Here are a few things to know about Antonia Losano and her relationship with animals. She loves dogs, cats, and otters. She’s terrified of horses and mice. She thinks bats are creepy. She says that the fox couple that lives near her house are adorable, but admits to mixed feelings when one morning she saw the two trotting through her yard with a freshly killed rabbit dangling from one of the fox’s jaws. ¶ And she loves to tell you that animals are “everywhere, not just outside.” They are a part of our language (“he’s a fox,” “what a cute chick”); they’re part of our social identity (the geopolitical “Russian Bear”); and above all they are a part of our literature. Losano, an associate professor of English and American literatures, teaches a course called Animals in Literature, and here she offers a few of her favorite animal literary references. (With an assist from her husband, Dan Brayton, also an associate professor of English and American literatures, who gives us his take on the Whale in Moby-Dick.)
The white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
“ ‘Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!’ ”
He’s so very un-rabbit like. We think of rabbits as fuzzy and cozy and cuddly, and he’s absolutely not. The White Rabbit signals to us that not all is normal in Alice’s brain.
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard the ducks from Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings
“When they reached the pond and swam across to the little island, there was Mr. Mallard waiting for them, just as he had promised.”
I study romance and courtship plots, and I’m continually struck by how often literature, especially children’s literature, relies on birds—ducks, turtledoves—to serve as stand-ins for monogamous love. There seems to be a desperate desire to say: “Look at those ducks, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, raising their children. Aren’t they an iconic heterosexual couple, married with children, devoted to each other and family?” It’s as if we need these examples—pictures of marital bliss—to say “it’s normal to mate for life.”
Mr. Fox, the fox from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox
“ ‘I therefore invite you all,’ Mr. Fox went on, ‘to stay here with me for ever.’ ”
Traditionally, we think of foxes as sly and clever, a depiction that dates back to the Middle Ages with the fable Chanticleer and the Fox. (Chaucer memorably captured this same tale in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Barbara Cooney has also used it in her 20th-century children’s book, Chanticleer and the Fox.) But Dahl’s fox is a bit different. Dahl managed to preserve all of the fox’s slyness while also making him lovable. Dahl’s fox, at his core, is a patriarch who cares for his family and friends; his slyness is in service to the greater good.
Napoleon the pig from George Orwell’s Animal Farm
“ ‘Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.’ ”
The word “pig” has undeniably negative connotations, and Napoleon is a particularly piggish, a pig. Yet he is a pig who, by the novel’s end, is indistinguishable from humans. For a while, you can fool yourself that he’s just a pig, but the moral of Orwell’s allegory is that there’s something inherently destructive in the human search for power. We may be tempted to say that power is “dehumanizing,” but Orwell suggests otherwise.
The bear from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale
“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
What’s great is that the bear is famous for not really being there. It’s fleeting. present just in this one moment, this one stage direction. Scholars have argued over whether a real bear performed the role, as there were performing bears during this time, or whether a man in a bear costume played it. Bears have an iconic status as an animal that could surprise you in the woods—they’re large, they can be frightening—so to be pursued by a bear would be a classic nightmare. Yet Shakespeare turns the nightmare into something almost comic.
The wolf from Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves.”
“The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.”
Wolves are a fantasy of the familiar made strange; they’re like dogs, but they’re not dogs. Perhaps this is why they make such good heroes in supernatural romance fiction; part of our erotic makeup desires something as familiar as a domestic pet, but wild like a wolf. Angela Carter retells the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale, but here Red, isn’t frightened by the wolf with his big eyes and his big teeth. Instead of running away, she throws off her clothes and begins to undress him.
The cockroach from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”
Part of what Kafka is saying is in our present corporate culture we’re all bugs anyway. Gregor is a company man, a traveling salesman, who is a slave to routine, rising at the same time every day, catching the same train, following the same patterns. When he wakes up as a cockroach, he doesn’t particularly notice. He’s concerned that he can’t get out of bed, but the fact that he’s s a bug is less important than the fact that he’ll miss his train to work.
The whale from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
“So utterly lost was Flask [the third mate of the Pequod] to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil.”
The White Whale in Moby-Dick symbolizes our desperate quest to conquer what we don’t know; in the course of the novel it also comes to symbolize how little we do know—about whales, the ocean, the biophysical environment, and ourselves. Melville was a profoundly liberal thinker (small “l”) whose narrative of a lost-soul mariner (Ishmael), a monomaniacal whaling captain (Ahab), and a noble savage harpooneer (Queequeg) is in fact a relentlessly critical scrutiny of the limitations of our systems of knowledge. In the story, whales begin as fearsome beasts and evolve into emblems of what we don’t know about ourselves—they become us, our humanity.
Buck the dog from Jack London’s The Call of the Wild
“And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck’s throat was twisted into a savage growl.”
In the first part of the novel, Buck is a complacent domestic tyrant. He’s king of the castle, but has done nothing to earn that position. When he’s stolen and shipped off to the Yukon and forced to become part of a sled pack team, Buck must do something that domestic dogs don’t typically have to do—test his mettle in the “real world.” First he has to fight for survival in the harsh winter; then he has to fight to become alpha male in the pack. It’s a brutal and violent stage of his life (and of the book). Then he meets Thornton, a man who can inspire loyalty, and the tale becomes a human/animal love story. Yet when Thornton dies, Buck reverts to the wild, literally running with the wolves. In this one character, we see all the possible options that a dog can be.
The geese from the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.”
“Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air / are heading home again.”
Oliver offers us an exquisite image of wildness, mystery, and the inevitable cycles of life. Geese are harbingers of spring and fall. Here in Middlebury, it’s a part of our annual ritual. The geese have left; snow is coming. For Oliver, geese mean that and much more: they are “harsh and exciting—/over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”
Black Beauty the horse from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty
“Why don’t they cut their own children’s ears into points to make them look sharp?”
When Sewell wrote Black Beauty, people had radically different relationships to horses than they do today. In 19th-century London, horses were more populous than people. Horses were work animals, They were the primary method of transportation. Everyone was intimately acquainted with horses then, and this book captures those lives. Today, horses are very expensive pets.
Aesop’s Fables
I can’t pick just one to illustrate the significance of these fables—it’s the very collection that’s so revealing. Why do we have these moral fables, really the first children’s tales that teach us how to be good—and almost all the characters are all animals? Why can’t we teach our children how to behave by telling stories about humans? I think it’s because we need the animals to provide distance from ourselves. And it works. Psychologists have conducted research that shows children do learn morals from
animal stories. From animal tales.