In 1888, English actress Ellen Terry appeared as Lady Macbeth in a green gown heavily trimmed with beetles’ wings. John Singer Sargent famously painted Terry in the gown as a serpentine embodiment of female power. Adopting animal elements in dress can be read as confirming the power and pervasiveness of colonialism: applying costly flora and fauna to fashionable Western dress provides emphatic visual affirmation of how indigenous natural resources were used to support Western European habits of conspicuous display and consumption. In addition, when choice pieces of fauna are applied to the female body as part of dress, that body becomes analogized with the animal world. This essay explores the tensions seen in Ellen Terry’s body in the beetle’s wing dress, using Bill Brown’s “thing theory” to position the stage costume as what Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy have called a “performing thing,” which asserts its own communicative agency in a destabilization of the subject/object relationship. Terry attempted to present Lady Macbeth as a proper Victorian wife. Her beetle wing gown, however, communicated a queen consumed by her animal nature, in accordance with Victorian anxieties about shifting gender roles. Terry’s costume is part of the broader dynamic of reading women’s bodies as animal in a transference of attributes from animal to woman that positions women’s bodies as a colonized site just as the animals they wear are subjugated to colonial rule.