Margaryta Golovchenko

Paola Ferrante, HER BODY AMONG ANIMALS

Toronto: Book*hug, 2023. $23.00

The title of Paola Ferrante’s short story debut, Her Body Among Animals, immediately brings to mind questions of relationality and presence. As an art historian focusing on animal studies, my instinctive first thought was to wonder whether the unnamed “her” was out of place among the animals or if “she” is there because someone decided “she” belongs there—whether, in short, there is a commonality, if not kinship, between “her” and the animals. This thought is complicated further by the fact that the reader comes to realize that they cannot, with any certainty, know whether this “her” is of the same species as the animals, or if the physical proximity is the result of a shared state of being.

This sense of questioning, of contemplating the identity of “her” on an individual and categorical level, pervades Ferrante’s collection. These eleven stories capitalize on this ambiguity across multiple genres and contexts. Several sci-fi stories—like “When Foxes Die Electric,” “Cobwebs,” and “So What If It’s Supposed to Rain”—exist between the same covers as a story like “Pandora,” the imagery of which conjures up footage of the 2018 van attack in downtown Toronto. Rather than the fantastical elements diminishing the urgency of the everyday, the moments that seem most ordinary are the ones that often become most terrifying, to the point where it is sometimes difficult to acknowledge that such things continue to happen. In the case of “Pandora,” the repetition of “don’t ask me” invokes not only the storytelling traditions that gave us myths like Pandora’s box, but also the pressure put on victims to tell their stories, to share their experiences and the “lessons” they drew from them.

Throughout Her Body Among Animals, the reader follows a “her” who is never fixed, even by a name. All but one of the stories—“The Silent Grave of Birds”—centre a female protagonist, whether in first or third person. But even in “The Silent Grave of Birds,” “her” takes the form not just of the characters Ava and Julie, but also of the dead boy who haunts the memories of the speaker and his friend group: “We never called Eli by his name. It was Ellie, and one I told everyone ‘elle’ was French for ‘she,’ it was ‘Girlie.’ ‘Girlie’ was the biggest middle-school insult we thought we could muster for a boy.” Ferrante takes the stereotype of femininity as a set of behaviours and physical features and works with it, only to then push against it with characters who do not fit into this system. Some of the most notable examples are the “albatross” in “The Underside of a Wing” and the “Weeping Woman” in “Everyday Horror Show.” Ferrante suggests that an albatross is an identity—a state of (female) being that contains the dynamic of both the endangered and the one who endangers. The result is an internal struggle, “a girl […] having trouble agreeing on the exact nature of the problem with the albatross.” A similar split occurs with the weeping woman, except Ferrante situates her in a later point of womanhood. Having recently had a daughter, the speaker of “Everyday Horror Show” appears to be experiencing postpartum depression, which is explored through supernatural film imagery and anxiety about the growing environmental disaster. The weeping woman is a culmination, interiority made physical, “and your neighbour sees the weeping woman is real.”

Her Body Among Animals is a feminist book. In some ways such a statement will seem obvious. The collection explores themes like the sense of loss women can experience within their romantic and maternal relationships and how silence can be systemic and nonverbal, extending to the societal pressures placed upon women and the resistance they face should they refuse these expectations. In these stories, women hesitate or outright refuse motherhood while facing pressure from friends and family, which at times causes them to doubt their own decisions. Mental health is wrapped in sexual assault as well as motherhood and domestic abuse, with the latter pair often interconnected, too. At the same time, Ferrante also emphasizes the systemic failures that have cultivated behaviours and perceptions that result in toxic masculinity. In “A Trick of the Dark,” a story that gracefully dances on the line between fantasy and allegory, the female protagonist witnesses her husband turn into a fire-breathing dragon. This leaves her wondering whether what she saw was real while also processing the abuse she has experienced: “I feel like I should know better by now than to see a dragon.” In “Among Chameleons and Other Shades,” a young couple’s plan to elope and board a SpaceX mission to Mars is derailed as Maddy begins to question her desire to stick to the plan. While the event catalyzes her eventual breakup with Adam, it is the insight into his thoughts in the beginning of the story that set the tone for what is to follow: “But he thinks this girl will be different, even if they’ve only known each other for a month. He thinks she wants the same as he does, what his parents have: a nice house, two kids, a tenuous agreement that even if things end up not great between them, it’s far too late to start over and do things any differently.”

Several thematic clusters become apparent the further one gets into Her Body Among Animals, yet the order of the stories prevents these connections from feeling too on-the-nose. Instead, these connections form organically, getting the reader to think back to earlier moments in earlier stories. What might otherwise seem like an act of careful reading takes on a new significance in Ferrante’s collection. The similarities of the experiences of her protagonists in the various stories create a kind of internal society whose hardships and tribulations echo audibly into our own present-day moment. While some of the stories suggest specific geographic locations, the thematic concerns of the book situate it more broadly in North America, showing that women’s safety and agency is a concern that surpasses municipal, provincial, and federal borders. More importantly, Ferrante does not give the reader the satisfaction of closure in her stories, no matter how “resolved” they may feel. This creates a sense of complexity, as answers do not come quickly, or sometimes at all, and as things can go ignored—open wounds left to scar without any gentle care to facilitate the healing process.

Yet in all cases, regardless of the circumstances and degree of reality, Ferrante emphasizes voice, not just of the women experiencing violence and societal pressure, but also of those who witness these situations in their everyday lives. In “The Silent Grave of Birds,” the male protagonist, Gavin, uses a similar strategy as the protagonist of “Everyday Horror Show” in using film as a way of trying to process reality. At one point, Gavin thinks: “Bad things that happened had sound to them, explosions of guts and gore and blood, or at least a creepy soundtrack. Silence meant it wasn’t so bad.” But Her Body Among Animals is a spectrum of those silences somehow amplified into being. Together, they highlight how women are animalistic insofar as, like animals, they are put on display, carefully scrutinized, and expected to perform according to a predetermined script. In this book, “she” longs to be heard rather than simply seen.