To retain an active relationship with nature that did not tap into nostalgic remorse was Elizabeth Bishop’s gift, and something that made her stand out among her contemporaries. In her poetry, the natural world is not ‘out there’ but around us, humans. Yet, she escapes anthropocentric descriptions that focalise the human as the centre of this joint world. In referring to herself as “a minor female Wordsworth” (Bishop 1994 222), she drew from a tradition that other modern writers of the twentieth century were eager to dismiss. However, her uniqueness lay in the adjectives she used to describe herself. She was “minor” in the way that she did not make herself, her narrators or the spectators of her poetry any bigger than the animals they came in contact with. She was a “female” bringing a new reading of nature that had previously been ‘owned’ and written about by male writers— Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to name just a few. I argue not only in favour of Bishop’s awareness of this limitation of humankind in understanding beyond ourselves, but also in utilising this shortcoming to reflect our projection of social norms onto animals as a way to overcome the aforementioned issue. In looking at a selection of Bishop’s poems, namely “Roosters”, “At the Fishhouses”, “The Riverman”, “The Moose” and “Pink Dog”, this essay investigates the ‘critical anthropomorphism’ employed, and its role in contesting gender norms that prefigure in human society through its extension into the animal world.

The genders of animals in the selected poems are explicitly pronounced by the narrator in a manner that simultaneously anthropomorphises them and also questions the facticity of these claims. Surprisingly, meagre scholarship is available on animals being gendered, with most research collapsing the boundaries between sex and gender. In the wake of what gender studies has established, particularly Judith Butler’s landmark contributions, I visit the ‘constructed-ness’ of gender in humans to its anthropomorphised corollary in animals. In doing so, what emerges is an ecocritical perspective, that Bishop is seen to share, which enumerates all the ways in which anthropocentric efforts to bind animals to their gender roles is futile precisely because they are not human. Thus, even in anthropomorphising them, Bishop accentuates their animality (qualities that make them animals). In so doing, Bishop’s gendering and un-gendering of animals leads to what I propose to be “gender anthropomorphism” as it tethers human social identity construction to animal behaviour (which is inevitable), but also reveals the futility of doing so, as animals continue to evade such classifications.

With Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection, the myth of human beings’ descent from God was debunked and our affiliation to/as animals was strengthened. While this brought species closer, it also nudged anthropomorphism in a direction that sparked concepts like ethology and critical anthropomorphism which carefully evaluated the rationale with which we approach ‘the others.’ This essay is an effort in this direction, which recognises the impossibility of contending the ‘animal other’ through any method other than relationality. Bishop’s goal is complicit with this recognition, through the animals that equally participate in writing themselves onto the page.

One of the eponymous animals in her poem “Roosters” has in ‘his’ “fighting blood” (Bishop 1991 37) enough rage to tackle another rooster and ‘his’ hens (a rooster/cockerel is a biologically male chicken and a hen is of the female sex). He is “raging” (37), that is depicting traits of anger, to the narrator who is woken up by their early morning “screaming” (36). This fight scene reminds the narrator of “war” which is “unwanted” (36), an allusion to the Second World War which had ended a year before her collection “North & South” came out in 1946 (which includes this poem). The poem is interspersed with war terminology; the roosters’ fight is regarded as a display of American “heroism” (37) of the kind that civilian soldiers showed even in a war that they felt was “unwanted.” There are references to mythology when Bishop invokes the ancient Greek practice of roosters being “elected to shoot at on a post” as sacrifice for being “combative” (36) due to their perceived devilry, and Christian scripture in which roosters take part in the judgement of “Prince of the Apostles” (38). Both references signify a mental capacity for thought and cognitive assessment. Despite the narrator’s own projections of these past human beliefs, the roosters are questioned “what are you projecting?” (36), allowing for a reassessment of these historical conceptions and a refusal to impose them onto the species.

This forms the basis on which Bishop’s stance on anthropomorphism is playing out. Just as the narrator of the poem humanises the rooster but also sees the animal questioning this humanisation (by projecting back), ‘critical anthropomorphism’ maintains this balance between ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Priscilla Paton informs that behaviouristic “hard sciences” contest anthropomorphism for the “assumed falsity, arrogance or sentimentality of the imposition of the human on the non-human” (Paton 210). Bishop’s anthropomorphism challenges this ‘imposition’ by the human by making the rooster in her poem project back onto ‘us.’ The rooster resists complete immersion into human history by challenging the narrator’s analysis of the ‘traits’ possessed by them, and in doing so, lends a more nuanced reading of animal character.

In this back-and-forth is the subtext that unsettles the impositions; the narrator’s questioning of the rooster’s projections signals to their own subterranean unsettlement at these allusions and reveals the unease, and slight aggression with which they turn back to question the rooster, upon knowing that these carefully worded histories do not add to the character of the animal. There is a frustration there that is a result of Bishop’s self-reflexivity and willingness to challenge her own prose, in order to foreground this tension between externality that the animal is attributed by us, and internality that the human has no access to.

This interplay of relationality between the human and non-human interested Bishop. Anne Stevenson, who penned down her epistolary correspondences with the poet, reveals that the “convention” of personification of animals made Bishop uneasy for the way that it “took so little notice of the nature of animals themselves” (Stevenson 74) and erased their interiority. This insight into Bishop’s awareness of the animal self adds to the argument surrounding her unease of imposing a template of humanly-perceived animal identity; it shows that she, like the animals in her poems, resisted the mould that was created for them to readily fit into. These animals (analyzed in further detail in subsequent paragraphs) resist conforming to the mapped out, archetypal ‘characters’ that feature in animal literature. Bishop also positions herself as a poet in a contested space by writing/voicing this recourse of projecting onto animals our own conceptions of them. She allows space on the page for a rebuttal to this by either having the animals fight back to reclaim their identity, or through their (animals’) actions that contradict what humans expect of them. As exemplified in “Roosters”, she resists the danger of a one-sided narrative that takes away the agency of the non-human, by letting the animals “‘show their relations’ to her on their own terms, not hers” (Stevenson 74).

This tangential pull, on both sides towards the ‘other’, is seen in “At the Fishhouses” when the seal dips back and forth between the world of the narrator and “his” natural abode in the water. Bishop accentuates the anomaly in this process by calling the water “dark deep” (impermeable) but also “clear” (transparent) (Bishop 1991 65). If earlier, “the heavy surface of the sea […] is opaque” (64), the seal being “curious about me” (37) open up a whole new world for humans. Not only does this refer to the limitation of humankind, dismissing an anthropocentric state of mind by revealing our confinement to particular spaces of the earth, it also places the power with the animal which gets to decide how much of itself it wants humans to see (I am using ‘it’ as a neutral pronoun in referring to animals in a bid to resist gendering). “[A]nthropomorphism by omission [which was seen by early scholars in the field as] the failure to consider that other animals have a different world than ours” (Burghardt 137) restricted the scope of animal studies, but Bishop does not omit these differences, rather foregrounds them through an anthropomorphic technique which is critical of itself.

That Bishop does anthropomorphise is clear by now in the way that she has written her animals, since as Michael Malay argues, she “cannot escape the domestication of language” and recognises that “our understanding of animal others cannot extend beyond the circumference of our thought” (Malay 67). What is new is the way that she handles this limitation; there is respect for what we as humans cannot know, and maybe even should not know. This is why the “knowledge” of the water in “At the Fishhouses” will “burn your tongue” (Bishop 1991 66) because our language is not equipped to comprehend it, and yet Bishop burns her figurative tongue because it is the only way to write/speak of the other.

