In the horror-romance hybrid The Burrow (2022, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour), a soldier hiding in a Welsh hillside falls in love with a feral jenny he calls "Cordelia." The romance is hallucinatory: he hallucinates her speaking in the voice of his dead sister. When the enemy finds him, he chooses to shoot the jenny to prevent her from being eaten, then immediately turns the gun on himself. Critics were split, but Sight & Sound called it “a devastating allegory of self-destructive devotion.” To write a long article on this topic, one must address the elephant—or donkey—in the room: sexuality. In no serious literary tradition is the man-jenny relationship depicted as sexually consummated. The "romance" is always of the agape (selfless, spiritual) or storge (familial) variety, never eros .
A reclusive soil scientist named Aris, divorced and suffering from prosopagnosia (face blindness), inherits a failing olive farm in Crete. The only creature he can reliably identify is a elderly jenny named Heli (short for Helianthus, sunflower). He cannot remember human faces, but he recognizes the exact pattern of Heli’s gray-brown muzzle, the cross-shaped dorsal stripe, and the way her left ear twitches when she lies down.
This bizarre but poignant archetype—the jenny as maternal-sacrificial-romantic partner—influenced later, more famous works. One can trace a direct line from La Jennette to the gentle, world-weary donkey in Robert Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar (1966), though Balthazar is male. Turn the gender, and you get the quieter, nurturing presence of the jenny in The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton, where the donkey who carries Mary to Bethlehem is retroactively feminized in later paintings as the silent companion of Joseph. In contemporary short fiction, the man-jenny relationship has become a subtle vehicle for exploring loneliness, neurodivergence, and eco-romanticism. A prime example is the award-winning 2019 story "Selenium Morning" by Lydia Pasternak (no relation to the poet), published in The Kenyon Review .
Here, the relationship is not romantic but protective . The male figure (Priapus) is shamed; the donkey (female, in some tellings) becomes a guardian of feminine virtue. This inversion sets the stage: unlike the horse, which amplifies male ego, the female donkey often humbles or redirects male desire toward domestic tranquility.
Perhaps that is not romance as Hollywood sells it. But it is romance as life lives it: slow, imperfect, smelling of hay and dust, and full of a bray that sounds, if you are lucky, like your name. Author’s note: This article examines fictional and mythological representations only. Real-world human-animal relationships should always be governed by ethical standards of care, consent (where applicable), and local laws. Romantic storytelling is a metaphor; the genuine bond between a human and a working animal is one of mutual respect, not romantic love as defined by human sexuality.
The most famous near-miss is in the 1995 film The Journey of August King , where a lone traveler (Jason Patric) bonds with a jenny carrying stolen goods. The donkey has no name, but he whispers to her as if to a wife. When he must sell her to pay a debt, the scene is shot like a divorce—slow, rain-soaked, with the donkey refusing to leave his side. The film critic Roger Ebert noted, “The most painful farewell is not between the man and his human love interest, but between the man and the donkey. We realize he has spoken more truth to that animal than to any person.”
