The Spanish Horse and the Thunder Drum: Taxidermied Subjects and Animal-Made-Objects in the Early Nineteenth Century

Monica Mattfeld

doi:10.52537/humanimalia.15999

Author(s)

Monica Mattfeld University of Northern British Columbia Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15999

Abstract

Life for many horses at the turn of the nineteenth century was short and subject to objectification before and after death. However, the life and afterlife of one horse at Astley’s Amphitheatre, the Spanish Horse, resisted the usual loss of identity animal death often brings. In this article I first provide a biography of the Spanish Horse and then question his afterlife as a theatrical thunder drum. In doing so, I think about the nature of taxidermy, memorial, and the usual binary of subject/object inherent within fragmented animal bodies. As part of this process, I explore the thunder drum/Spanish Horse with the aid of ecofeminism, philosophies of taxidermy, and material feminist thought, and I argue that the afterlife of the Spanish Horse as a thunder drum was one of loving remembrance that did not erase the animal self within the material object. Instead, I suggest, the preservation of the Spanish Horse’s skin after death enabled his ongoing participation and agential voice within the Amphitheatre, while elevating him above other animals therein.

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Author Biography

Monica Mattfeld, University of Northern British Columbia

Monica Mattfeld is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern British Columbia, where she specializes in animal studies and the literature and history of eighteenth-century England. She has published on the interplay between animal and human disability, early modern horsemanship practices, theatrical animals, the early circus, and performances of human and animal gender. She is the author of Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (2017), and co-editor of multiple animal-studies publications. Her forthcoming second monograph is entitled Equines in Eighteenth-Century Thought: Intersectional Discriminations and the Imperfect Horse (Palgrave Macmillan). It focuses on discourses of equine disability, animal activism, and systems of discrimination and exploitation over the long eighteenth century.