128DIORAMAShunt (fig. 3.7). Decorum constituted a pervasive and yet extremely subtle
anthropomorphization that reassessed for the viewer the naturalized and
thus unquestionable nature of human demeanor.
To impose decorum on the representation of animal bodies clearly in-
dexes (on a discursive level) what Haraway argued: that dioramas, in the
early modern age, functioned as a “morality play on the stage of nature.”^73
The aesthetic fixity of dioramas, along with their incarnations of deep,
unspoiled nature, constructed a permanence upon which ideals of racial
purity (eugenics) could be inscribed. Simultaneously, the conservationist
ideals, which on the surface motivated the construction of dioramas,
emerged as the ultimate attempt to preserve a threatened manhood
through the salvaging of the materials required for that very moral for-
mation to be constructed.
It is in this sense that natural history dioramas came to constitute a
substantial assertion of ideological values of a patriarchal kind. They ap-
propriated animal bodies for the purpose of narrating human stories. But
that this would happen, considering the discourses and practices at the
crux of which taxidermy dioramas emerged, was perhaps inevitable. As
Hegel stated, “art digs an abyss between the appearance and illusion of
this bad and perishable world, on the one hand, and the true content of
events on the other, to re-clothe these events and phenomena with a
higher mind born of the mind.... Far from being simple appearances
and illustrations of ordinary reality, the manifestations of art possess a
higher reality and a truer existence.”^74
In this sense Haraway is also right that “realism is an aesthetics proper
to anxiety about decadence”—an aesthetics that natural history discur-
sively appropriated from art historical discourses and practices. It is also
in this context that Haraway assigned to the modern museum of natural
history the role of medical technology and hygienic intervention against
the decadence of modern man.^75 The space of confinement proposed by
the museum was therefore a moralizing one—one through which the con-
sumption of patriarchal narratives portrayed in diorama displays provided
“purification” from the corruption of industrialization and civilization.
Simultaneously, in the museum of natural history, the taxidermy animal
was purified of its violent animality, that unreasoning that in Foucault par-
allels the animal and the mad.^76 The neutralized form of objectivity pro-
duced by the sovereign gaze of the naturalist had the main purpose of