Time to Cultivate Your Inner Seal: Eric Linklater’s “Sealskin Trousers” as Posthumanist Guide to Mutability
In this paper I argue that “Sealskin Trousers” by Eric Linklater can be read as a posthumanist model text, in which, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, “the process of becoming animal expresses the materialist and vitalist force of life, zöé as the generative power that flows across all species” (2009, 529).
“Sealskin Trousers,” published in 1947, is a version of the selkie myth, with specific references to Francis James Child’s ballad 113, “The Great Silkie from Sule Skerry.” Selkies are shape shifters, often female seals who become women when they go ashore and lay off their sealskins, but there are also male selkies, like the one in the Child ballad and this story. In “Sealskin Trousers,” however, we are treated not only to a modern iteration of the selkie ballad, and the folkloristic motif of the animal bridegroom (Carol G. Silver). This story also offers an (allegedly) scientific explanation of and guide to the transformation that takes place when the sealman’s human girlfriend follows him into the sea, leaving her dress and her human fiancée behind. Since the story is narrated by the distraught fiancée, there are certainly strands of ambiguity and unreliability, but the combination of social criticism, evolutionary biology, materialist theory and animal myth creates a posthumanist affirmation of the possibilities of change, and of “attachment and connection to a shared world” (Braidotti, 530).
Works cited
Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 526–532.
Child, Francis James. “113: The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry.” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 1882. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Child%27s_Ballads/113
Silver, Carole G. “Animal Brides and Grooms.” Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature, 1st ed., Routledge, 2005, pp. 93–100.
Linklater, Eric. “Sealskin Trousers.” Sealskin Trousers and Other Stories, Rupert Hart Davies,1947, pp. 107-127.
2022.
THe ASLE-UKI Biannual conference, Northumbria, England, 6-8 September, 2022