‘What do we mean when we say an animal performs?’
My guests on this programme are Karen Raber, professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and Monica Mattfeld, assistant professor of English literature and history at the University of Northern British Columbia. Together they are the editors of a fascinating recent collection of essays entitled Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater, published by Penn State University Press in their always stimulating Animalibus series.
Karen and Monica write in their introduction to the book:
Recent work in the sciences and the humanities has provided new tools to investigate questions of animal performance before the twentieth century – the focus of the collection – from horse dramas on the 19th stage in London to animals theatricalized on the early modern table to flea circuses. In the interview, we touch on some of the issues, but before we began, I spoke to Monica and Karen about how they had got into the field of animal studies:
monica mattfeld
I actually come from a background in history. My undergrad and master’s degree were both in history, but I came to animal studies through my own personal experiences, my hobbies if you like. I have been an ardent horse person for as long as I can remember and it was something that I had found I really wanted to know more about, but there wasn’t any literature in existence when I first started my studies. So it kind of fell into it out of a desire to simply known more in an area that hadn’t had anything done.
hedgehog & fox
And at the same time as not discovering much secondary literature, were you aware that it was a huge amount of primary material, that the past had left a huge amount of interesting writing and depictions of horses?
monica mattfeld
Absolutely, absolutely. Any go-through the existing historical databases or image collections or even just a simple Google search turns up a massive amount of information and primary material that has not been dealt with in any shape or form.
hedgehog & fox
Karen, what about you? What was your route into animal studies?
karen raber
So Monica knows this story because it’s exactly the same as hers. I also was a horsewoman from the time I was old enough to demand to be allowed to ride a horse, and I’ve been pretty consistent about remaining involved in that area of life. I have a couple of horses that I compete here, I ride dressage.
But I’m of a generation when it was quite literally impossible to think about [animal studies] as a field specialization. I came through graduate school in the late 80s/early 90s, so I opted for what I considered a kind of ethical approach to literature at the time, mainly feminism. I worked with the New Historicists so there was a little bit of that, and the exposure through the New Historicists bent towards including primary texts and anecdotal material and historical evidence, and that in turn opened the door to thinking about the way in which there was room for this kind of work.
Now, I didn’t get a chance to do much with it until well into my tenure here at the university. I spent the first part of my career working on women writers, and eventually work by literary scholars like Erica Fudge and a few others, Bruce Boehrer in particular, made it possible to think about this as a full specialty and I’m very grateful to them for paving the way for people like me who were searching for a way to make it their work.