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THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY

From Chaucer to Gray

I

n referring to the special power of poetry to mediate animal pres-

ence to human awareness, Elizabeth Costello, in J. M. Coetzee’s Lives

of Animals, dismisses “that kind of poetry [in which] animals stand

for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so

forth.”^1 While Costello makes this sweeping assertion as a way of set-

ting up a contrast to poetry that is able to represent something of the

actual 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 common. In his book on poetry about ani-

mals, Randy Malamud evaluates poems by the degree to which they

“substantially approach or interact with animals” and thus avoid alle-

gorically representing exclusively human concerns, which he argues is

a virtually impossible ideal.^2 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.^3 Similarly, 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 cul-

tural 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