In delineating the struggle between the human and non-human which ecocritical studies critics have seen as ‘culture’ versus ‘nature’ respectively, a line is drawn. This line which Bishop sees as encapsulating the human limitation to cross, has previously been blurred in narratives by “the absence of humans” (Ganetz 206; emphasis in original) as, Hillevi Ganetz argues, it allows for a “pure”, authentic depiction of nature. She explains that “people are not ‘nature’; they are ‘culture’ in too great a degree, and threaten to destroy” (206) the illusion of possessing “knowledge”. But Bishop, by describing nature in ‘painful’ detail in “At the Fishhouses”, wishes to un-blur this line. In her critical anthropomorphism then, this division is not a ‘line’ with the potential to be crossed, but a barrier that cannot be broken. If for Ganetz, this line is anthropomorphism, then Bishop perceives it as a necessary evil. If the human does enter the natural realm, “Bishop subsumes the human to a nature that remains powerfully alien, that opposes transformation into culture” (Rosenbaum 67). In her poems, the omnipotence of human knowledge is challenged by having human beings and animals face each other to juxtapose the vast unknown of the animal world with the small scope of information that ‘we’ possess. The parallelism of the encounters, with the narrator of “At the Fishhouses” residing on land, and the seal peeking out of the ocean, also conveys the multi-dimensionality of life. Ganetz’s ‘line’ is highlighted in the poem by making it geographical and mapped out; the physicality of the embankment which separates land from water serves as a metaphor for this division of spheres. Through this concretisation, Bishop’s awareness of human disability to cross the embankment and meet the seal is made apparent. The animal holds the power and is the possessor of knowledge and ability. The seal can not only peek out of the water to meet the human’s gaze but also come onto the beach and inhabit a ‘human space’ that is land surface, but the human is incapable of doing the same by residing in the ocean. The line is a barrier only for us insofar as we construct it to preserve ourselves. It can easily be crossed by animals if they so desire. Rosenbaum’s argument about nature’s resistance to “transformation into culture” (Rosenbaum 67) resounds with the addendum that nature also keeps culture (humans) out of their system of life. In other words, animals (as representatives of ‘nature’) may resist crossing over to human side of the line out of volition, but can if they want, but humans are not capable of dipping into the ocean, unless invited by nature.

The narrator in “At the Fishhouses” finds the seal to be “like me” (Bishop 1991 65) even as they register their inability to dip into ‘nature’ as easily as the seal can. However, the narrator in “The Riverman” who encounters a Dolphin, “a man like myself” (Bishop 1991 105) that “slid into the water” (105), is able to follow ‘him’ as “a door in the water opened inward” (105) for him. At first, this appears to contradict the anthropomorphic barrier that Bishop is erecting, but in the course of the poem, despite the “knowledge” that the man gains from Luandinha, the river “serpent”, he remains at the mercy of ‘nature’. He learns only as much as the river teaches him in order to become a sacaca (witch doctor). This knowledge is imparted “in a language I didn’t know”, in a language “I can’t speak […] yet” (106). The only way to understand what Luandinha says to him is to invariably become the non-human, which is why he understands her “like a dog” (106). Here again, the power is placed in nature so as to avoid omission of its interiority. The anthropomorphic line between the two is a barrier when being represented by humans but becomes a ‘door’ if nature so chooses, just as the “Dolphin singled me [river-man] out; Luandinha seconded it.” (109)

The insurmountable conception by humans of the ‘animal other’ in only relational terms to our ‘self’ ties in with Paul Shepard’s “taxonomy of selfhood” (Shepard 99) that he sees humans as projecting onto animals. Going back to the definition of anthropomorphism itself in which human traits are ascribed to non-human entities, this process reflects our inevitability to detach our ‘cultural’ self to perceive nature for what it is: “each kind of animal gives concrete representation to an ephemeral and intangible element of the human self” (Shepard 83). Thus, even in the attempts to understand through the apparatus available to us, we end up reflecting our own categorical conceptions that form identity and character. Our attribution of traits to animals is governed by our societal, cultural viewpoints of them, not by any innate display on their part. The “raging heroism” of the rooster (Bishop 1991 37), the seal’s “interest in music” (65), and the manliness of the Dolphin (105) are projections of the human mind onto them, which they counteractively disavow. The “knowledge” thus remains “historical” in its restriction to human conceptual past.

If we understand ourselves through a systemic projection onto our animal others, then which aspects of our identity as humans get transferred so as to “humanise” them? Priscilla Paton argues that ‘nomenclature which identifies us in our social sphere is similarly ascribed to animals, as part of this “taxonomy of selfhood” as “names also situate individuals in hegemonic structures, social contracts, and intimate groups” (Paton 204). When an animal is named, it enters a community, and ironically becomes a ‘social animal’. I propose a taxonomy of gender that achieves a similar purpose in Bishop’s poetry of situating animals in a structure of power that comes to dictate their ‘identity’. Just as “naming suggests power over what is named” (Paton 204), gender functions as the mould in which humans try and fit animals in an anthropomorphic effort to stabilise their identity. Gender here is understood as a socially constructed metric that conventionally comes with mandated actions or requisites to be followed. These are gender roles which are categorised into the masculine and feminine archetypes in humans (often creating stereotypes), correspondingly imposed on animals as a way to hold ‘power’ over them, even as we try to better gauge them.

