TY - JOUR
AU - Colvin, Christina M
AB - Zebras, basilisks, ostriches, ants, jerboas, pangolins, and other varied creatures feature in the work of Marianne Moore, well known for her poetic exploration of animals. The range of nonhuman species that slither, swim, and burrow through Moore’s poetry reflects her passionate curiosity for nonhuman life: she was a known devotee of wildlife documentaries, scientific naturalism, and the study of biology. The diverse fauna of her poems also recall the expanding opportunities for early-twentieth-century American urbanites to see—first-hand—captive and dead animals from around the globe. According to friend and fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, Moore “always (emphasis in original) went to the circus, wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” and Moore was also a frequent visitor to zoos and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) (Bishop 125). As a New York City resident, animals displayed in entertainment venues and educational facilities served Moore’s enthusiasm for studying the creatures she would not have an opportunity to encounter otherwise. Moore was not an uncritical consumer of such displays, however. As she watches Moore observe a snake “writhing about in a glass-walled cage,” Bishop doubts that Moore “hate[s] seeing animals in cages.” Even so, Bishop hesitates to simplify Moore’s regard for animal captivity. When the caged snake raises his head as if to return Moore’s look, Moore declares, “‘See, he knows me …. He remembers me from last year,’” an assertion Bishop interprets as “a joke … but perhaps not altogether a joke.” Moore’s “joke” may come across as an admission of her own frequent visits to see circus animals: so frequent that even a snake recognizes her. At the same time, Moore’s assertion undercuts the anthropocentric suggestion that a snake’s recognition of a particular human is only conceivable as a joke: that is, Moore’s attribution of cognitive complexity to the snake may challenge the ethicality of the animal’s captivity. Even so, such a reading seems at odds with Moore’s enthusiasm for the opportunity captivity affords her to encounter the snake on multiple occasions, and Bishop does not resolve this potential conflict in Moore’s principles. Analyzing Moore’s poetry in the context of her appreciation for animal exhibitions reveals the tension between her personal and poetic celebration of animals and the often exploitative means by which she encountered them. For Robin G. Schulze, some of Moore’s work argues that “[t]he representation of nature and the exploitation of nature go hand in hand,” yet what constitutes nature in Moore’s poetry is itself indeterminate (“Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish” 1–3). Rather than portray a pristine natural world untouched by human influence, this essay contends that Moore’s poetry represents the “nature” she knew best: animals under glass and behind bars, including the caged snake who raised his head as if in recognition during her visit to the circus. Because Moore’s in-person encounters with animals were almost entirely mediated by zookeepers, ringmasters, and taxidermists, the discrepancy between the context in which she encountered animals and the animals’ natural habitats fundamentally shaped her understanding of nonhuman creatures. Moore’s critics including Schulze, Victoria Bazin, and Catherine E. Paul have explored the poet’s ambivalence toward the consumer products and experiences made available by modernity, and Randy Malamud’s study of Moore through an animal studies lens suggests the ethical implications of her animal poetry. Building on these critics’ crucial insights into Moore’s passion for animals and personal collection of goods made from animal bodies, this essay analyzes her work through the potentially troubling context of her visits to places often associated with animal death or low standards of animal welfare.1 Thanks to the growth of literary animal studies and ecocriticism in particular, scholars now read Moore’s numerous animal figures as not just allusions to herself, friends, and family members, and her contribution to modern poetry, but also her reflection on the relationships between humans and animals and humans and the natural world. For Lawrence Buell, Moore’s work “capture[s] distortions of engineered environments” including those of her own urban home, and her fascination with natural, man-made, and in-between objects makes her work a rich site for environmentally minded investigation (24). However, ecocritical enthusiasm for Moore has tended to gloss moments in her work that celebrate the use of nonhumans.2 Rather than rush to figure Moore as a reflection of our own contemporary ecological thinking, we might consider how her work addresses the phenomenological unease between environmental and animal ethics and the pleasures of modern consumer culture. Because the creatures Moore encountered were often animals in cages or skins preserved for exhibition or fashion, this essay argues that her poetic animals figure a zoo-logic, an understanding of animals developed by encountering them in “unnatural” places. She demonstrates how human desire and nonhuman strangeness converge in modernity to yield unexpected, transgressive forms of species life.3 Moore’s personal ethics remain doggedly ambiguous, yet her poetry’s emphasis that wonder, violence, pleasure, and indeterminate boundaries between humans and animals coalesce in sites of animal exhibition provides essential insight into the practices of zoos and, by extension, the constellation of forces affecting animal and species existence today. “Beyond the Body of the Pelt” In her Dial “Comment” from April 1926, Moore compares the work of the artist to the work of the zoo director: “The ideal director of a ‘zoo,’ we are told by Mr. William Hornaday, must at this time when tempted to ‘take on’ mammals, birds, and reptiles, be a master in the art of refusing. The avowed artist must also, unless we are to have fads rather than individuality, be an artist in refusing” (Moore Complete Prose 161). Moore’s paraphrase of William Temple Hornaday comes at the end of his tenure as the first Director of the Bronx Zoo, a position he held from 1896 to 1926. That Hornaday should make an appearance in Moore’s work is unsurprising: Moore was an enthusiastic visitor to the Zoo during Hornaday’s directorship and monitored additions to its collection with zeal. In a letter to her friend and patron Bryher dated July 7, 1921, for example, Moore