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

She was fascinated by all animals but her affection was odd and remote. She wanted to know what her dog was feeling.... Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by someone who would love to be a dog.... Her dog was the embodiment of her own spirit, not the pet of an owner. (Bell 410)

This empathetic identification and curiosity, undistorted by any narcissistic greed for adulation, informs Woolf's text.

The narrative begins with a disquisition on the origins of English spaniels, emphasizing that a cocker spaniel's very existence as such depends on the vagaries of human exploitation. This is highly pertinent to the position of purebred dogs in Victorian England, where the definition and segregation of canine breeds was bound up in the attempts of the rising middle class to define itself by maintaining strict distinctions of identity (Thurston 97-120). Woolf pointedly observes that human lineages are not so indisputably, physically apparent as those of dogs (16).

Woolf tries to imagine what the sensual impressions of Flush's puppyhood would have been. Walking with Miss Mitford in the countryside, "a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils"; amidst this olfactory abundance he is overcome by "a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any--a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories--the smell of hare, the smell of fox" (20). At this point Woolf's poetic recreation of a puppy's consciousness leads her to the same insight that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas arrived at after thousands of hours of observation--that human companions are not the center of a dog's psyche. In the excitement of his specifically canine experience of smell, Flush "forgot his mistress; he forgot all humankind" (20).

Woolf does not entirely omit Flush's sexuality from her catalogue of his early experience, though she couches it in elaborate metaphor and euphemism: "Love blazed her torch in his eyes; he heard the hunting horn of Venus" (21). It is true that this approach lacks the frankness of the later dog biographer J. R. Ackerley, who describes the sexual experience of the Alsatian bitch Tulip more directly: "She panted, they panted. Some were so exhausted by their efforts that they vomited, bringing up breakfast or lunch" (158). Woolf's approach is consistent with her reticence in writing about human physicality. Yet, within the confines of Victorian rhetoric, her language does succeed in conveying something about an imperative canine desire.

In addition to the frontispiece photograph purporting to show the book's subject, the first edition is illustrated with line drawings by Vanessa Bell emphasizing a canine perspective, along with contemporaneous portraits of Mrs. Browning and Miss Mitford (thus identified in the captions). When Miss Mitford presents Flush to her invalid friend Miss Barrett, his transfer of allegiance is presented with a less inhibited poetic empathy than his canine relationships. Suddenly aware that Miss Mitford has truly departed, leaving him in the strange surroundings of Wimpole Street, "the irrevocableness and implacability of fate so smote him, that he lifted up his head and howled aloud" (30). Accepting the condolences of Miss Barrett, Flush exchanges a "surprised" gaze with her: