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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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Flush's relations with other dogs are less complicated than his human entanglements, being untroubled by individual attachment. Flush does not bond with another dog, as he would if he were allowed to roam free. Woolf attempts to understand how Flush would make sense of the varieties of dogs he encounters during his guided walks in Wimpole Street: "Flush knew before the summer had passed that there is no equality among dogs" (40). He is aware of himself as a member of the elite, signaled by the treatment he receives from human beings, as well as by the hierarchical behavior patterns of other dogs.

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Woolf vividly represents an obscure corner of Victorian history--the phenomenon of dognapping for ransom. This practice was facilitated by the proximity of privileged areas such as Wimpole Street to degraded slums such as Whitechapel. The historical Flush was stolen three times; Woolf acknowledges in an endnote that she compresses these incidents into one (175). Going against her father's wishes in paying Flush's ransom, Miss Barrett personally delivers the sum to the dognappers' headquarters in Whitechapel to ensure that it will arrive before Flush is killed. By putting her own life in jeopardy to save the life of her dog--one whom she has sometimes treated indifferently, not least in the incident that led to his dognapping--Miss Barrett discovers the fortitude that will later enable her to elope with Browning and find integrity as a human being.

For Flush, the effects of the dognapping are precisely those that scientifically or commercially exploited animals suffer under abusive conditions. Kept in a state of tortuous neglect for five days in a filthy cellar, Flush begins to lose his mind: "The racket, the hunger and the thirst, the reeking smells of the place ... were fast obliterating any clear image, any single desire" (96). As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson argues, this is what Pavlov unintentionally demonstrated to be the result of such treatment in his experiments on dogs (183). Woolf gives Elizabeth Barrett's report of her reunion with Flush, following her intrepid efforts to free him: "He was not so enthusiastic about seeing me as I expected" (108). Delving into Flush's consciousness, Woolf supplies the reason for this unstereotypical behavior: "There was only one thing he wanted--clean water." The conventional human expectation of creatures who are created for our pleasure is unmasked here as a failure of human empathy.

In his last years, in Italy, Flush is allowed for the first time to live as a free-range dog. His relations with Mrs. Browning are "far less emotional now than in the old days," when they were cloistered together (125). Flush "embraces" other dogs, experiencing "what men can never know--love pure, love simple, love entire" (127). This freedom permits him to accept even the birth of the Brownings' son without being painfully afflicted with jealousy.

At the end of the narrative, in a passage that Woolf worried over and rewrote, Flush has a dream before he dies, recalling the incidents of his life. Woolf humbly describes his dream in the form of postulations. She suggests that a racial memory might emerge at the last: "Was he coursing up a hot hill-side with dark men shouting 'Span! Span!' as the rabbits darted from the brush?" (167). After happy memories of his puppyhood among the Mitfords, he is startled awake by a memory of intense terror among the dognappers of Whitechapel. (Again, Woolf phrases these descriptions as hypotheses only.) Flush jumps up, runs frantically, and dies. Notably absent from the dream are any memories of Flush's life with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, affirming that this book has not been simply a secondary biography of the poet. Must this scene be acknowledged as a sentimental conclusion? Dreams, of all psychological phenomena, imply not only a consciousness but a subconscious. Yet one point on which animal researchers agree is th at dogs dream; only the content of their dreams remains unknowable (Masson 114-16). Woolf's imagining of Flush's dream, written from the assumption that canine dreams like human ones emerge from a mixture of memory, anxiety, and desire, is as valid as any.

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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2002 by Craig Smith

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