Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Woolf and the Others at the Zoo
text’s major characters, John and Josephine, visit the Zoo as a courting couple, but soon
argue about their relationship. Josephine angrily insists that from love of her family, she is
“not going to live with you, or do anything they would mind if they found out” (5). She accuses
him of being a “wild beast” (7), and in response he surrenders himself to the Zoological
Society, which accepts him as an extremely popular exhibit. After a series of tense interviews
through the bars, Josephine eventually accepts her status as beast as much as John’s, and
begs entrance to his cage, saying “be damned to everyone else…. Nobody can make me feel
ashamed now” (91). Th is realisation brings about resolution, for the Zoo reveals that John’s
contract releases him should he ever become engaged to be married, and they pass out into
a “crowd…chiefl y composed of couples like themselves” (94). Th ere is an obvious subtext
here, as with Garnett’s earlier novel, Lady Into Fox (1922), that human sexuality is somehow
inherently animalistic and requires freeing from social repression; Garnett’s own expression
of the poetic fallacy of animality. However, it is important to recognise that in both instances,
it is principally female sexuality which is explored. As Michael L. Ross notes with a
shared enthusiasm, Garnett believed that liberation could come through female characters
“hearkening to the call of the wild” (229). However, Garnett also fears the full animal force
that he detects in woman. Th is is clearest in the fi gure of the orang-utan which occupies the
cage next to John’s, and which is repeatedly, and uniquely among the Zoo creatures, emphasised
as female. In a fi t of jealous rage, it embraces John in a symbolically emasculating sexual
attack, “slowly grinding his fi ngers to a mere pulp” (69). Female sexuality, therefore, must
hearken to the call of the wild, but, for the good of Man, not surrender to it.
I am using Garnett here as a representative of an ancient and resistant tradition of
women as the embodiment of the transgressive power of the poetic fallacy of animality. As
Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan remark in a historical review of the feminine and the
animal, since classical times “the ideological justifi cation for women’s alleged inferiority has
been made by appropriating them to animals” (1). It is Woolf’s reaction to this metaphor,
and to the patriarchal claim to own and manipulate it, which lies at the heart of her consideration
of the Zoo. Woolf unconvincingly assured Garnett that she preferred A Man in the
Zoo to his earlier work “though its [sic] clumsier and less accomplished.” She also told him
that “Your humans are a little stiff I think” (L3 99-100), a damning criticism of a novel
where, despite its setting, there are only two minor animal “characters.” However, Woolf
understood all too well the fallacies which underpin Garnett’s plot before she had read his
novel, for she had depicted the signifi catory dangers of London Zoo fi ve years previously,
in Night and Day. Th e novel’s heroine, Katharine, her secretly estranged fi ancé William, her
potential lover Denham, and her cousin Cassandra, all make an unsuccessful trip to the Zoo.
At fi rst, there appears to be no hint of animality as, alone with Denham, Katharine gazes
at the bears and sees seeming humans. She asks, “I wonder if these animals are happy,” and
then buys buns, and is seen happily “breaking the bun into parts and tossing them down the
bears’ throats” (386-87). However, the Zoo as locus of murky atavistic desire is soon evident,
but only through male eyes. Denham sees his beloved “against a background of pale grottos
and sleek hides; camels slanted their heavy-lidded eyes at her” (387), and easily appreciates
her as the bestial woman, in communion with the non-human. He later “saw her bending
over pythons coiled upon the sand” and gazing at “slim green snakes stabbing the wall again
and again with their fl ickering cleft tongues” (387-88). Th e snake as clichéd image of disruptive
female eroticism hardly requires comment. Katharine becomes increasingly under
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