The rooster’s heroism in “Roosters,” thus, comes to be predetermined not only through its “traditional” past (Bishop 1991 35) but also the role that having the “crown of red” on ‘his’ head demands. (37) His many “wives” in the poem are constantly referred to; they “lead hens’ lives / of being courted and despised”. (35) Leading a hen’s life (which a human has no way of knowing) is linked to its life as a ‘wife’ that conveys a domestic temperament in this context of waiting for the husband to take charge. By bringing in the concept of marriage, which is a social contract, Bishop leaves no scope of reading the gendered chickens as doing anything outside the ‘role’ that they are expected to play out. Bishop’s use of language to guide a particular type of reading that invokes this conventional adherence is worth noting. The hens being “courted” creates a Victorian imagery which, as Foucault expresses in The History of Sexuality, was a time of “repressive hypothesis” and stringent conformity to the gender constructs of society (Foucault 15). The polygamous rooster whose biological sex also makes him the masculine husband/hero/ “commander” displays a form of machismo that, according to critic Shadi Neimneh, Bishop must have seen a resurgence of in the post-War days when gender roles were strongly reiterated, with family-life being sold as the ultimate goal. (Neimneh 142) The rooster’s sex and gender are conflated by Bishop to depict husbands taking on the masculine role of providing for their wives and fulfilling their socially gendered functions.

The language used to describe the roosters and hens binds them to prescribed roles that they are expected to follow. The rooster is ‘manly’ for the way that ‘he’ wards off other roosters and returns triumphant to his flock of female chickens whose purpose is to nurture him. Interestingly, only the hens are referred to by Bishop as wives, the rooster is not burdened with the responsibilities of a ‘husband’. This pointed critique of the additional weight of carrying feminine responsibilities is pronounced through the superfluousness with which the actions of these animals is analysed. Visually, the hens may have been clucking around in one spot, but Bishop chooses to superimpose a Victorian setting onto this scenario, making the allusions to courtship excessive and therefore satirical. The arbitrariness of the comparisons further signposts the argument that this essay is making—that is of Bishop’s awareness of our anthropomorphic tendency to view animals. There is a frustration as well as an awe of the animal other: frustration at not having the tools at our disposal with which to access their ‘truth’ but also an awe of their power to evade this anthropocentrism. Bishop writes the animals in anthropolinguistic and gendered terms that are preloaded with categories in which they will be sorted. However, the heightened gender roles imposed on the ‘wives’ and the rooster satirise and highlight the futility of these impositions in capturing the interiority of the animals.

In a powerful commentary of class relations, Bishop’s poem “Pink Dog” elucidates the plight of a “poor bitch” (Bishop 1991 190) for whom gender, sex, and sexuality converge in ‘her’ struggle to keep herself alive. The narrator on noticing the animal’s “hanging teats”, simultaneously pronounces it a “nursing mother”. (190) Maternity which is debated by scholars as being imposed onto women socially and not something that is inherent, becomes linked to its biological sex, thereby tethering sex and gender together. As a “beggar”, the “naked and pink” dog is exposed to the same expectations that patriarchal society expects of girls/women, which is to look pretty. In order to make it in show business (the “Carnival”) or even otherwise, “you simply cannot afford to be an eyesore” (191). This is a critique of the building blocks of human society that treat the female sex/gender (synonymous here) as objects for visual pleasure. The dog’s pinkness is due to its bare skin, but also a colour signifier of gender which is stereotypically associated with femininity. Here again, the repercussions of being feminine are reiterated through this dog’s narrative and it is fraught of the role that it has to act out in order to survive. The narrative then does not belong to the dog at all, but to women who are treated like dogs by a patriarchal mechanism that profits from the impositions that it has put on them. Bishop is conscious of the story that she wishes to tell. The language used is humanistic, the terms used are gendered and sexualised, namely ‘naked’, ‘pink’, ‘nursing’, to connote that the poem wishes to convey the struggles of a highly sexualised gender (constructed by humans and perpetrated by humans).

