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Revealing Nature
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16384 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1989 |
3,034 Words |
| Author
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Catherine Maclay
Catherline Maclay is a writer and editor who lives in
Berkeley, California. |
THROUGH OTHER EYES
Animal Stories by Women
Irene Zahava, ed.
Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1988
190pp., $8.95 paper
In Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's short novel La Chatte, written in 1933, a young man who has just married prefers sleeping on the divan with his cat to sleeping in bed with his wife. She finally grows so jealous that she pushes her rival off the balcony of their ninth-floor apartment. The cat is saved by an awning that breaks the fall, but the young husband leaves his wife, preferring to be alone with Saha, his cat.
La Chatte is not included in this unusual anthology of animal stories by women; if it had been, it would serve as an odd counterpoint to stories that demonstrate an almost mystical bond between women and animals, a bond that decidedly excludes men. The stores collected in Through Other Eyes: Animal Stories by Women are, with few exceptions, by contemporary writers, composed in a social and political climate far different from that of Colette. What these authors share with the French author, however, is a consuming interest in the relationships between humans and animals, and in the way that humans and animals communicate with one another.
One of the strangest and most haunting examinations of the bond between a female human and a female animal in this collection occurs in "One Whale, Singing," a dreamy, poetic story by Keri Hulme, whose 1985 novel, The Bone People, won her critical acclaim. The story's two main characters are
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