details a recent trip to “the Bronx” to see, among other creatures, an albino snake she had “been waiting to see for a month,” as well as a mongoose, an animal “it has always been the ambition of my life to see” (Moore Selected Letters 166). Moore’s interest in the zoo’s collection was also due to her collection of art, newspaper, and magazine clippings, curiosities, as well as wearables comprised of animal fur and hair. As Paul argues, Moore’s work as poet and editor reflects her interest in “the creative possibilities of assembled collections” and the imaginative opportunities made available to visitors by well-curated museums and, I would add, well-curated zoo collections (161). Moore’s comparison between the artist and the zoo director, as well as her reference to Hornaday in particular, invites consideration of how the aesthetic composition of zoo displays influenced Moore’s work. Before accepting leadership of the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday was one of a growing number of taxidermists who skinned, stuffed, and arranged animals with fastidious dedication to an aesthetic of realism, an aesthetic Hornaday applied to his zoo exhibit designs. As a taxidermist, Hornaday advocated lifelike representations of animals rather than mounts posed as hunters’ trophies. By paying attention to the reproduction of minute details such as the varying looseness of an animal’s skin, Hornaday’s stuffed animals reflected his familiarity with the appearance of living creatures acquired through years as a hunter and collector. In 1882, Hornaday was appointed Chief Taxidermist for the United States National Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution. He oversaw the Department of Living Animals which, among other responsibilities, maintained a collection of living animals to serve as reference tools for taxidermists as they mounted dead specimens, a practice that reflected the growing emphasis in natural history museums that taxidermy capture the look of “real life.” Hornaday was also one of the first taxidermists to contextualize specimens within habitat settings. By assembling what he termed “artistic groups”—several mounts of the same species representing different sexes and stages of maturity, arranged in an artistically rendered habitat—Hornaday crafted an idealized vision of animals situated in an equally idealized “nature.” In New York, Moore would have been witness to aesthetically similar, contemporaneous developments in natural history museum taxidermy as a visitor to the AMNH, particularly during the 1930s when Carl Akeley, the “Father of Modern Taxidermy” who worked at the same taxidermy supply establishment where Hornaday had also once been employed, was arranging mounts in habitat dioramas for his famous African Hall.4 The realist taxidermy of Akeley and Hornaday—their representation of dead animals as if they were alive and observable in their natural habitats—mirrored the very aesthetic that Hornaday strove to produce through his reform of the Bronx Zoo’s live animal exhibits. Prior to the naturalistic turn in American zoo exhibit design, ecological relationships between animals and their habitats were not well understood and therefore not a representational priority for zoos; consequently, animals were frequently displayed behind bars or in cages. Hornaday’s zoo exhibit designs enact a shift from the uniform presentation of exotic curiosities in cages toward the diorama effect of naturalness that makes legible a relationship between the display and the displayed. As Elizabeth Hanson explains, Hornaday’s experience as a taxidermist motivated him to downplay the highly visible enclosures prevalent in nineteenth-century American zoos and foreground naturalistic scenes similar to his own taxidermied “artistic groups”: [Hornaday] attempted to translate the moment-frozen-in-time by a museum diorama to the display of live animals …. Zoo visitors should find animals alert and active, their fur and feathers well groomed. Accoutrements such as grass and leaves, as well as painted backgrounds, which added to the beauty of museum groups, could also be used in zoo displays. Like museum specimens, zoo animals should evoke wonder—an appreciation for the beauty of wildlife. Reforming zoo display methods, by exhibiting animals in large enclosures without bars, helped create an illusion that the animals were free, just as a naturalist would find them in the field. (134–35) As Hanson illuminates, the zoo landscapes produced by placing live animals against painted backdrops and in enclosures decorated with greenery offered a beautiful “illusion” to visitors. This illusion idealized both the “nature” represented by built habitats and the well-groomed animals cast as perfect representatives of their species (134–35).5 The aesthetic advanced by such exhibits was one of a pristine, unchanging nature, or as Timothy Morton puts it, nature conceptualized as a “transcendental, unified, independent category” (13). Hornaday’s aesthetic would have concealed discrepancies such as those between zoo enclosures and animal-delineated territories: despite decorative flourishes, zoo housing is not equivalent to miles of exposed prairie or networks of crowded jungle. Additional limitations of zoo exhibits are important to consider: sick, injured, or deformed animals could violate an exhibit’s Edenic quality, as could indications of animals’ dissatisfaction with captivity. Ever the keen observer, Moore detailed frustrations articulated by caged animals. Writing to Bryher of the Bronx Zoo, she worries about a bird of paradise’s ability to adapt to a life of confinement: “It kept uttering piercing cries from time to time and looking in a tense way toward the upper corners of the cage; I am afraid it will never get used to being caged” (Moore, Selected Letters 167). Moore’s verse also addresses depictions of animals that exclude the less-than-perfect. In “No Swan So Fine,” Moore compares a sculpted swan to a live swan, emphasizing the latter’s awkward features. While the live swan “with swart blind look askance/and gondoliering legs” does not possess the regal trappings borne by the chintz china swan such as “fawn-/brown eyes and toothed gold/collar on to show whose bird it was,” the china swan’s idealized quality—that there exists “No swan” like it—aligns it with the “dead” king who owned it rather than with living swans (Complete Poems 19). This comparison implies the speaker’s affection for live swans: chintz cannot capture the latter’s dark, “blind” eyes and