From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf's Flush

Summary

In The Companion species manifesto (2003) donna haraway alludes to a room of one's own (1929) when arguing that “categorically unfixed dogs”—which we might call “mongrels,” “random bred dogs,” “mixed breeds, or just plain dogs”—need “a category of one's own”: “woolf understood what happens when the impure stroll over the lawns of the properly registered” (88). although woolf's most detailed portrayal of a dog, in her fictional biography flush, happens to be of a cocker spaniel, my paper will explore some of the ways in which this text complicates the relationship between the “properly registered” and “unregistered,” and negotiates the contested, sometimes contradictory, spaces shared by humans and animals. over the past fifteen years or so flush has garnered more critical attention than had previously been the case, and some of the earliest, most insightful examples include susan squier's reading of flush as a “stand-in for the woman writer” (124), ruth vanita's claim that flush's relationship with barrett browning works as “a metaphor for the socially created gap between members of the same gender” (254), and pamela caughie's argument that woolf's novel works as “an allegory of canon formation and canonical value” (146). but more recently critics such as craig smith, dan wylie and jeanne dubino (see her paper included in this volume) have turned their focus to questions concerning animality in woolf's text. as smith warns, it is important to move away from allegorical readings which can of ten betray an “anthropocentric bias,” where woolf's fictional biography is “accepted as a serious object of study only to the extent that it may be represented as being not really about a dog” (349). taking the dog in this text seriously as well as the text itself—therefore worrying over, as jane goldman puts it, “the dogginess of the dog” (“when dogs will become men” 180)—i am interested in the ways in which woolf's modernist canine experiment anticipates and intervenes in the wider context of our own contemporary debates on the question of the animal in literary studies, philosophy and posthumanities.