The Animal in Allegory: From Chaucer to Gray

Abstract

In referring to the special power of poetry to mediate animal presence to human awareness, Elizabeth Costello, in J. M. Coetzee's Lives of Animals (1999), dismisses “that kind of poetry [in which] animals stand for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth” (50). While Costello makes this sweeping assertion as a way of setting up a contrast to poetry that is able to represent something of the actual embodied individual animal, the idea that there is a kind of poetry, or more generally, a mode of animal representation, in which the animal is a purely allegorical figure is a common one. In his book on poetry about animals, Randy Malamud evaluates poems on the degree to which they “substantially approach or interact with animals” and thus avoid allegorically representing exclusively human concerns instead, which he argues is a virtually impossible ideal (31). More generally, ecocritics like Lawrence Buell and Leonard Scigaj have valorized nature writing that somehow stays true to the actual physical world and resists projecting meaning onto it. It is similarly the case that, in the representation of animals, animal-oriented criticism decries the various ways in which animals have been used and subjected, including the ways in which we have supplied them with cultural and social meaning. Projecting meaning diminishes our sense of their distinctness, makes them merely subjects of our power, and co-opts their presence. Thus extreme versions of anthropomorphism are offensive not just to those who wish to preserve some sense of the distinctive power of human being, but also to those sympathetic to an idea of animal difference. In this essay, I want to explore poems that use animals allegorically to represent something else. My goal is to examine the category of allegorical animal poems that is frequently invoked as a way of distinguishing what “real” animal poetry is. Does such a category exist? How can we define the boundaries between poems that use animals to signal purely human concerns and those that seem to take animals seriously, that is, to represent animals in themselves? My argument is that, in the early modern history of English literature, allegorical representations of animals are characterized by doubleness and complexity; rather than transparently referring to a primarily human significance, animal allegories simultaneously hide and reveal the contested nature of the boundary between humans and animals.