gangly legs. The china swan’s perfection emerges from its sculpted shape and status as a luxury commodity; its form does not imply investment in the authentic representation of wild swans. Hornaday, however, strove for his zoo animals to appear both wild and perfect. When put into practice in a zoo exhibit, Hornaday’s aesthetic aligns captive animals with the dead king’s china swan far more than the zoo director likely would have wished: both china swan and zoo exhibits display owned, managed commodities with imperfections minimized in the service of ideals of nonhuman beauty. Central to the “moment-frozen-in-time” aesthetic advanced by Hornaday’s zoo exhibits, then, was the concealment of less-than-perfect animal specimens and the human management required to keep them in captivity (Hanson 134). Representing nature as beautiful and separate from the ugly influence of humanity, Hornaday’s zoo physically and conceptually divided humans and nonhuman animals. Drawing from Edward Said’s discussion of “imaginative geography,” Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert suggest that many human discourses “position ‘them’ (animals) relative to ‘us’ (humans) in a fashion that links a conceptual ‘othering’ (setting them apart from us in terms of character traits) to a geographical ‘othering’ (fixing them in worldly places and spaces different from those that we humans tend to occupy)” (13). The naturalistic turn in zoo exhibit design enacted the conceptual and geographical othering of animals Philo and Wilbert describe. By placing animals in habitat settings imitative of a pristine natural world, these exhibits physically and ontologically isolate humans from the nonhumans on display. Importantly, the separation between human and animal represented in Hornaday’s zoo aesthetic was motivated by the conservation mission he brought to the Bronx Zoo. As David Hancocks explains, the growth of American cities and the “shift from agriculture to industry” brought with it a “growing awareness of loss of wildlife” around the turn of the century (88). During an expedition to collect bison for a US National Museum taxidermy display in 1886, Hornaday experienced the shock of wildlife decline first hand: he and his team struggled for five months to collect a mere twenty-five bison on the very plains where millions of the animals had roamed only ten years earlier (Hancocks 91). When Hornaday assumed leadership of the Bronx Zoo, he did so with the understanding that human actions could drive wildlife to extinction. In response, he wanted his zoo to establish “a city of refuge for the vanishing species of the continent” (qtd. in Hancocks 92). Rather than depict the stain of anthropogenic influence, the romanticized nature portrayed in Hornaday’s zoo omitted a portrayal of humans as either a cause of wildlife population decline or as overseers who maintained a “refuge” of captive individuals. Hornaday’s nature restored the zoo’s “wilderness,” as well as the animals in it, to a time before humanity’s invasion.6 As her depictions of animals demonstrate, Moore saw through Hornaday’s artifice. Her particular savvy as a consumer of animal representations would have made her especially sensitive to the growing prevalence of zoo and museum animals exhibited within idealized habitat settings. Despite the realism increasingly favored by zoos and museums, their simplified vision of ecological relationships, disguise of anthropogenic influence, and emphasis on animals’ aestheticized appearance challenged Moore, herself a portrayer of animals, to consider how such exhibitions shaped her experience of nonhuman creatures. In consequence, Moore’s poetry represents not wild, untouched, idealized animals existing in natural habitats, but the creatures she knew best: captive animals in built habitats. As Malamud argues, “For zoo animals, life is manifestly constricted, and by all apparent indications—whether we acknowledge or repress this—unnatural” (14). Importantly, Moore’s poetry draws attention to the “unnatural” assemblage of human and nonhuman that comprises her animals; she also questions the idea that animals only belong within the specific contexts humans construct for them, including the context of untouched nature. As Philo and Wilbert point out, animals “often end up evading the places to which humans seek to allot them, whether the basket in the kitchen, the garden, the paddock, the field, the cage or whatever” (13). Moore does not write of zoo escapees, yet her animals are thoroughly transgressive. As creatures partially constituted by man-made artifacts, ideals, and physical and conceptual orderings, they contest the human/animal, culture/nature dichotomies Hornaday’s zoo and taxidermy displays attempt to codify. For Moore, looking at an animal means looking at a paradox: at once an abstract, human notion of natural beauty and a singular, material creature. We glimpse such dialectical creatures when we read Moore’s poetry. Scholars including Leavell and Schulze have examined Moore’s numerous allusions to and citations of print materials and artistic techniques and works. Building on these explorations, I suggest Moore references man-made objects in her description of animals to emphasize not only her creatures’ human composition, but also to show how such man-made objects provide insight into nonhuman behaviors and physical forms. Although not an animal often displayed in zoos, the skunk in Moore’s “The Wood-Weasel” nevertheless exemplifies her zoo-logic. Throughout the poem, Moore emphasizes the creature’s composite status, the skunk comprised of a multitude of nonhuman and human components: The Wood-Weasel emerges daintily, the skunk— don’t laugh—in sylvan black and white chipmunk regalia. The inky thing adaptively whited with glistening goat-fur, is wood-warden. In his ermined well-cuttlefish-inked-wool, he is determination’s totem. Out- lawed? His sweet face and powerful feet go about in chieftain’s coat of Chilcat cloth. He is his own protection from the moth, noble little warrior. That otter-skin on it, the living pole-cat, smothers anything that stings. Well,– this same weasel’s playful and his weasel associates are too. Only Wood-weasels shall associate with me. (Complete Poems 127) Moore liberates the skunk from its humble reputation by focusing not on its well-known capacity to emit a noxious odor, but on its striking appearance. Moore’s wood-weasel is hardly “black and white” in the sense of being simplistic or unambiguous. Rather, the skunk’s striped exterior thoroughly confuses