PET PROJECTS Nigel Rothfels, General Editor Advisory Board: Steve Baker (University of Central Lancashire) Susan McHugh (University of New England) Garry Marvin (Roehampton University) Kari Weil (Wesleyan University) Books in the Animalibus series share a fascination with the status and the role of animals in human life. Crossing the humanities and the social sciences to include work in history, anthropology, social and cultural geography, environmental stud- ies, and literary and art criticism, these books ask what thinking about nonhuman animals can teach us about human cultures, about what it means to be human, and about how that meaning might shift across times and places. Other titles in the series: Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Marcus Baynes-Rock, Among the Bone Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist, eds., Gorgeous Beasts: Monica Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader, and Adam Dodd, eds., Animals on Display: Heather Swan, Where Honeybees Thrive: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Stories from the Field Natural History Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld, eds., Ann-Janine Morey, Picturing Dogs, Performing Animals: History, Agency, Seeing Ourselves: Vintage American Theater Photographs J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals: Mary Sanders Pollock, Storytelling Apes: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, Primatology Narratives Past and Future 1870–1914 Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth- Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches Century Britain of Time Dick Blau and Nigel Rothfels, Elephant House Pet Projects Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive ELIZABETH YOUNG The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Copyright © 2019 Publication Data The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Names: Young, Elizabeth, 1964– author. Printed in the United States of America Title: Pet projects : animal fiction and Published by The Pennsylvania taxidermy in the nineteenth-century State University Press, archive / Elizabeth Young. University Park, PA 16802-1003 Other titles: Animalibus. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania The Pennsylvania State University Press is : The Pennsylvania State University a member of the Association of University Press, [2019] | Series: Animalibus : of Presses. animals and creatures | Includes bibli- ographical references and index. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania Summary: “An analysis of how animals State University Press to use acid-free were represented in the nineteenth paper. Publications on uncoated stock century in fiction, taxidermy, and other satisfy the minimum requirements media, threaded together with the of American National Standard for author’s reflections on animal illness Information Sciences—Permanence of and on the field of animal studies”— Paper for Printed Library Material, Provided by publisher. ansi z39.48-1992. Identifiers: LCCN 2019028824 | ISBN 9780271084947 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Saunders, Marshall, 1861–1947—Criticism and interpreta- tion. | Saunders, Marshall, 1861–1947. Beautiful Joe. | Animals in litera- ture—History—19th century. | Dogs in literature—History—19th century. Classification: LCC PN56.A64 Y68 2019 | DDC 809.93362—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2019028824 Contents List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 5 First-Dog Voice Literary Taxidermy CanLit 15 81 165 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 4 His Master’s Voice Mounting and 47 Mourning 127 Coda 203 Acknowledgments 223 Notes 225 Index 259 Illustrations 1. Beautiful Joe, Phoenix Edition cover 6 20. Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Passenger Pigeon 132 2. Beautiful Joe, frontispiece 35 21. Woman and dog in White Dog 140 3. Beautiful Joe, illustration of Joe 40 22. Charles Livingston Bull, Beautiful 4. Beautiful Joe, illustration of Billy 43 Joe’s Paradise, frontispiece 152 5. Francis Barraud, His Master’s Voice 49 23. Charles Livingston Bull, Beautiful 6. Jay Rial’s Ideal Uncle Tom’s Cabin 67 Joe’s Paradise, illustration of journey 153 7. Charles Moore, Birmingham, Alabama Policemen Use Police Dogs During 24. “I’m Lost” poster in Wendy and Civil Rights Demonstrations 74 Lucy 159 8. Man and dog in White Dog 77 25. Woman and dog in Wendy and Lucy 162 9. Natural History Museum at Tring, Gallery 6 85 26. Henry James Morgan, Marshall Saunders entry, Types of Canadian 10. Natural History Museum at Tring, dog Women and of Women Who Are or postcard 88 Have Been Connected to Canada 172 11. Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (St. 27. Nina Katchadourian, My Pets 184 Bernhard) 91 28. Beautiful Joe postcard 207 12. Nina Katchadourian, Chloe 92 29. Gunter Neumann, Margaret Marshall 13. Eugene S. M. Haines, The Saunders monument, Beautiful Joe Taxidermists’ After-Dinner Dream 98 Park 209 14. William T. Hornaday, “Manikin for 30. Beautiful Joe dog cairn, Beautiful Joe Tiger—First Stage” and “Manikin for Park 211 Tiger—Completed” 105 31. Gunter Neumann, Beautiful Joe mon- 15. John N. Hyde, The Cruelties of ument, Beautiful Joe Park 212 Fashion 110 32. Gunter Neumann, Beautiful Joe 16. Martha Maxwell, In the monument, Beautiful Joe Park, side Workroom 115 view 213 17. Parlor taxidermy in Psycho 117 33. Lucius Hyde, Birds of Mary Lyon’s Time parlor dome 217 18. Birds in playground in The Birds 119 34. James Gehrt, Canada Warbler 218 19. Candida Lacey, Booth Museum of Natural History, Brighton 126 35. Sara Angelucci, Aviary (Female Passenger Pigeon/extinct) 220 Introduction The place is New England, Massachusetts, Northampton; the time is March 2008, spring break in my academic calendar but closer to wintry, not at all 1 summery. A summary: It is a weekday morning and I am walking my golden retriever, Frankie, to his veterinarian, just a five-minute stroll through my neighborhood, for his annual checkup, during which she finds a lump in his abdomen, and a worried look crossing her kind face; as we return home, he zigzags and collapses, disoriented, and I drive him to the small hospital here in western Massachusetts for animal emergencies, twenty minutes north up the highway, where he is given an abdominal ultrasound and an unfamiliar doctor says, brusquely, “This is cancer, a large tumor is hemorrhaging, you need to go to Tufts”—the big veterinary hospital near Worcester—“immediately”; now it is late afternoon, now the dog is whimpering in pain, now I call a friend for help and she comes right away and drives us an hour eastward on the turn- pike, from which we turn off into unfamiliar central Massachusetts and are immediately lost on country roads; now it is evening, quite dark, and finally the hospital looms up in front of us, and we bring in Frankie, who is admitted, stabilized, and scheduled for surgery; now we get back into the car for the long drive back. It is the dead of night, and I am somewhere in the middle of my own gothic landscape, holding Frankie’s collar in my hand, as if he is already dead. He is seven. There is more to this canine plot—not yet a funeral plot—and I will narrate it in these pages, though a personal dog story of some shagginess will, I know, interest some readers more than others. But the animal stories underneath, prior, and adjacent to this personal one will be, I hope, of general interest. They map a nineteenth-century cultural landscape—New England, old England, North American—with some surprising views. p For example, in the months that follow this opening scene, I return many e t p times to the animal hospital in central Massachusetts; it is where the Tufts r o j University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine trains its students. It e c t turns out that the Tufts animal hospital was built on the site of the former s Grafton State Hospital, which was established in 1901 as part of the Worcester Lunatic Hospital; the Grafton hospital was known as the “farm colony” for the Worcester one, which means it was where the latter’s “chronic insane” lived out their lives in agricultural and domestic pursuits. I learn about Grafton’s history from the website of an artist, Anna Schuleit, who has meticulously documented the interlocking histories of Massachusetts mental institutions.1 Another of these institutions is in the town where I live: the Northampton Lunatic Hospital—later known as the Northampton State Hospital—which was founded in 1856, riding the wave of social reform advocating better treat- 2 ment for the mentally ill. Soon, however, the institution offered less emphasis on treatment and more on incarceration; by the 1950s, the Northampton State Hospital had thousands of patients and few psychiatrists. This history is typi- cal of the American asylum, as was the deinstitutionalization of Northampton patients in the 1960s part of a national trend; the last patients were released in 1993.2 So Tufts’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, née Grafton State Hospital, was on the same asylum atlas as the Northampton State Hospital, which is connected to me through several paths. I live in Northampton about a mile from Smith College, whose fields the state hospital abuts. I teach American literature and film at Mount Holyoke College, which is, like Smith, historically a women’s college; they are two of the original “Seven Sisters.” And Mount Holyoke is sibling to the state hospital by design: the seminary system from which the college emerged bore “a marked resemblance to the structure of asylum life.”3 The Northampton State Hospital is also in my life in an off-label way. In 2008, when my story about Frankie starts, I see its buildings daily: they are on the verge of redevelopment, but for now, they stand, looming and crumbling, straight out of Gothic Central Casting. In 2000, Anna Schuleit broadcast Bach through the speakers facing out from the empty buildings’ windows. This installation was an attempt to render the uncanny audible—in the artist’s words, “to make the building sing.”4 Other sounds are heard there now, especially those of dogs, because the grounds of the defunct state hos- pital have become Northampton’s unofficial dog park; they are where I walk Frankie most days, especially after I write. I am finishing a book entitled Black