The eerie title of Rachel Poliquin’s beautifully illustrated and designed book, The Breathless Zoo, first in the exciting new “Animalibus” series edited by Nigel Rothfels and Gary Marvin, immediately calls attention to the contradictions at the heart of its subject. Taxidermy, which can be traced at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is a process whereby animals are killed in order to be preserved and displayed, and in which their deaths—deliberate and celebrated in some instances, accidental or mourned in others—linger in the background of that display. The result is an irresolvable tension between the live animal taxidermy recalls and the lifeless object it has become. Not quite a history of taxidermy, although filled with intriguing historical facts about the taxidermic process and its changes over time, Poliquin’s book is organized around the “Cultures of Longing” of its subtitle, and the various human desires that have given rise to a process that so often produces a “queasy” response from onlookers. Divided into chapters on Wonder, Beauty, Spectacle, Order, Narrative, Allegory, and Remembrance, the book itself inspires its own queasy delectation over images that are at once gorgeous and repulsive, thereby implicating the reader in desiring gazes that are as psychologically suspect as they are aesthetic, scientific, or simply whimsical. Indeed, readers might be reminded early on of Hitchcock’s character Norman Bates, who, in the film Psycho, reveals his stuffed mother.

The book opens with a discussion of the British exhibition Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome by the artists Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson, who set out to photograph and/or collect every mounted polar bear in the United Kingdom. They found thirty-four nanoq (the Inuit term for polar bear) in a range of natural history museums, but also appearing to offer flower baskets in parlors or mixed up with children’s toys in play rooms. Oversized and displaced in both environments, the bears became “purloined objects of science” (4), but for what purpose is unclear. Recalling the living, individual bears that were once a part of nature but are now “neither fully science nor fully art,” they point toward the questions that will be addressed to the array of animals represented in the book: “Animal or object? Animal and object?” (5) Taxidermy never allows us to choose between these states that are always in tension, argues Poliquin. As a result it is unclear who and what taxidermy serves, and about whom or what it gives the most information: the animals or the humans who re-created them. Indeed, any information about the animals is obscured by the irony that they had to die to exist, and by the ambiguity of taxidermic aims that range from the aesthetic to the narcissistic, and from the palliative to the perverse.

Poliquin traces the history of taxidermy back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of wonder, where the later aims of Enlightenment science to dissect in order to know were yet subservient to aesthetic urges to preserve and to display objects of beauty or foreignness. Less than animal form, it was the sheer materiality of animal parts or even fossils that contributed to the “poetics of strangeness” of these cabinets. Transformed into natural history cabinets, they were homes for the very first taxidermied specimens: exotic birds from the West Indies that died during transport. Hummingbirds would become the rage under the influence of Romantic poets, exported from the Americas to be delicately arranged on sprawling branches in the cases of Bullock’s Liverpool Museum, which opened in 1790. Preserved in an effort to hold on to their exquisite and foreign beauty, the hummingbirds were eaten away by maggots and rot—problems of technique that were not remedied until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These decaying specimens might seem fitting for a Romantic sensibility in which adoration resulted in killing and stuffing—a clear contrast to current sensibilities where environmental preservation means keeping alive.

In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, fascination with individual specimens gave way to new interests in spectacles of animal behavior and, in particular, animal savagery. The universal exhibitions offered occasions for displaying new methods for preparing large animal mounts and, consequently, for satisfying new desires for spectacles of wild animality, conquered by Western, colonial forces. Indeed, good taxidermy itself depended on high-quality skins, and thus on the fruits of “travel, discovery, and conquest” (91). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the floating signifiers of savagery meant that the first and only human to be included in a taxidermic spectacle was the Arab in Jules Verreaux’s “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions.” “The animal violence and aggressive displays of imperial conquest of the natural world had meshed perfectly with the political and cultural agendas of the world exhibitions,” writes Poliquin (97). How this lone human specimen, exception to the rule of taxidermy as animal, figured within those colonial agendas, however, receives rather scant attention. Readers do learn that the piece was adopted by the American Museum of Natural History in 1869, and then disposed of for being “too emotional and distracting for educational purposes” (97). What specifically was the distraction?

