Sarah Amato. Beastly Possessions

Sarah Amato’s first book, Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture, is a tale of “Victorian social life told through an examination of human-animal relations” (3). The project was initially inspired by a diorama (by the amateur taxidermist Walter Potter) depicting a complete late-Victorian wedding—only with nearly identical tabby kittens playing every role. Gaining a full understanding of the affectionate and macabre impulses behind that 1890 tableau took Amato “to the rituals of Victorian pet-keeping [chap. 1], gendered depictions of cats and dogs and the company of female animal fanciers [chap. 2], into the Zoo [chap. 3] through several museums [chap. 5], and into Victorian consumer culture [chap. 4]” (16). While acknowledging recent work on “the difficult project of trying to access the experience(s) of being animal in certain historical moments, places, and conditions,” Amato “explores the way animals and representations of animals have affected people” (15). As she puts it, human “relationships to pets and zoo animals were tangible, smelly, messy, disconcerting, comforting, and sometimes tasty; representations could be equally troubling” (15). The result is a wide-ranging look at various ways that domestic and display animals (agricultural animals and wildlife in situ are excluded) were folded into everyday (principally urban) Victorian life.

Amateur · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Macabre · Media studies · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History