"Another armored animal": modernist prosthesis and Marianne Moore's posthumanist animiles. Issue 3 (2nd September 2018) - Mason, Dancy
ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Marianne Moore and her so-called "animiles"—her poems that depict animal subjects—re-reading established narratives about Moore and her modernism. Although criticism has often aligned Moore with certain rigid facets of humanist thought, as well as with a gendered fastidiousness, I argue that Donna Haraway's concepts of posthumanist "contact zones" and "situated knowledges" are in fact more appropriate to describe her work's complex, even messy relationship to the animal domain. Through the use of figurative, prosthetic language, Moore responds to early-twentieth-century anxieties about war-time prosthesis and the whole body, creating hyperextended animal subjects that refuse both containment and a universal, scientific humanist perspective. As a result, these animals are rendered ultimately unknowable, and poems such as "The Pangolin" and "The Jerboa" take up a feminist attitude and frustrate reductive critical and cultural narratives about the other, the "hale body, " and fussy "Miss Moore" herself. Rather than becoming neat, scientific specimens, Moore's proliferating animiles form entire networks of identities, perspectives, and embodiments. In short, Moore's posthumanism variously affords a constellation of sensitive responses to the conditions of modernity; a sophisticated and yet at times contradictory registration of the other; and a wondrous perspective on life in a diverse world.