At issue here, of course, are the different historical contexts shaping taxidermic narratives and the information they are intended to display, as well as the changing contexts for their visual reception. In chapter 4, Poliquin focuses on traditions of scientific taxidermy meant to represent a theory—and hence to embody “what is already known” (131). Similarly, in chapter 6 she considers allegorical dioramas that were popular in the Victorian era, where kittens or squirrels carry on a tea party, or cute little rabbits are seated at writing desks showing their work to the Master Rabbit, as in “The Rabbits’ Village School” by Walter Potter. Like fables, these works invoke human foibles and follies through a typecasting of animals. Nothing is meant to provoke a different kind of “deep” looking that moves to the life and death of the individual animal before its subjection to the theory or the cuteness. Ironically, such a gaze upon the animal as individual may be found through practices that lie outside the scientific and aesthetic, and tend rather toward the personal and experiential. Hunting trophies and taxidermied pets are clearly opposed in the particular human-animal relations invoked, but aligned in their attempts to pay tribute to particular experiences with an animal. Trophies, Poliquin writes, “are not anonymous deaths, they are souvenirs of a passionate, deadly personal desiring” (152). This is as true for the European tradition of the hunt and its ties to aristocracy as for the American wilderness tradition and its emphasis on prowess. Poliquin interestingly draws out the historical and cultural similarities and differences in these traditions and the decors they have inspired, but leaves out what I would regard as integral questions of gender. As much as hunting is evidence of a human desire to kill a specific animal—one worthy of the hunt—it has also been evidence of a masculine desire and even, at times, a male homo-social desire operating through the animal in the place of the female body.

It is against and in criticism of the violence of such a tradition that we can understand the “de-taxidermy” of an artist like Angela Singer, whose jeweled trophies feminize even as they mourn the dead prey. Singer and the collaborative Dutch artists who go by the name of Idiots are among the few contemporary taxidermy artists treated in the book. Poliquin’s descriptions of these works that often combine precious metals and gems with the heads and skins of animals are sensually evocative and pay tribute to the undeniable beauty or even nobility of the deceased animal, while also appealing to starkly opposing claims of morbid curiosity and inspired awe, “of flesh and allegory” (194). Here, however, Poliquin’s insistence that all taxidermy inscribes desire and longing begins to ring a bit flat, if not as an avoidance or domestication of the very perverseness within taxidermy that these artists seize upon. Steve Baker has elsewhere used the term “botched taxidermy” as a way of describing the wrongness suggested by postmodern animal art—materials and pieces that do not quite fit into a legible whole—and, by extension, the wrong done to the animal (Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaction Books, 2000, 54). Poliquin focuses her attention on enigmatic longing over ethics, and possibly over aesthetic disjunction as well. True, she acknowledges the new “dandyism” that furnishes living rooms with “reclaimed” trophy heads as a camp or kitsch disdain for morality. And she comments that the “salvage mentality” of the Contemporary Zoological Conservatory in Toronto might seem to “gloss over the ethics of animal killing” (169) with its vast collection of vintage deer heads, bears, fox, beavers, and birds. Ultimately, however, she applauds the Toronto display in its ability to “reindividuate” the animals, and to give them “full lives in the afterlife” (169). “Some dignity of the animal” is maintained by these reclaimed hunting trophies, she asserts (169). Would we say the same of Norman Bates’s mother?

What exactly does taxidermy aim to preserve? In her final chapter Poliquin poses this question by turning to Loulou, the stuffed parrot from Flaubert’s story, “A Simple Heart,” and to the vogue of preserving pets that also reached its height in the Victorian era. Like cloning today, stuffed pets offered a means to remember, while simultaneously indicating that the practices and aesthetics surrounding mourning and grief are themselves historical and shaped by available technologies. They also stand as evidence of the “unbridgeable chasm between humans and other animals” that continues to this day, despite the method of plastination developed by Dr. Gunther van Hagens to exhibit anatomical human bodies in the popular show Body Worlds. Even without their skin—the derm of taxidermy—van Hagens’s bodies (whom Poliquin does not address), like those of the preserved pets, stand inexorably as relics of particular people rather than of allegorical figures or scientific categories. But Body Worlds’s conflation of personal remembrance and public entertainment provokes the tensions inherent in taxidermy (animal and/or object), and thus of the risks it runs as a practice of mourning. These risks are alluded to in the description of the 2008 fire that destroyed Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle’s huge and distinguished taxidermy collection on the rue de Bac, in Paris, there since its opening in 1831. “A strong acrid smell of burned hair, horns, hooves, and wings assaulted all who entered the building the morning after” (222). As in the case of Flaubert’s parrot, these animals were preserved for a kind of second or afterlife, though only to be resubjected to a second metaphorical death—a death not by killing (whether ennobling or not), but by accident, decay, or neglect. Describing the blackened butterflies, burned parrots, and singed bear, Poloquin exclaims—though in what inflection it is unclear—“the animals never seemed so alive” (222). Does it take this second death to incite or invite that deep looking invoked earlier, a kind of looking that sees beyond the imposed, human longings and toward the vulnerability of the animals? Perhaps it is this vulnerability, this mortality, which we humans share with animals, that taxidermy has attempted to disguise all along. May they rest in peace.