Linguistic gendering also plays a crucial role in Bishop’s poetry in foregrounding an aspect of anthropomorphism that brings the animal into a community that follows a structure of hegemonic masculinity (propounded by R. W. Connell) in fixing oppressive gender roles for both the recognised binary genders. Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues that Bishop’s poem, “by entering a narrative syntax” of recounting a dog’s plight, also

“enters a historical syntax” of “male poetic history” which is a specific manner of writing women in fiction, and thereby also enters “a traditional gender framework” of heteronormative rules to be followed (Blasing 273). The use of gendered pronouns and terminology that affirms epistemic violence upon the female “exposes how subject/object relationships are gendered within the larger syntax that governs this representational system” (Blasing 273). By gendering through pronouns, Bishop is drawing on the history of linguistic creation which cannot be separated from its socio-cultural context; this context, especially during post-War period was informed by hegemonic masculinity. The shift from an object, that is an animal object, to a gendered subject (rooster, bitch, man-dolphin, she-serpent) is part of an anthropomorphic procedure that is inescapable from regulatory, systemic mores that dictate the ‘nature’ of these subjects, in keeping within the history of writing.

In her other poem “The Moose”, one sees identity being created through language; the recognition of the gender (connoting that gender is therefore also visible/tangible/perceptible) is articulated by Bishop in the guise of an always human narrator when they encounter the animal other. Just as in “Pink Dog”, being female also corresponds to being feminine, that is a “nursing mother”, the moose is described in terms that were excessively used for females during Bishop’s time. At first, “it” approaches the bus (with human spectators) who proceed to call it “homely”, “perfectly harmless”, “safe as houses” (Bishop 1991 173). Right before this, Bishop notices it to be “antlerless” (173), a biological differentiator of the sexes. Since this is succeeded by the aforementioned adjectives, is Bishop spelling out the process by which animals are gendered by us? The “hanging teats” of the dog and “antlerless” moose garner a response from humans that immediately associates its sex with a socially constructed gender as a means to ‘understand’ the other; since the self is gendered, the other needs to be too, if it is to be written about. This is corroborated by the fact that the moose’s shift (linguistically) from an “it” to a “she” occurs not when the passengers notice the lack of antlers, but after they notice ‘human traits’ that make her “homely”, “awful plain”; it is only then that one passenger dramatically proclaims “Look! It’s a she!”. (173)

It is here that Bishop’s ‘critical anthropomorphism’ is most perceptibly seen as challenging the construction of selfhood itself. In revealing the arbitrary method of gendering animals, Bishop calls into question the legitimacy of considering gender as a categorical attribute of identity to signify “likeness and unlikeness with animals” (Paton 200). I see these poems confirming what Judith Butler argues decades later in Undoing Gender and Gender Trouble about the ‘constructed-ness’ of gender as well as sex. She theoretically breaks down the argument of earlier scholars by negating the fixity of biological determination. By saying that “sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity” (Butler 1990 8), she argues that just as gender has been understood through its relation to sex, “sex [is] gender all along” (8). The delayed response of passengers to the moose is the interstitial time that humans take to “regulate” the sexed animal object which is when “the gendered subject emerges” (Butler 2004 41). The animal’s transformation on the page from object to subject is achieved through anthropomorphising them by way of linguistic gendering, attribution of traits and adherence to gender normative roles. However, this process does not automatically make the animal like our ‘self’’; the animal continues to exist as the ‘other’, not through the writer’s imposition but through the animal’s own resistance. When the animal as a ‘gendered subject emerges’, it still evades human conception of what being of that gender entails. What is domesticated in the poems is precisely the language alone, not the animals in question. Critical anthropomorphism permeates through our reading when we recognise that, in remaining the ‘other’ to the narrator’s human ‘self’, the animal’s own self emerges. The animal’s resistance is an assertion of selfhood, of critically forging animality.

If Bishop had figured it out, then how did her anthropomorphism combat it, instead of reaffirming it? As a continuation to my argument earlier in the essay about Bishop vesting power and agency in the animals through a ‘line’ that keeps their knowledge secret, the way that she writes her own impositions of heteronormative gender roles onto them is different. Her hyperbolic gendering of animals by constantly drawing attention to the artifice of language through repetitive pronouns and other stereotypical terminology is symbolic in understanding what Butler has termed “gender performativity”. The last line of “Pink Dog” which urges the dog to “Dress up! Dress up and dance at the Carnival!” (Bishop 1991 191) accentuates the putting on and off of gender by way of performing it. There is no way to know if the dog does dress up, but it does challenge the pinkness (representing demure chastity) by walking around naked which makes the “passersby draw back and stare” (190). Daston and Mitman argue the same in Thinking with Animals that we “cast animals in performances” to make “something abstract, hidden, or conjectural visible and concrete” about our ‘self’ (13). Despite what Ganetz calls a “gender routine” meaning an instinctual upholding of gender roles by humans (Ganetz 198), Bishop recognises that animals are mysterious, “with a life of their own” (Daston 13). Thus, however much humans orchestrate by commanding them to “dress up”, “complete mastery is an illusion” (Daston 13). Even without Bishop’s explicit pronouncement of her construction of their ontological presence through gender, the animals themselves refuse to perform.