reductive and binaristic concepts of human and animal and even nonhuman species with other nonhuman species. “[C]hipmunk” comprises the skunk’s “regalia,” he wears “goat-fur,” “otter-skin,” and a “chieftain’s coat of Chilcat cloth” (a combination of wool, bark, and other natural fibers), and his “wool” is also made of ermine fur—ermine itself a species of “weasel”—dyed with cuttlefish ink. This visual and tactile inventory of animal features insist that a realistic depiction of nonhuman attributes cannot take place against a superficial background that metonymically reduces the natural world to a discrete backdrop. Rather, intimate, phenomenological familiarity with the entire animal kingdom may be necessary to understand even one of its members. Moreover, human influences have transformed nearly all the animals mentioned: they appear as skins, furs, and coats. As in Moore’s poem “New York,” explored below, the skunk’s animal fashions imply the beauty of pelts and the violence required to procure them because skunks, too, are pursued for their fur. Eric Jay Dolin explains that, during the late nineteenth century’s “Age of Extermination,” named for the massive number of animals killed for food, sport, and fashion, “more than four hundred thousand skunk were killed for their furs” (310–11). The skunk’s composition of the furs of other animals as well as his own status as a hunted creature reveals the burden borne by Moore’s lighthearted depiction. The poem implies that the violent history of skunks’ relationship with humans inflects encounters with and descriptions of “living” skunks. Creating a discrepancy between blithe narration about “the skunk—/don’t laugh” and that same animal swaddled in the skins of its fellow mammals, Moore’s poem suggests the rich vocabulary requisite for understanding even an unassuming creature (Moore, Complete Poems 127). Making visible the literal and figurative layers of an animal beautiful, humorous, historied, and hunted, the poem also envisions the composite skunk as a creative creature in his own right. Rachel Trousdale suggests how the poem’s reference to cuttlefish ink expands our understanding of the wood-weasel. She writes that, when the skunk’s fur becomes “ermined well-cuttlefish-inked wool,” the “cuttlefish’s protective spurt of noxious black ‘ink,’ which it uses as a skunk uses its musk, here becomes a literal ink used for drawing” (127). Building on Trousdale’s insight, the connection between the cuttlefish’s ink—imagined here as a tool for illustration or, we might conjecture, writing—and the skunk’s defensive spray bridges the divide between ostensibly unlike animals, including two species as evolutionarily divergent as humans and skunks. Man-made animal objects help account for animals’ “adaptively”-made and human-influenced existences. Because the skunk—that “inky thing” both an ink-black creature and one created with the poet’s ink—sprays a substance itself comparable to ink, the poem enables us to see the skunk declaring himself through a kind of woodland writing (Moore, Complete Poems 127). The skunk marks others with his claim to life, a claim that “smothers anything that stings.” Reimagining the skunk’s spray and black body as ink, Moore’s zoo-logic utilizes “human” actions like writing and drawing to suggest that certain animal features might be analogous to human traits. Resonant with Philo and Wilbert’s description of zoo escapees, Moore’s skunk and other composite creatures “inject what might be termed their own agency into the scene, thereby transgressing, perhaps even resisting, the human placements of them” (13). That is, through a signifying practice that defies a separation between civilized and caged, the skunk overrides the aspect of zoo spectatorship that organizes animals into a category opposed to the human. Almost a century following the publication of Moore’s first collection of poems, Donna Haraway contemplates human and nonhuman animals as “entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not” (When Species Meet 88). Haraway conceptualizes animals as assemblages by thinking through ongoing issues of ontology and animal ethics, particularly the ethicality of scientific experimentation on animals. In contrast, Moore does not necessarily arrive at her conception of unnatural animals in attempt to consume or behave more ethically toward nonhumans. Rather, Moore’s poetry mines the creative possibilities enabled by the use of animals as consumer goods and entertainment. As Bazin argues, Moore’s poetry “is founded upon something of a paradox for it responds to the sensuous pleasures of modernity while at the same time recognising the destructiveness of such pleasures” (119). Rather than liberate animals from their cages, Moore’s poetry scrutinizes all that cages enable: artistic expression, a critique of pristine “nature,” personal pleasure, and views of modern human–animal relationships. Whereas advocates for animal welfare often ask how an animal’s living environment facilitates or restricts “natural” behaviors, Moore asks what sites of human–animal encounter—including circuses, museums, and zoos—allow animals to become: conceptually, behaviorally, artistically, and otherwise. The indulgent, self-critical, and imaginative method of zoogoing that informs Moore’s poetry accentuates modernity’s use of nonhumans and the countless unique, intersecting, and interspecies ways of being that result. Although not typically considered one of her “animal poems,” “New York” provides an instructive lens through which to approach Moore’s paradoxical stance toward animal use: in this poem, Moore depicts a vibrant urban hub indebted to the fur trade. She distinguishes her animals from idealized representations that obscure historic and ongoing use of nonhumans by illustrating the city’s dependence on animals, its citizens cloaked in skins and furs: the savage’s romance, accreted where we need the space for commerce— the center of the wholesale fur trade, starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes, the long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt; the ground dotted with deer-skins—white with white spots, “as satin needlework in a single color may carry a varied pattern,” and wilting eagle’s-down compacted by the wind; and picardels of beaver-skin, white ones alert with snow. […] it is not that “if the fur is not finer than such as one sees others wear, one would rather be without it”— that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe; it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity, the