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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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There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I--and then each felt: But how different!... Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? (31)

Here Woolf brings into question both the Cartesian divide and the putative simplicity of human-canine relationships. The promise of a Platonic completion of lost halves cannot be realized in this scene, however. This is dramatized in the moment's conclusion:

Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. ... Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.

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Their standoff is resolved, or at least accommodated, by Flush's taking up his new position at Miss Barrett's feet, "where he was to lie forever after." Their long gaze results in a revelation not of identity but of relationship.

Flush's companionship, as Miss Mitford had hoped, draws Miss Barrett out of her deep depression. Woolf's delineation of the gradual but decisive effect that Flush has on Miss Barrett is strikingly similar to accounts of the use of pets in psychotherapeutic treatments of hospital patients, nursing home residents, and prison inmates. (2) The constant companionship of Flush and Miss Barrett is not without its conflicts and limitations: "Sometimes the tie would almost break; there were vast gaps in their understanding" (44). If Flush cannot comprehend Miss Barrett's motivation in spending "hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black stick," the poet is unable to comprehend the dog's "alternate rages of lust and greed" at the scent of a passing bitch or a distant mutton-bone (44). Woolf scrupulously establishes that these gaps in understanding are mutual.

Assuming his position as guardian companion with great intensity; Flush refuses to leave Miss Barrett in her back bedroom, even to take a walk. Woolf squeamishly refrains from explaining how the physical difficulties that would arise from this situation are surmounted. Ackerley devotes an entire chapter to Tulip's "liquids and solids." Woolf's complete censorship of the subject represses one of the most constant concerns in any human-animal relationship--and one that must surely have been a major difficulty in the stuffy, overfurished back bedroom on Wimpole Street. Again, Woolf's cultural inhibitions in writing about the body limit her art.

Flush's jealousy of Robert Browning as he commences his courtship of Miss Barrett is dramatized not as an absurd comedy, but as a painful struggle toward understanding on Flush's part, not unlike Woolf's representations of human children confronted by adult relationships in such novels as To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Robert Browning's indifference in this struggle infuriates Flush. It ends with Flush belatedly consenting to eat cakes that Browning has brought him as a peace offering--an historical incident, which Woolf presents with quotations taken from the Browning letters (Flush 80). The cakes have become putrid during Flush's long stubborn refusal to eat them; swallowing his pride along with the pastry as he acknowledges defeat in the struggle for dominance, Flush contradicts Wittgenstein's theory that dogs cannot feel humiliation. That theory remains controversial in recent studies of canine behavior (Masson 102).

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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith

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