and hunted, but charged with ancestral eloquence. Rankine is exploring the experience of marginalization. Clark’s work, alluring and repellant, generates a disturbance that mirrors the state of self-alienation. And yet its physicality subsumes these ideas: “Little Girl” is overwhelming as an artifact, a bodily presence. “I am fascinated by affect, by positioning, and by intimacy,” Rankine said, discussing her use of the photograph in an interview. “What happens when I stand close to you? What’s your body going to do? What’s my body going to do?”

These questions would not be out of place in “Mostly Dead Things,” in which taxidermy suggests how, in love, one person becomes new in the hands of another. Vuong imagined his buck as a corpse that never stops dying. Dahl and Bloch saw taxidermies as semblances of lost beloveds. But, for Arnett, to be a taxidermied thing is to be “positioned with intent”—to have, perhaps, a self that is both natural and constructed. A taxidermied thing moves with agility between and around categories: art and nature, life and death. It gives characters the freedom, the ability, to step out of their skins. And it gives readers a fresh way to think about fiction itself, which lives, or half lives, on the rippling cusp of the real.