otter, the beaver, the puma skins without shooting-irons or dogs; it is not the plunder, but “accessibility to experience.” (Complete Poems 54) Despite the poem’s urban setting, Moore’s New York teems with nonhumans. In addition to foxes, dogs, and horses, the poem references “ermine,” “deer-skins,” “eagle’s-down,” “beaver-skin,” as well as “the otter, the beaver, the puma skins.” This varied inventory of objects made from animals, particularly the repetition of “skin” and “skins”—at once nouns describing animal exteriors and verbs for the removal of those exteriors—emphasizes the violence inherent to animal products. New York revels in its use of animals. “[P]eopled with foxes,” urban dwellers seem to become proper citizens only when adorned with another creature’s remains. Even as we consider the violence in Moore’s landscape, “New York” does not provide a moral condemnation of either animal-based fashions or the colonial projects that established and maintain the city. At best, the poem expresses ambivalence toward the practices and products it describes. The city’s skins are beautiful in their visual diversity: deer skins, “white with white spots,” decorate the ground, and their likeness to the “varied pattern” of “satin needlework in a single color” suggests a complexity of appearance achieved by natural camouflage and the precision of human craftwork. Such an evaluation of animal goods finds equal wonder in the work of natural forces and human artists. Alison Rieke describes the challenge of reading Moore’s interest in these pieces. For Rieke, the poem “appears to express… the kind of enthusiasm she felt when she saw a fur belonging to her classmate during her college years. Yet Moore … employs this subject matter to present a discerning critique of commodity culture in New York” (Rieke 162). Moore appreciates the beauty of felled animals and recognizes the ethical cost of her pleasure. That said, the vitality of the dead animals makes it difficult to read this poem as a straightforward critique. Long hairs are “waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt,” the whitened beaver skins are “alert,” and even the “wilting eagle’s-down” suggests a lively thing’s clinging to life (Moore, Complete Poems 54). As Linda Leavell argues, “Fur is a paradigm of the assembled object both aesthetically and morally, for it serves two purposes, first in the life of the animal and second in the city, as a valuable commodity” (124). The artistic practices that represent animals may give them a second life, a suggestion borne out by Moore’s description of stirring skins. Animal products animate the city, and the dead animals’ vitality challenge the suggestion that fur and skins only represent violence. Rather, the lively, dead animals express a wildness not fully appropriated by the commodity form. The final two lines of “New York” assert what the city of dead yet animate animals offers: not “plunder” or the animal goods themselves, but “‘accessibility to experience’” (Moore, Complete Poems 54). Unlike the Bronx Zoo’s idealizing aesthetic, Moore confronts and displays the tension between appropriation and representation. Her depiction of New York departs from the “scholastic philosophy of the wilderness” and the “dime-novel exterior” referenced in the poem’s middle. The poem insists the city is “not” these visions, neither an idea of wilderness nor a romantic illustration. Instead, Moore’s poem embraces the “accessibility to experience” facilitated by modernity: “ermine,” “deer-skins,” and as we may infer due to Moore’s own interest, captive animals. That said, awareness of the violent processes that led to the animals’ “‘accessibility,’”—the “shooting-irons” or firearms and hunting “dogs” the city could not be “without”—tempers naïve celebration. Moore dares readers to see modern, unnatural animals for not only their beauty and particularity, but also the killing and management that supports their accessibility. As “New York” suggests, the value of furs and skins should not be “estimated in raw meat and berries,” the foods that nourish wild creatures and help their prized bodies grow. The value of animal products and managed animals lies “beyond the body of the pelt,” in the encounters and configurations that unnatural conditions enable. Focusing her attention (and ours) on the violent requirements of modernity, Moore’s art takes seriously the exploitative practices that facilitate her poetry about animals. Rather than eschew those practices and embrace the wilderness escapism of idealized animal displays, she acknowledges her debt to nonhuman use. Beyond her contemplation of early-twentieth-century practices of animal display, however, Moore’s attention to trade in animals and animal products during the early twentieth century anticipates the practices of present-day zoos and the genetic diversity that frequently determines captive animals’ value. As Matthew Chrulew explains, conservation goals transformed zoos in the latter half of the twentieth century, and zoos developed expertise in captive breeding, motivated in part by “the economic incentive created by greater restrictions on the capture and importation of wildlife.” The species populations maintained by zoos do not cohabitate; rather, members of species “reside in disparate sites throughout a region or even the world, and their capacity to interbreed only exists as the result of human efforts to design their interactions and to transport individuals or substances extracted from their bodies” (Chrulew 147). Following Chrulew, species maintained by zoos become recognizable as thoroughly composite entities. That is, in addition to the supervision required to keep individual animals alive, zoos and captive breeding programs require a concept of species that accounts for ongoing, intensive human management across whole populations. Ecocritical investment in species conservation during the current era of environmental crisis must account for the human intervention increasingly constitutive of species existence. By emphasizing their surprising, befuddling strangeness, Moore can help us recognize and encourage the transgressive animality of such composite creatures. “What There is to See” at Marianne Moore’s Zoo Like a zoo director, Moore puts unnatural animals on display. Unlike a zoo director, Moore draws readers’ attention to the assemblage formed by display, animal, and spectator. Even in “The Octopus,” a collage-like portrayal of Mount Rainier following a trip Moore took with her brother