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Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith
In 1933 Virginia Woolf published Flush: A Biography, an experiment in genre that purports to tell the life story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's canine companion. It was Woolf's most popular book during her lifetime, but it has subsequently become her most neglected. Scholarly opinion has generally dismissed Flush as a trivial potboiler, unworthy of its author's position as a major modernist innovator. The present essay will attempt to reassess that judgment by viewing the text in relation to recent developments in the study of animal behavior and nonhuman subjectivity, by assessing the reasons for critical hostility toward the book, and by analyzing Woolf's own conflicted views on her project.
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As a dog story, Flush belongs to a subgenre of the literary animal story. The first successful English novel with an animal protagonist is Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877). Sewell deploys the conventions of Victorian first-person narrative in writing an equine "autobiography." Her protagonist's experiences could only have befallen a horse, but his voice and emotions are recognizably human. This divided, anthropomorphic narrative subjectivity facilitates the author's project of inspiring sympathy for the plight of abused horses. In the early twentieth century, the many animal stories of Colette display a similar moral purpose. Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) exercise a more "masculine" emotional detachment, developing Nietzschean allegories of heroic atavism. London's superdogs shed the "feminizing" influence of civilization, returning to an unspoiled feral state.
Among Woolf's high modernist contemporaries, Mikhail Bulgakov puts a canine character to satiric service in Heart of a Dog (1925). Bulgakov takes the pretext of the fantastic dog story as a vehicle for commentary on distinctly human political issues. This becomes the favored form for dog stories by postmodernists such as Harlan Ellison. Flush, in contrast to other classics of the animal story genre, is neither specifically humane nor specifically humanistic in its agenda. Rather, it represents Woolf's attempt to exercise modernist literary techniques in the mapping of a canine subjectivity, as an experiment worth performing for its own sake.
Woolf's book has numerous direct or indirect successors. Eric Knight's widely imitated adventure story Lassie Come-Home, appearing seven years after Flush, tries to evoke the particularities of canine experience for a specifically young adult audience. The dog memoir has formed a distinct branch within the canine subgenre of the literary animal story. Later writers as various as John Steinbeck (Travels with Charlie),Jacqueline Susann (Every Night, Josephine!), and Paul Auster (Timbuktu have described their own canine relationships. But perhaps only My Dog Tulip, by Woolf's Bloomsbury acquaintance J. R. Ackerley, matches Flush in seriousness of methodology and elegance of execution.
A fresh critical response to Flush must first take account of the explicit nature of Woolf's project: to write the biography of a dog. To date, attempts to explicate this text have approached it as a feminist allegory of the subjugation of women in Victorian England. (1) This has had the unfortunate effect of implying that Flush may be accepted as a serious object of study only to the extent that it may be represented as being not really about a dog. The anthropocentric bias that underlies these readings has its discursive foundation in the Enlightenment.
Descartes formulated modern anthropocentrism in his distinction between humans, who by virtue of reason are aware of their experience, and nonhuman animals, which he claims are effectively machines lacking in significant self-awareness. Descartes's followers took this view to its logical conclusion, insisting that nonhuman animals are incapable of even such basic experiences as physical pleasure or pain. That position became the standard justification for vivisection and other abusive practices. As the zoologist James Serpell points out in his deconstruction of this discourse, Descartes's theory provided a rationalization for practices previously justified on theological grounds:
The early Christian (and Aristotelian) view that animals were created purely for the benefit of mankind, and the Cartesian idea that they were incapable of suffering, were mutually compatible variations on the same theme. Both provided human beings with a license to kill; a permit to use or abuse other life-forms with total impunity. (170)
Charles Darwin, in one of his most extraordinary interventions against the established order, challenged the Cartesian divide by pointedly studying human and animal consciousness as points in a continuum of experience (Masson 162-63). But Darwin's attempt to counter the claims of anthropocentrism in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) met with even greater resistance than his theory of natural selection. Resistance to the investigation of animal emotion and consciousness, as opposed to mechanistic animal behavior, persists in science to this day; most of the modern investigation of animal consciousness has occurred in the relatively marginalized and underfinanced work of wildlife field observers.
