Poetry and Animals

THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY51

presenting some form of sympathy for the animal. Gray’s poem presents
an animal face that barely masks a deep misogyny, “the en-gendering of
figures of vanity, luxury, and consumerism,” as Suvir Kaul has argued.^31
The association of fables with children here enables the infantilizing of
women as well as the trivializing of animal life in general.
A final lesson we may draw from Gray’s animal fable is that the dou-
bleness of allegory seems to inhere both in the poem itself and in our
acts of interpretation. We can, and normally do, interpret literary ani-
mals allegorically even if a poem appears literally to be about an animal.
By enforcing a leap beyond the “mere” animal, Gray’s poem marks a
moment when animal allegory becomes for readers strictly binary, allow-
ing us to pass over the literal, or the represented, to some abstract and
always human meaning. Much like anthropomorphism, allegory can be
a strategy for bringing the animal and our relations to it to light or a
mechanism of distortion, of putting the animal in its place.