in 1922, she gestures to the cultural mediation inflecting her uncommon glimpses of “wild” creatures: a mountain goat, for example, she describes as boasting an “ermine body” (73). Despite the prevalence of animals comprised of human and natural influences in her work, “The Monkeys” offers an unusual depiction in Moore’s work of a zoo animal. Importantly, “The Monkeys” attributes poetic voice to both a human and nonhuman speaker. As Andrew M. Lakritz puts it, “Moore… writes from within two positions: the visitor to the zoo as well as the animal in the zoo, same and other within the same utterance” (Lakritz 153). The dual voices establish a resemblance between zoo spectator and inhabitant—the capacity to speak a shared language—and allow an animal the rare occasion to respond to those who would make him into a passive object.7 Moore portrays the zoo as a site of reciprocal observation, an alternative to the idea that animal exhibitions permit only one-sided, spectator–object relationships. Moore’s four-stanza poem devotes nearly equal space to the human and the animal’s speech, the first half of the poem spoken from the perspective of a zoo visitor, the second from the perspective of a captive big cat. Unlike several of Moore’s “animal” poems, “The Monkeys” briefly depicts its titular animals, beginning “The Monkeys” “winked too much and were afraid of snakes” (Moore, Complete Poems 40). The second sentence and subsequent lines recall several other zoo animals with brevity. That a poem about the relationship between human spectator and captive animals should begin with monkeys underscores the distinction the zoo visitor establishes between herself and the primates on display. The category “monkeys” functions as a catch-all term for a number of species; it also suggests a group of primates and Homo sapiens’ status as great apes. Finding the displayed monkeys winking “too much,” the zoo spectator focuses on what she understands as excessive, animal conduct as if her distaste might differentiate her from the primate order to which she belongs. The opening of “The Monkeys” forms an assemblage comprised of spectator, zoo, and zoo inhabitants, and Moore’s poem therefore leaves open the possibility that zoos can expose humans’ fundamental animality. The zoo spectator’s sparse descriptions not only contrasts Moore’s proclivity for enlivening detail, but also indicates the first speaker’s conception of animals as sets of simple, observable surface features. As her reflections on the zoo proceed, so do her uninspired accounts of animals: […] The zebras, supreme in their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin  and strictly practical appendages   were there, the small cats; and the parakeet—    trivial and humdrum on examination, destroying  bark and portions of the food it could not eat. The speaker vacillates between a desire for the animals’ features to be more exotic or less shocking. The zebras are “supreme” but only in their “abnormality,” the latter word implying not admiration for the equines’ black and white but unease at the sight of grotesque bodies. She describes the elephants as disappointing not because of their extremity, but their dull appearance in the context of the zoo display: they have “strictly practical appendages” and gray, “fog-colored skin.” “[T]he small cats” were simply “there,” and as Schulze discerns of the poem’s parakeets, “Locked in a cage, unable to explore, that parakeet’s foraging instinct expresses itself as a useless and destructive activity that the speaker cannot understand except as a reflection of her own boredom” (The Degenerate Muse 197). The spectator watches the animals without consideration of what the context of the zoo engenders for either her own self-conception or her view of the creatures and their activities. In the context of Moore’s larger body of work, the spectator’s shortsightedness may reveal the poem’s instructional objectives: to teach readers how to look at zoo animals. Paired with the critically neglected essay “What There is to See at the Zoo”, Moore wrote for The Book of Knowledge 1955 Annual later in her life, “The Monkeys” presents its first speaker as a zoo patron unappreciative of the wonders exhibited by zoos. In her essay, Moore details animals with interest, familiarity, and an eye for connections between environmental adaptations and animals’ colors, markings, and shapes. She also shows how an observation of these features enables glimpses of beauty. Compare, for example, how the poem’s first speaker finds the elephant’s appendages “strictly practical,” while Moore’s essay dedicates a paragraph to the dexterity of the elephant’s trunk, her concluding sentence finding splendor in functionality: “What prettier sight is there than the parabola described by an elephant’s trunk as it spirals a banana into its mouth?” (Moore, Complete Poems 40; “What There Is to See at the Zoo” 425). While it serves as a point of contrast between Moore’s adoration of zoo animals and the attitude of the first speaker of “The Monkeys,” Moore’s essay redraws the very spatial and conceptual boundaries between human and animal that several of her poems deconstruct. In addition to her catalog of animal features, Moore’s essay emphasizes the spatial divisions between humans and animals that should not be transgressed: We are the guests of science when we enter a zoo; and, in accepting privileges, we incur obligations. Animals are…brought from their natural surroundings to benefit us. It is short-sighted, as well as ungrateful, to frighten them or to feed them if we are told that feeding will harm them. If we stop to think, we will always respect chains, gates, wires or barriers of any kind that are installed to protect the animals and to keep the zoo a museum of living marvels for our pleasure and instruction. (427) Moore’s insistence that humans mind barriers declared by “chains, gates, wires or barriers of any kind” appears thoroughly strange considering her personal history of scaling fences and disobeying barriers to better access captive creatures (427). What seems to be Moore’s turn away from the possibilities of human–animal assemblages echoes the “strong instinct for civic responsibility and morality” that Rieke discovers in many of Moore’s late poems (169). In her zoo essay, Moore paradoxically seems to become less invested in the ethicality of captivity. Given her earlier work’s insistence on the relationship between composite creatures, desire, and violence, the essay’s celebration of zoos neglects consideration