Butler states that gender is sustained through repetition: “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” (Butler 1990 33) In “At the Fishhouses”, the narrator’s knowledge is “historical” in the way that it has been reiterated repeatedly over time. The surface of the water is the anthropomorphic ‘line’ between culture and nature; knowledge, in a dialogue between the two realms of selfhood comes to be dialectically “flowing, and flown” (Bishop 1991 66). Just as gender, for Butler, is “in process”, Bishop’s anthropomorphic gendering of animals is “in process”, a part of it is ‘flown’ and constitutes socio-historical construction, and a part of it is ‘flowing’ and symbolises an ongoing rewriting of history by animals. In this regard, Bishop’s critical anthropomorphism includes what I call gender anthropomorphism for the way that it introduces gendered corollaries within the animal domain only to signal its own limitations. Shephard’s taxonomy of selfhood interlinks with a taxonomy of gender, woven into the fabric of language that Bishop uses to anthropomorphise animals. The naming of animal behaviours and actions concretises and restricts the reader’s perception of animals, who develop only as projections of our own genders. However, it is critical of its methodology in the way that Bishop satirises and exaggerates the gender roles that she ascribes onto the dog, the hens, and others. It’s a conscious gendering that is cognizant of its imposition onto animal nature, which remains opaque to us. Bishop’s appraisal of the animality of nature is not a by-product of her gendering of them, but the purpose of doing so, meaning that she genders the animals in her poems in order to emphasise the process of anthropomorphism itself. Gender here is a device that functions not to familiarise readers with animals but to defamiliarize them.

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the writers in American literary circles who paved the way for a new style of writing that dissociated from a New Critical mode with a “rejection of the highly specific gender roles of popular post-war culture” (Neimneh 142). It was more stripped down than Romanticism in its “sexual frankness and questioning of gender” (142). This paper has tried to locate this ‘questioning’ within the paradigm of anthropomorphism in an effort to read her poetry as an ecocritical venture into utilitarian ethics and “undue humanizing” (Midgley 128).

The range of poetry analysed in this essay has been restricted to five, namely “Roosters”, “The Riverman”, “At the Fishhouses”, “The Moose” and “Pink Dog”; however, they trace an evolutionary arc in Bishop’s literary career, demonstrating her resolution to write her animals with animality. Her recourse to anthropomorphism is telling of her awareness as a writer in being limited by certain tools; this is evinced in her other poems as well, such as “The Fish” in which she cannot help but call the fish’s “lip” a lip (Bishop 1991 43) because human language is the only tool at our disposal in contending with the ‘other’. The readings of the five poems conducted here are thus in no way exhaustive, and can be extended to others, in detecting a ‘critical anthropomorphism’ that refurbishes the existing tools to reveal something new.

Gender becomes the primary frame in the essay, due to Bishop’s exaggerated gendering of the animals to achieve a patterned anthropomorphic representation that tells the reader more about human societal relations than that of animals’. Poems like “Roosters” and “Pink Dog” are satires with a motive to use the animals as a reflecting agent to unearth the hegemonic patriarchal structures that govern human society. In a dialectical split between human (culture) and animal (nature), Bishop’s poems not only foreground the artificiality of human culture and its construction, but do so by using the natural instincts of the animal terrain that is beyond the reach of human syntax. In “At the Fishhouses”, “The Riverman” and “The Moose”, it is the seal, dolphin and moose respectively that make appearances that Bishop uses to disclose the process by which we perceive and respond to one’s gender. It illuminates Judith Butler’s theory of performativity by showing the external signs that the narrators/readers/spectators base their assumptions on and depending on which genders are formulated and ascribed. It is the animals that refuse this imposition and counter the anthropomorphic spectacle of performing gender. This revelation of “gender anthropomorphism” unfurls in the poems as a cautionary sign to writers and readers alike as they begin to ‘slide into the water’.