Certainly, none of my customers or coworkers recognized me—not in the way I used to garner recognition, anyway. Whereas I had been “doctor” and “professor” before, on the phone with my customers I was just “Lisa” (no last name) or sometimes “hon,” “doll,” and even “princess.” To my boss, I was one of the “phone sales girls.” Most disturbing of all, I no longer had reason to lay claim to the accomplishments that always had helped me to define myself—my higher degrees and record of publications meant little to meat cutters who needed fifteen cases of bottom round flats and needed them now.
One day, I recognized myself in a way that I did not expect. Coming home from work, I turned on my husband’s computer and started when I saw his screen saver. It featured a photograph of his paternal grandfather. In the picture, Granddad Christian wears a white apron and stands behind a counter in the West Virginia mining store where he worked as a butcher. In fact, both my husband’s grandfathers were butchers. I never knew Granddad Christian, but I remembered bits of his advice that my husband likes to repeat. “A sharp knife is safer than a dull one. Never cut against the grain.” Staring at the picture on the screen, my mind still full of my day’s work (Had I remembered to prebook Eric’s order for Oscar Mayer bacon? Did I hit a wrong key and accidentally send thirty cases of whole fryers to Anita’s Market?), I suddenly felt as though I were living in Rembrandt’s day, when trades like butchering were passed down from one generation to the next. Was it my destiny to, if not butcher meat, work alongside it?
I hoped not. Animal flesh may not have been uncommon in Rembrandt’s day or in my husband’s family, but dealing in flesh disturbed the rhythm of my own life. It derailed my ambitions, diminished my time to write, and threatened to decimate my sense of self. It would be no exaggeration to state that, at the warehouse, I felt as stripped of my outer layer, as bare and raw, as Rembrandt’s giant side of beef.
I sometimes wonder if Rembrandt, too, saw his Slaughtered Ox as a kind of self-portrait. Extrapolating from what we see on this panel, we should not be surprised to learn that he painted the ox during a particularly difficult time in his own life. Increasingly beset by debts that he could not pay, Rembrandt plunged ever deeper into financial difficulties in the early 1650s and finally, in July 1656, applied for voluntary bankruptcy. His house and all his possessions were sold, and he moved into a working-class neighborhood. Never again did he attain the popularity he had experienced earlier in his career.
Did Rembrandt feel stripped down and flayed when he painted the dead ox? Did this image represent a way for him to express the rawness of bankruptcy or the peeling away of his livelihood? Looking at reproductions of his ox in my old art history books, I felt a kind of kinship with the artist. Certainly he found himself in a far direr situation than did I when I went to work at Roundy’s; nevertheless, I could not help but feel an affinity for someone who, like me, turned to meat during a time of personal and financial turmoil.
It probably would have helped Rembrandt’s financial situation if he had sold The Slaughtered Ox. However, a painting of this subject appears in a 1656 inventory of his possessions, suggesting that he may have kept the panel, at least for a while. Rembrandt’s biographers speculate that it may have represented something more than financial flaying to the artist, something that he wanted to hold onto. For my part, I found it difficult to imagine that, beyond providing a regular paycheck, meat could mean anything significant to me.
To a number of modern historians, The Slaughtered Ox carries far more serious connotations than money woes. As they note, the painting falls clearly into the category of imagery called memento mori, or reminder of death (literally, the Latin phrase is rendered in the imperative and can be loosely translated, “remember, you too shall die”). Memento mori paintings, which usually are still lifes, often feature such objects as snuffed candles, clocks, and wilting flowers, all of which signify the passing of time. In a darker vein, skulls, plucked feathers, and rotting fruit could be added to refer to the decay of the flesh. Dutch memento mori still lifes often do not include animal flesh. But meat was a memento mori in the writings of seventeenth-century Reformed theologians in England. For these religious, eating meat served as a reminder of the inevitable corruption of all flesh. The Leicestershire divine John Moore wrote in 1617,
So in our meates (as in a looking glasse) we may learne our own mortalitie: for let us put our hand into the dish, and what doe we take, but the foode of a dead thing, which is either the flesh of beasts, or of birds, or of fishes, with which foode wee so long fill our bodies, until they themselves be meate for wormes? All this we see by experie