of not only the conceptual work performed by animal displays, but also how animals may resist human-imposed orderings. “The Monkeys” refuses the straightforward moral instruction of “What There is to See at the Zoo.” Despite zoo conventions that seek to physically and emotionally divide onlookers from the looked-at, the poem insists that zoos can facilitate encounters with nonhumans that teach spectators about animal exploitation and their own complicity in such practices. What begins as the first speaker’s “dim” recollection transforms into a fully quoted, highly detailed meeting between the spectator and big cat: I recall their magnificence, not now more magnificent than it is dim. It is difficult to recall the ornament,  speech, and precise manner of what one might   call the minor acquaintances twenty    years back; but I shall not forget him—that Gilgamesh among   the hairy carnivora—the cat with the wedge-shaped, slate-gray marks on its forelegs and the resolute tail, astringently remarking, “They have imposed on us with their pale  half-fledged protestations, trembling about   in inarticulate frenzy, saying     it is not for us to understand art; finding it   all so difficult, examining the thing as if it were inconceivably arcanic, as symmet- rically frigid as if it had been carved out of chrysoprase  or marble—strict with tension, malignant   in its power over us and deeper    than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp,   rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur.” (Complete Poems 40) While the first speaker equates most zoo animals to minor acquaintances met decades prior, the big cat’s address persists in her memory. The moment of transition between the first speaker’s sketch of animals and her memory of the big cat suggests the transformative power of their encounter. She not only recalls the cat’s appearance and speech with the precision absent in the first stanza, but also yields her speaking voice to him, giving the cat literally and figuratively the last word. As she recalls her meeting with the big cat, the spectator more closely resembles Moore’s preferred zoo visitor: she respects zoo animals for what they offer, especially when that offering comes in the form of a trenchant critique of human pomposity. Specifically, the cat addresses the supposition that animals are unfit to understand art, an “imposed” restriction that enables humans to celebrate the capacities they alone presume to possess. As Malamud avers, essential to the cat’s speech is the context from which he speaks: “Critics have too quickly glided over the implications of a caged zoo animal discussing art…they miss [Moore’s] fascinating consideration of the cat and art, and of the cat as art” (Malamud 333). Crucially, the big cat reflects on art interpretation from the position of an art object. As shown above, the naturalistic turn in zoo exhibit design positioned zoo and mounted animals against visual flourishes that maximized animals’ aesthetic appeal. The big cat therefore speaks about not only art interpretation, but also the interpretation of animals as art, specifically animals in man-made settings. The cat’s speech critiques the very zoo visitor who describes animals as creatures with simple sets of features and behaviors at the beginning of the poem.8 He interrogates her refusal to let the monkeys, zebras, elephants, parakeets, and big cats, as captive animals, articulate through their bodies and behaviors what makes them unique and worthy of study irrespective of ideals of nature. The big cat advocates a mode of encountering zoo and other composite animals that mirrors Moore’s position throughout much of her poetry. He scorns what humans have “imposed” on “us,” the animals: namely, “half-fledged protestations” expressed in “inarticulate frenzy” that argue “it is not for us to understand art” (Moore, Complete Poems 40). This imposition is doubly oppressive: it establishes humans as the only creatures that can understand and, presumably, create art; then, it uses that very constructed hierarchy—the schism between humans and all other creatures—to make animals into art objects.9 The cat’s vibrant speech, vastly more engaged than the human speaker’s voice from the same poem, establishes him as a worthy commentator. The cat addresses his would-be oppressors further, reflecting on how humans often identify animals, that is, as “inconceivably arcanic” and “symmet-/rically frigid.” The line break that divides “symmetrically” into two even parts (including the hyphen) evinces the cat’s playful poetics as well as the stakes of his verbal performance: a challenge to the idea that humans and nonhumans do not share traits such as creativity. Rather than perceive exhibited animals as “inconceivably arcanic” as the poem’s first speaker does, the cat argues the opposite. He suggests not to examine “the thing”—here, both an art object and an exhibited animal—as strange beyond comprehension and static with sameness “as if it had been carved out of chrysoprase/or marble.” Harnessing poetic voice, creativity, and self-reflection, the cat defies the spectator’s reading of animals as “strictly practical,” “dull,” or simplistic in form or habit. The big cat emerges as an embodiment of one of Moore’s composite creatures: he represents an animal whose mediation through human language enhances rather than diminishes the wonder and strangeness of his nonhuman animality. The last lines of “The Monkeys”—the big cat’s inventory of materials used in trade and commerce—trouble the conclusion of the poem with his self-referential list of animals and animal-made products: “horses” as well as “fur.” The cat stresses captive animals’ status as objects for trade: Hornaday’s history as a collector of dead and living animals resonates here, as does the exchange of animals and their genetic material across zoos. As zoos redefine themselves as arks of species diversity, Moore’s poetry requires that we ask just what “there is to see” in contexts reliant on animal captivity and use. With our discursive composition of animals literalized in captive breeding programs and other sites of forced reproduction, Moore helps call attention to the uncomfortable echo between species conservation and commodification.10 Many animals and even entire species currently endure within—to varying degrees—“unnatural” environments: to insist otherwise seems both idealistic and dishonest. What can animals become within the environments we influence? Rather than pursue the twin ideals of untouched wilderness and pure, wild animals in the vein of early-twentieth-century animal displays, Moore embraces the configurations of composite creatures. Environmental and animal ethics as well as the critical legacy of Moore’s playful, unwieldy animal assemblages insist that we imagine, interrogate, and be sensitive to how fluctuating combinations of desire, violence, and the urgency to conserve species affect nonhuman existence. Footnotes 1 Moore appreciated clothing made from animals and collected trinkets made from their remains. Famously, Moore enlisted Bishop’s help when her elephant hair bracelet needed repair, and Moore herself sourced hair from a baby circus elephant. For more on Moore’s ambivalence toward animal products, see Rieke’s excellent analysis and my reading of “New York” in this essay. 