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Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith
There is an obvious economic imperative to maintain the Cartesian divide. Serpell describes the ethical bind that arises from the arbitrary distinction between animals raised to be slaughtered and tormented, by commerce and by science, and animals raised to be pampered and valued in themselves as pets (3-20). The intimate awareness of non-human emotion that we experience in living with dogs or cats throws into question our exploitation of other species (and less fortunate members of these same species) that have demonstrably comparable levels of intelligence. Rather than acknowledge the ethical bind involved in our treatment of agricultural, sport, and laboratory animals, we in our culture save face by denigrating our own observation and experience with companion animals. We characterize pet keeping as a decadent manifestation of late capitalism and misspent postindustrial resources-a stereotype that falls apart if one takes account of the widespread and ardent practice of pet keeping among the native peoples of the Americas and the Pacific from prehistoric times to the present (Serpell 60-72).
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Our continued reliance on the Cartesian divide in maintaining our scientific and commercial arrangements has even been discredited by its own methods. In the 1970s, a study at the Johns Hopkins Medical School found that dogs experienced measurably reduced levels of stress when gently caressed by lab workers while being subjected to intense electric shocks (Serpell 120-23). That is, the Johns Hopkins researchers objectively established the ethically insupportable nature of their own experiment: they proved that the dogs in question experienced emotional affect in the presence of human beings who were colluding in their torture. However, this study has proved no more influential than Darwin's. Instead, the scientific community has elected not to know what it knows, effectively returning the Cartesian divide to its origins in culturally mandated superstition. As the psychologist Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson notes, animal emotion "is regarded as too dangerous to be part of the scientific colloquy--such a minefield o f subjectivity that no investigation of it should take place" (17).
This discourse has been crucial to the reception of Flush, in that the bad faith by which the Cartesian divide is maintained depends on the equation of anthropomorphism with sentimentality: to view nonhuman animal consciousness in human terms is, ipso facto, to sentimentalize it. This categorically precludes any view of animal consciousness whatever, since human terms are the only ones we possess. Literature, categorized as one of the "soft" disciplines, remains in a position subservient to the "hard" scientific disciplines of the modern university. Flush must be placed in the context of this discourse, which was already in place in Woolf's time. It was with good reason that she was sensitive to ridicule by critics who wrote from the position of "masculine" detachment, with its paranoid exclusion of "feminine" intuitive observation. Woolf was particularly fearful of being dismissed as "sentimental."
