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Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith

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Ethologists--scientists devoted to observing animals in their native habitats--have found a critical form of anthropomorphism to be consistent with their projects, particularly in exploring the cognitive processes of nonhuman species. Donald Griffin, who first theorized the method that is now standard among ethologists, refutes the charge of sentimentality thus:

[I]t is actually no more anthropomorphic, strictly speaking, to postulate mental experiences in another species than to compare its bony structure, nervous system, or antibodies with our The charge carries weight only if one assumes in advance that animals do not have such experiences, and thus the accusation merely reiterates the original assumption.

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Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has observed that laboratory experiments concerned with animal behavior, far from providing reliable models of objective observation, are rendered essentially useless by their invasive and artificial nature (3).The intuitive, anecdotal methods developed by wildlife observers, deploying anthropomorphism within carefully maintained critical boundaries, remain the most reliable means of researching animal behavior as well as animal consciousness.

As described by Quentin Bell, Woolf's methods in writing Flush are related to those of modern ethologists in their guiding premises and in the sensibility they manifest. Flush is usually described, if it is described at all, as the story of Robert Browning's courtship of Elizabeth Barrett as seen through the eyes of Barrett's cocker spaniel. This is accurate as far as it goes, but defining Flush in these terms is not unlike defining the Grasmere Journal as a book about the poet William Wordsworth as seen through the eyes of his sister. Woolf follows the outline of the historical Flush's biography as reconstructed from the Browning letters and other scattered sources. She describes his first months at his suburban home with Mary Russell Mitford, his incarceration in the sick room of Elizabeth Barrett in Wimp ole Street, his more traumatic incarceration among dognappers in the slum of Whitechapel, and his last years with the Brownings at Pisa and Florence. But Woolf does not simply provide a secondary account o f the Brownings' travails and itinerary. As Bell observes, she attempts "to describe Wimpole Street, Whitechapel and Italy from a dog's point of view, to create a canine world of smells, fidelities and lusts" (409).

Bell does not locate the original of Woolf's Flush in a human personality but in Pinka, the golden cocker spaniel presented to Woolf by Vita Sackville-West (409). Indeed, a photograph of Pinka posing as Flush in aVictorian interior serves as the book's frontispiece (Hussey 89). Bell sees Woolf's primary source material as her observation of Pinka. Having spent her life among dogs, Woolf was not conventionally effusive in her behavior with them (Bell 409). She was thus well positioned to make respectful, informed, and unsentimental observations, and to deploy anthropomorphic comparisons and metaphors in a sophisticated way:

Across the widest gulf: nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf's Flush

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith

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