2 Josh A. Weinstein claims, for example, that Moore’s verse presents an “ethical stance toward animals and the earth” rooted in notions of interdependency similarly visible in contemporary ecopoetry (373). While intriguing, I hesitate to call Moore’s stance toward animals in particular unambiguously “ethical.” Moore considers the cost of her consumption of animals, yet she does so while celebrating what their use enables. 3 Malamud argues that Moore avoided basing her poetry on first-hand experiences of “the creatures themselves,” preferring to research with secondary sources—including newspaper clippings, books, and magazines—that do not rely on animal captivity (336). Moore was indeed an avid reader, yet her enthusiastic visits to places of dead and live animal exhibition challenge Malamud’s suggestion that she disapproved of animal captivity altogether. 4 Paul observes that “the reality” of AMNH taxidermy displays impressed Moore, particularly when the museum transitioned from taxonomic displays to habitat dioramas which emphasized how organisms function “in relation to other life-forms around them” (167). 5 For how habitat dioramas exercised this aesthetic of idealized nature, see Haraway’s “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” 6 Hornaday’s ideal of wilderness was neither new nor unique; in this persistent idealization, “wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural” (Cronon 110). See Cronon for how cultural attitudes toward wilderness have evolved. 7 Despite the prevalence of animals in Moore’s poetry, an animal speaker appears on only one other occasion in her work via the poem “Black Earth.” 8 My reading of the big cat’s critique is indebted to Malamud’s excellent analysis. 9 Elizabeth Grosz’s suggestion that art is rooted “not in the creativity of mankind but rather in a superfluousness of nature” inspires my reading of the cat as art object and artist (10). Grosz invites us to consider how animals use their bodies and energies for projects in excess of what is necessary for their survival. 10 Here I also have in mind industrialized animal agriculture, yet instances of human-managed reproduction of animals, at various scales and levels of violence, are certainly many. Works Cited Bazin Victoria. Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity.  Ashgate, 2010. Bishop Elizabeth. “Efforts of Affection.” Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Prose . Ed. Giroux Robert, 1984, 121– 56. Buell Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond.  Harvard UP, 2001. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Chrulew Matthew. “Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation.” Australian Humanities Review  50 ( 2011): 137– 57. Cronon William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader . Ed. Hiltner Ken. Routledge, 2014, 102– 19. Dolin Eric Jay. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America . W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Grosz Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth . Columbia UP, 2008. Hancocks David. A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future.  U of California P, 2001. Hanson Elizabeth. Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos . Princeton UP, 2002. Haraway Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science , Routledge, 1989, 26– 58. Haraway Donna. When Species Meet.  U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print. Lakritz Andrew M. Modernism and the Other in Stevens, Frost, and Moore.  UP of Florida, 1996. Leavell Linda. Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts . Louisiana State UP, 1995. Malamud Randy. Reading Zoos . New York UP, 1998. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Moore Marianne. Complete Poems.  Penguin Books, 1981. Moore Marianne. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore . Viking Penguin Inc., 1986. Moore Marianne. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore . Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Moore Marianne. “What There Is to See at the Zoo.” The Oxford Book of Essays . Ed. Gross John. Oxford UP, 2002. Morton Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.  Harvard UP, 2007. Paul Catherine E. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism . U of Michigan P, 2002. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Philo Chris, Wilbert Chris. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations . Routledge, 2000. Rieke Alison. “'Plunder' or ′Accessibility to Experience′: Consumer Culture and Marianne Moore's Modernist Self-Fashioning.” Journal of Modern Literature  27. 1–2 ( 2003): 149– 70. Schulze Robin G. The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene.  Oxford UP, 2013. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Schulze Robin G. “Marianne Moore's ′Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish′ and the Poetry of the Natural World.” Twentieth Century Literature  44. 1 ( 1998): 1– 33. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Trousdale Rachel. “'Humor Saves Steps': Laughter and Humanity in Marianne Moore.” Journal of Modern Literature  35. 3 ( 2012): 121– 38. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   Weinstein Josh A. “Marianne Moore's Ecopoetic Architectonics.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment  17. 2 ( 2010): 373– 88. Google Scholar CrossRef Search ADS   © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Composite Creatures: Marianne Moore’s Zoo-Logic
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isx066
DA - 2017-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/composite-creatures-marianne-moore-s-zoo-logic-yt7oFT0uSc
SP - 707
EP - 726
VL - 24
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -