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Karalyn Kendall-Morwick

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 60, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp.
506-526 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2014.0047

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506 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush

f
mongrel fiction:

canine bildung and

the feminist critique of

anthropocentrism in

virginia woolf's flush

Karalyn Kendall-Morwick

Anticipating the 1933 publication of Flush, her biography of

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, Virginia Woolf identifies
the gendered stigma that hounds efforts to represent animal worlds:
"Flush will be out on Thursday & I shall be very much depressed, I
think, by the kind of praise. They'll say its 'charming' delicate, lady-
like" (Diary 4: 181). Indeed, a canine biography was a hazardous
undertaking for a female writer perpetually wary of being labeled a
"ladylike prattler" (181). The book re-presents a series of histori-
cal events—most notably, the storied love affair of Victorian poets
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning—from a canine perspective:
we follow Flush through his puppyhood with Mary Russell Mitford,
his early years in the Barrett home on London's aristocratic Wimpole
Street, and his later years with the married Brownings in Italy. As
an account of the life of a dog, Flush unavoidably joins a tradition of
female-authored animal (auto)biographies like Anna Sewell's 1877
Black Beauty and (Margaret) Marshall Saunders's 1893 Beautiful
Joe, which feature liberally anthropomorphized protagonists whose

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 60, number 3, Fall 2014. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
 Kendall-Morwick 507
first-person descriptions of cruel treatment at the hands of humans
were calculated to evoke sympathy for animal suffering.
That Woolf approached her canine biography with trepidation
is evident in her letters, which are peppered with references to her
"little joke" of a book (Letters 5: 140). Her fears about its reception,
moreover, were largely realized. While Flush became an international
bestseller and received a handful of positive reviews (one tellingly
titled "Brown Beauty"), most early critics dismissed it either as a
charming diversion from Woolf's more serious endeavors or as a piece
of second-rate literature beneath its author's eminent position within
a burgeoning modernist canon.1 As Craig Smith notes, a survey of
subsequent scholarship indicates that "Flush may be accepted as a
serious object of study only to the extent that it may be represented
as being not really about a dog" (349). Yet with the rapid expan-
sion of animal studies since the 2002 publication of Smith's essay, a
number of scholars have joined him in reevaluating Flush "as what it
declares itself to be: the biography of a dog" (359). Susan McHugh
underscores Flush's significance for critical accounts of literary mod-
ernism by connecting it to Woolf's famous declaration that "on or
about December 1910, human nature changed" ("Character" 421).
By narrating agency beyond the human, McHugh contends, "this
canine biography intimates why, when human nature changed . . . it
could never do so alone" (15).
The intertwined nature of human and canine character helps to
explain why a writer excruciatingly wary of being dismissed as senti-
mental would venture onto the literary minefield of animal narrative.
Woolf's attempt to "[throw] some light upon [Flush's] character"
(Letters 5: 167), after all, resonates with her challenge to novelists
in "Modern Fiction": "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the
mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or in-
cident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted
that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in
what is commonly thought small" ("Modern" 161). Strictly speaking,
of course, Flush is a biography, written in part as a parody of the new
breed of biography developed by Woolf's friend and Bloomsbury as-
sociate Lytton Strachey. Yet the task of piecing together a full canine
life from fragments of Barrett Browning's poetry and correspondence
forced Woolf to "invent a good deal" (Letters 5: 167), with the result
that Flush can be characterized as what Marjorie Garber calls "specu-
lative biography," a genre that, like the novel, "imputes motives,
intentions, and causes, linking historical events in an arc of character
intentionality that is a fictional construct" (Use 225).
It is my contention that Woolf gives shape to Flush's character by
appropriating conventions of that most humanist of novelistic forms:
508 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
the Bildungsroman. In this respect, she follows in the footsteps of Jack
London, whose canine Bildungsroman The Call of the Wild shares the
Victorian animal autobiography's interest in nonhuman experience but
privileges the development of canine character over the cultivation of
sympathy for animal suffering. The transformation of London's Buck
from a "sated aristocrat" (6) on a California estate to a "dominant
primordial beast" (36) in the Yukon wilderness echoes the prototypical
Bildung plot of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795), in
which the eponymous protagonist abandons a comfortable future as
a bourgeois businessman to pursue a risky but intrinsically rewarding
project of self-cultivation. By learning and ultimately transcending the
Yukon's "law of club and fang" to assume leadership of a wolf pack,
Buck finds personal fulfillment while also contributing to the future
of his species, thus achieving a dialectical harmony between self and
(canine) society (85). However, Buck's Bildung process necessitates
"the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature" (21), culminating
in a violent revolt against human sovereignty—"He had killed man,
the noblest game of all" (85)—that undermines the humanist values
of Bildung.
Flush's Bildung process is, of course, considerably less violent
than Buck's. Whereas "experience gained in the fiercest of schools"
(79) molds Buck into a fearsome predator "overspilling with vigor
and virility" (80), Flush's "education . . . in the back bedroom at
Wimpole Street" has the opposite effect: "We cannot blame him if
his sensibility was cultivated rather to the detriment of his sterner
qualities. Naturally, lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon,
he came to dislike barking and biting; he came to prefer the silence of
the cat to the robustness of the dog; and human sympathy to either"
(Flush 47). By underscoring the softening influence of "the bedroom
school," Woolf sharply differentiates her protagonist from London's
hypermasculine Überhunds even as she shares his investment in
canine character (35). Her representation of canine Bildung under
circumstances that parallel those of the woman writer challenges the
traditional Bildungsroman's depiction of self-realization as an ideal
achieved in the public sphere through prototypically male experience—
a feature that persists in London's antihumanist appropriation of
the form. In what follows, I argue that Woolf thus uses the figure of
the dog not merely to stand in for the woman writer but to expose
how anthropocentrism underwrites the phallocentrism of the literary
canon. Ultimately, I show how Woolf uses the intertwined Bildung
plots of Flush and Elizabeth to develop a model of literary character
that reflects humans' entanglement in the more-than-human contexts
of multispecies life.
 Kendall-Morwick 509
The Writing Woman and the Dancing Dog
Woolf's critique of the privileging of human male experience that
dominates the literary canon in general and the Bildungsroman tradi-
tion in particular becomes apparent in Flush's first visit to Regent's
Park, which closely resembles an experience of the fictional woman
writer who narrates A Room of One's Own. Seeing before him a vast
expanse of "grass, flowers and trees," Flush "dashe[s] forward to run
as he had run in the fields at home," only to find himself checked by
his collar and lead (30). Perplexed, Flush begins to notice differences
between the open fields of his puppyhood and the more regimented
space of the urban park: flowers, rather than dotting the landscape
haphazardly, are confined to "narrow plots" framed by "hard black
paths" on which "Men in shiny top-hats [march] ominously" (30).
Flush quickly comes to regard these features not as isolated phenom-
ena but as interrelated parts of a system that governs canine bodies:
"Where there are flower-beds there are asphalt paths; where there
are flower-beds and asphalt paths, there are men in shiny top-hats;
where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths and men in shiny
top-hats, dogs must be led on chains" (30). Taken together, these
features signify to Flush precisely what "the placard at the gate"
communicates to dog owners (31).
In the opening pages of A Room of One's Own, the narrator
becomes similarly aware of a male-authored social code that restricts
her movements. Sitting on a riverbank in the fictional Oxbridge, she
is contemplating the situation of the woman writer when "the sudden
conglomeration of an idea" prompts her to rush unthinkingly "across
a grass plot" (4). Much like the personified smells that "came tearing
. . . down the wind," "thrilled [Flush's] nostrils," and "ripped across his
brain" during his off-leash outings with Miss Mitford (12), the Room
narrator's idea "darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set
up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still"
(4). And just as Flush plunges spontaneously off the path in Regent's
Park, the narrator, spurred on by her "exciting" idea, unconsciously
"f[inds] [her]self walking with extreme rapidity" across the lawn (5),
where she is immediately "intercept[ed]" by "a man's figure" no less
ominous than the men in top-hats who send Flush shuddering back
to Elizabeth's side (4).
Their respective encounters with the male policing of public
space serve to remind Flush and the Room narrator of their subor-
dinate roles within a culture dominated by the intertwined forces of
anthropocentrism and patriarchy. Like Flush, the narrator quickly
discerns the rule conveyed by the man's look of "horror and indig-
nation": "he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there
was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the
510 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a mo-
ment" (4). And while the narrator attributes her sudden realization
to "Instinct rather than reason"—alluding to the irrationality ascribed
to women and animals alike by speciesist discourses—instinct alone
cannot account for her ready grasp of the culturally constructed rules
and hierarchical relations communicated through her silent exchange
with the Beadle (4). Rather, the similarities between her situation and
Flush's underscore the arbitrariness of social codes in a culture that
mandates the leashing of dogs and women alike, prompting Donna
Haraway to allude to the opening scene of A Room of One's Own in
The Companion Species Manifesto: "Woolf understood what happens
when the impure stroll over the lawns of the properly registered. She
also understood what happens when these marked (and marking)
beings get credentials and an income" (88).
That both woman and dog recognize their subordinate positions
within phallo- and anthropocentric social configurations reflects not
their acceptance of a natural order but their internalization of power
structures that privilege the male (and thus fully human) subject.
Their parallel encounters affirm Cary Wolfe's observation that "the
humanist discourse of species" serves to naturalize the oppression
of "the social other of whatever species—or gender, or race, or class,
or sexual difference" (8). Indeed, Woolf's Room narrator attributes
to a common source the possessive impulse that every "Alf, Bert, or
Chas" experiences in the presence of "a fine woman . . . or even a
dog" or "a piece of land or a man with curly black hair": "Ce chien
est à moi" (54). Flush can therefore be read as joining A Room of
One's Own in challenging how speciesism and phallocentrism work
together, helping to co-constitute patriarchy itself. Woolf signals the
connection between the dog and the woman as writer via the Room
narrator's characterization of her subject—"women and fiction"—as
a "collar" that "bowed my head to the ground" (3), recalling the
"heavy weight" that "jerk[s] at [Flush's] throat" and prevents him
from sprinting across the grass in Regent's Park (30). By emphasiz-
ing the parallel positions of the dog and the woman writer, as Jane
Goldman notes, Woolf appropriates for feminist purposes a tradition
of "misogynist . . . canine troping" (82) extending from Elizabethan
actor Nick Greene's assertion "that a woman acting put him in mind
of a dog dancing" (Room 59) to Samuel Johnson's infamous decla-
ration—cited favorably, the Room narrator observes, as recently as
1928—that "a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder
legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all"
(qtd. in Boswell 244).
In noting the similarities between the Room narrator and Flush,
I am not suggesting that Flush is simply a feminist allegory, as other
 Kendall-Morwick 511
critics have argued. In one of the earliest studies of Flush, Susan
Squier contends that it marks a "[return] to the theme of A Room
of One's Own" (122) in that its protagonist "operates as a stand-in
for the woman writer: for the woman poet who was his historical
mistress . . . and for the woman writer who was his creator" (124).
Certainly, as Squier notes, the first encounter between Flush and
Elizabeth establishes their "uncanny resemblance" (124): "Heavy
curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett's face; large bright
eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on
either side of Flush's face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his
mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them" (Flush 23).
But this likeness is quickly undercut:

As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I—and then

each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face
of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the
warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health
and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould,
could it be that each completed what was dormant in the
other? She might have been—all that; and he—But no.
Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one
being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was
woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely
divided, they gazed at each other. (23)

As this passage suggests, the inevitable disparities of interspecies

life complicate any simple equation of Flush's position with that of
Elizabeth. Woolf's critique of patriarchal structures hinges as much
on the differences between Elizabeth and Flush as it does on their
similarities. As a sexually intact male dog, Flush enjoys a relative
freedom from the moral constraints imposed on human females, and
in this respect "he is the envy of the woman writer," as Bonnie Kime
Scott observes (174). In her 1918 essay "Woman Novelists," Woolf
laments the burden of respectability that weighs disproportionately
on women to the detriment of their writing: "The problem of art is
sufficiently difficult in itself without having to respect the ignorance
of young women's minds or to consider whether the public will think
that the standard of moral purity displayed in your work is such as
they have a right to expect from your sex" (315). Unfettered by
such constraints, Flush engages in promiscuous sex before coming
to live with Elizabeth and also during his later years in Italy, with the
narrator underscoring the species and gender disparities that permit
him to do so with impunity: "Such conduct in a man even, in the
year 1842, would have called for some excuse from a biographer; in
a woman no excuse could have availed . . . . But the moral code of
512 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
dogs, whether better or worse, is certainly different from ours, and
there was nothing in Flush's conduct in this respect that requires a
veil now" (13).
Flush's promiscuity evokes what Patricia Alden calls the "sexual
Bildung" characteristic of narratives of male identity formation like
George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1886), Joyce's A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and D. H. Lawrence's Sons and
Lovers (1913), in which women play a largely instrumental role in
the male protagonists' Bildung processes (99). Flush evinces total
detachment in his sexual relations and so realizes, as Alden notes in
reference to Lawrence's Bildungsheld Paul Morel, "a full experience
of individuality without costly estrangement, guilt, self-betrayal, or
disillusionment" (99): "So variously, so carelessly Flush embraced the
spotted spaniel down the alley, and the brindled dog and the yellow
dog—it did not matter which. To Flush it was all the same" (Flush
119). As a purebred cocker spaniel who departs from the human-
created norms associated with breed coupling, he mirrors the male
Bildungsheld who resists the socially sanctioned union of heterosexual
marriage. Woolf underscores the centrality of sexual liberation to
Flush's Bildung process by drawing an explicit parallel between it
and Elizabeth's own means of development: "It cannot be doubted
that Mrs. Browning and Flush were reaching different conclusions in
their voyages of discovery—she a Grand Duke [a reference to her
engagement with Italian nationalism], he a spotted spaniel" (122–23).
While Flush's sexual awakening might seem merely to parody
that of the human male Bildungsheld, an air of sincere approval
mingles with irony in the idealized descriptions of Flush experienc-
ing "what men can never know—love pure, love simple, love entire;
love that brings no train of care in its wake; that has no shame; no
remorse" (119). While her own mixed feelings about literary obscen-
ity might explain why Flush's sexual exploits are, as Smith notes,
"couch[ed] . . . in elaborate metaphor and euphemism," Woolf's
correspondence conveys her delight at watching her own cocker
spaniel Pinka offend public decency (Smith 353). One letter informs
Clive Bell that Pinka "is violently on heat, yet must be exercised,
and if you consider that there are ten fox terriers in the Square, all
belonging to old, and mostly maiden, ladies, you can forgive the
gusto with which, when I've written this, I must take her out" (Let-
ters 4: 49). And in a letter to Quentin Bell, Woolf laments, "Beauty
shines on two dogs doing what two women must not do. Thats a
fact—Pinker got enmeshed with a fox terrier this very afternoon. Can
you blame them?" (Letters 4: 34). Thus, while Woolf's "approach [in
Flush] lacks the frankness of the later dog biographer J. R. Ackerley"
(Smith 353)—whose graphic depictions of canine intercourse in My
 Kendall-Morwick 513
Dog Tulip (1956) continue to polarize readers—her letters indicate
that she shares Ackerley's interest in the "fact" of canine sexuality.
Pinka served as a source of inspiration for Flush and a sign of
the queer power of canine desire in more ways than one, as she was
a gift from Vita Sackville-West—Woolf's lover and the subject of her
first speculative biography, Orlando (1928). Woolf's correspondence
with Sackville-West is rife with sexually charged canine imagery.
While both women sometimes directly adopt canine personas, more
often they position dogs as what McHugh in her analysis of Ackerley's
oeuvre calls "queer comrades" (133)—animals whose triangulating
presence in human interpersonal configurations implicitly challenges
the expectation of heteronormative coupling. When Sackville-West
took an extended trip to Persia, for example, both women envisioned
Woolf's mongrel dog, Grizzle, as a participant in their longed-for
reunion. Anticipating her lover's return, Woolf writes, "Grizzle and
Virginia will rush down to meet you—they will lick you all over" (Let-
ters 3: 253). Sackville-West replies, "The next thing you know of
me, will be that I walk in and fondle Grizzle" (Sackville-West 105).
Following Grizzle's death, the highbred Pinka assumed the role of
the queer comrade: "Please Vita dear dont forget your humble crea-
tures—Pinker and Virginia . . . . Every morning she jumps on to my
bed and kisses me, and I say thats Vita" (Woolf, Letters 3: 331). The
"joke" of Flush, then, overlaps with that of Woolf's earlier portrait of
her "dearest creature" (3: 228). In a letter urging Sackville-West to
sell the manuscript of Orlando, she promises to "write another book
and give you the MS. instead—about turning into a rusty, clotted,
hairy faithful blue-eyed sheepdog" (5: 41).
But while Woolf discerns in canine desire a queer potential to
subvert the sexual mores that tug like a collar at the throat of the
woman writer, she takes care to avoid depicting canine experience as
an unfettered "orgy of pleasure" (132). Satirizing the "idealization of
animality" that Carrie Rohman finds in the work of some of Woolf's
modernist peers (129)—especially in the antihumanist aesthetics of
Lawrence—the narrator refuses to indulge the fantasy of animal being
as "a Paradise where essences exist in their utmost purity and the
naked soul of things presses on the naked nerve" (Flush 132). Ursula
in Lawrence's Women in Love is representative of this view: "She
loved the horses and cows in the field. Each was single and to itself,
magical. It was not referred away to some detestable social principle"
(244). Woolf's canine protagonist, by contrast, "live[s] in no such
Paradise. The spirit, ranging from star to star, the bird whose furthest
flight over polar snows or tropical forests never brings it within sight
of human houses and their curling wood-smoke, may, for anything
we know, enjoy such immunity, such integrity of bliss. But Flush had
514 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
lain upon human knees and heard men's voices" (132–33). Flush's
evolutionary and personal entanglement with the human species
deconstructs the nature/culture binary implicit in Lawrence's ideal.
Thus, if the comparison between the pet dog and the woman writer
underscores the moral and social constraints imposed on the latter,
it also reveals the inadequacy of traditional literary modes for repre-
senting character as it emerges in what Haraway calls the "contact
zones" of interspecies life (When 4). As I discuss in the next section,
the limits of literary characterization are especially evident in the
Bildungsroman, which, with its emphasis on the individual realization
of human potential, isolates the Bildungsheld from the interspecies
relations that give rise to this potential.

Canine Bildung
Woolf's implicit critique of the intertwined anthropocentrism
and phallocentrism of the Bildungsroman tradition in Flush brings
this once-marginalized text into conversation with her more widely
celebrated feminist novels. In his study of the modernist Bildung-
sroman, Gregory Castle posits Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915) and
Mrs. Dalloway as "radical feminist Bildungsromane" that "reclaim
and reconfigure classical, aesthetic-spiritual Bildung to serve the
developmental needs of women" (215) who aspire to more than
the "quietist piety, moral perfection, and marital security" promoted
by the so-called "female Bildungsroman" of the nineteenth century
(198). Flush similarly reclaims the zoocentric gestures of the Victo-
rian animal autobiography and the naturalistic animal story even as
it eschews the sentimental anthropomorphism of the former and the
phallocentrism of the latter. Thus, just as any attempt to establish
Flush's significance by divorcing it from the animal narrative tradition
would obscure how it both participates in and critiques that tradition,
Castle insists that efforts to situate Woolf's novels of female develop-
ment within "a separate tradition" uncoupled from the "male-oriented
discourse of Bildung" are deeply problematic (214). Such a redraw-
ing of boundaries, he warns, "reinscribes the very gender and genre
differences that a writer like Virginia Woolf seeks so brilliantly to
overcome, for her novels do not so much discover a separate space
of female self-development as occupy a common space that is seen
in a radically different fashion from the men who share it" (214–15).
While The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway re-present domestic
and public spaces from the female perspectives so woefully under-
represented in the literary canon, Flush brings to light an even more
marginalized perspective. Like Elizabeth's servant Lily Wilson—whose
"extremely obscure" life, the narrator insists in a lengthy endnote,
 Kendall-Morwick 515
"cries aloud for the services of a biographer" (Flush 168n)—Flush
offers a radically different view of the spaces he cohabits with the
woman writer, thus exposing the anthropocentric privilege and limita-
tions of Barrett Browning's perspective. His difficulty adjusting to the
stifling environment of the bedroom, signified by the overpowering
"smell of eau de cologne" that continually "lacerate[s] his nostrils,"
serves partially to highlight the injustice of Elizabeth's circumstances
(27). As a dog, however, Flush experiences the constraints of domestic
life even more acutely. Having spent his puppyhood "enjoy[ing] with
all the vivacity of his temperament most of the pleasures and some
of the licenses natural to his youth and sex" (11), he finds "All his
instincts . . . thwarted and contradicted" as he adapts to "a life of
complete seclusion" (32–33).
Elizabeth's own confined situation fosters a partial appreciation
for the effects of Flush's deprivation: "She was too just not to realize
that it was for her . . . that he had sacrificed the sun and the air"
(48). Her historical counterpart noted with empathy the similarities in
their circumstances: "Why, what is Flush, but a lapdog? And what am
I, but a woman? I assure you we never take ourselves for anything
greater" (qtd. in Adams 22). Yet Barrett Browning also recognized
the ways in which these circumstances would weigh more heavily
on a dog. When her friend Mary Russell Mitford first offered her the
young Flush as a gift, she doubted whether "an active sporting dog
could be happy sharing her confined life" (Adams 13). When she
finally consented to receive Flush, she resolved "to make it up to
him, at least something of it, in love and care" (qtd. in Adams 14).
While ill health prevented her from maintaining the level of activity
he enjoyed with Mitford—with whom he took the daily off-leash walks
that Woolf's Flush remembers when he first glimpses Regent's Park—
Barrett Browning kept Flush mentally occupied, endeavoring to teach
him numbers, letters, and games using the positive-reinforcement
methods now advocated by professional dog trainers. During his
"arithmetic lessons," she would "[hold] up pieces of cake while Flush
barked out the correct number," rewarding his successes with tidbits
and "applause" (Adams 19). Woolf's Elizabeth exhibits a similar faith
in Flush's intellectual potential and "[does] her best to refine and
educate his powers still further" (Flush 47).
Indeed, in her efforts to introduce Flush to objects like a harp
and a mirror, Elizabeth strives in particular to facilitate the intertwined
processes of "aesthetic education" and "self-cultivation" that, accord-
ing to Castle, remain central to modernist recuperations of Bildung
(27). While Flush briefly examines the harp but loses interest once he
concludes "that it was not [alive]," the mirror proves more unnerving:
516 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
[S]he would make him stand with her in front of the
looking-glass and ask him why he barked and trembled.
Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? But what is
'oneself'? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is?
So Flush pondered that question too, and, unable to solve
the problem of reality, pressed closer to Miss Barrett and
kissed her 'expressively.' That was real at any rate. (47–48)

As a number of critics have noted, in this scene Woolf anticipates

Lacan's theory of the mirror stage as a formative moment in the
process of self-realization.2 However, the competing definitions of
selfhood in this passage, coupled with the uncertainty as to whether
the questions posed through free indirect discourse represent the
thoughts of Elizabeth, the narrator, or Flush, undermine anthropo-
centric assumptions that posit the ability to recognize oneself in a
mirror as a universal sign of self-awareness. As Kari Weil argues,
Flush's expressive kiss "pits the 'real' body language of affection
against the often unreal signs of identity that otherwise structure
human relations and human–animal relations alike" (85). That Flush
discovers "reality" not in the illusion of autonomous identity but in
his embodied relationship with Elizabeth—a theme to which I will
return—indicates the limitations of compartmentalized models of the
self for both human and nonhuman animals.
Flush's barking and trembling aside, dogs have not been
shown to respond to their reflections in ways that demonstrate self-
awareness (as defined, of course, by human inquirers). In Inside of
a Dog, comparative psychologist Alexandra Horowitz offers a compel-
ling theory of dogs' failure to pass the so-called mirror test. While
chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants have evinced something like
self-awareness by investigating a new mark on their bodies when
presented with their reflections, dogs "never examine themselves
in the mirror"; instead, they "look at it idly" or, like Flush, respond
"as though it were another animal" (219). Horowitz proposes that a
"possible explanation for the dogs' behavior is that the lack of other
cues—specifically olfactory cues—coming from the mirror image leads
dogs to lose interest in investigating it. Some fantastical odor-mirror
that wafts the dog's own scent while reflecting the dog's own image
would be a better medium" for gauging canine self-awareness (219).
Further compounding the test's ocularcentrism is its presumption of
"a specific kind of curiosity about oneself: one that leads humans to
examine what is new on our own bodies. Dogs may be less interested
in what is visually new than what is tactually new: they notice strange
sensations and pursue them with nibbling mouth or scratching paw"
(219–20). In other words, dogs' apparent failure to demonstrate self-
 Kendall-Morwick 517
awareness via the mirror test might instead reflect a human failure
to recognize how species differences influence whether a mark is
"noticeable, and also worth noting" (220).3
A more accurate measurement of canine self-awareness would
require a more rigorous attempt to imagine the canine Umwelt—
ethologist Jakob von Uexküll's term for an organism's perceptual
world. This is precisely what Woolf endeavors to do in scenes like
the one describing Flush's first entrance into Elizabeth's room, which
stresses the olfactory and tactile nature of his Umwelt (though the
limitations of human perception mean that Flush's sensations can
only be approximated through analogy):

Only a scholar who has descended step by step into a

mausoleum and there finds himself in a crypt, crusted with
fungus, slimy with mould, exuding sour smells of decay
and antiquity, while half-obliterated marble busts gleam
in mid-air and all is dimly seen by the light of the small
swinging lamp which he holds, and dips and turns, glanc-
ing now here, now there—only the sensations of such an
explorer into the buried vaults of a ruined city can compare
with the riot of emotions that flooded Flush's nerves as he
stood for the first time in an invalid's bedroom in Wimpole
Street, and smelt eau de cologne. (Flush 19–20)

The very structure of this sentence, which distends to the point that
it must start anew following one of Woolf's characteristic dashes,
illustrates the inadequacy of human representational modes—like
the mirror itself—to portray the room as perceived by Flush. By pil-
ing on descriptive phrases and figurative appeals to humans' limited
senses of smell and touch, passages like the above push the reader
to imagine sensations beyond human capabilities. Indeed, Flush
acclimates to Elizabeth's room largely through the overlooked (by
humans) senses of smell and touch: "Very slowly, very dimly, with
much sniffing and pawing, Flush by degrees distinguished the outlines
of several articles of furniture" (20). And although he is eventually
"amazed" to see "staring back at him from a hole in the wall another
dog with bright eyes flashing, and tongue lolling," the mirror is one
of the last objects to attract his notice (21).
By imagining the distinctly canine ways that the historical Flush
might have experienced the environments he cohabited with Barrett
Browning, Woolf exhibits an arguably keener insight into canine Um-
welt than does Uexküll himself. Despite his groundbreaking theoriza-
tion of perceptual worlds beyond human comprehension—an insight
that profoundly influenced not only the emerging field of ethology
but also the anti- and posthumanist thought of figures like Heidegger
518 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
and Deleuze—his illustrations depicting the same room through the
eyes of a human versus a dog in A Foray into the Worlds of Animals
and Humans convey a rather conventional view of animal experi-
ence as impoverished (Uexküll, fig. 2–3), prefiguring Heidegger's
characterization of "the animal" as "poor in world" (Heidegger 176).
The images use different colors to denote the "effect tones" of the
room's furnishings—that is, the subjective meanings they signify as
a result of their use-value to the perceiver (Uexküll 96). In the im-
age representing the human Umwelt, Uexküll assigns an effect tone
to nearly every object in the room. An array of colors designate the
"reading shade" of the bookshelf, the "writing shade" of the desk, the
"light tone" of the lamp, the "walking shade" of the floor, the "sitting
shade" of the chairs, sofa, and stool, and the "eating and drinking
tones" of the plates and glasses and the table on which they sit; only
the walls have a neutral "obstacle shade" (96–97).
The dog's view of the same room is starkly limited by compari-
son. While Uexküll includes walking, sitting, eating, and light shades
in the canine Umwelt, he assigns an obstacle shade to the remaining
objects. In representing the canine Umwelt as a mere subset of its
human counterpart, Uexküll fails to imagine specifically canine ways
of acting in and on this environment. We might reasonably surmise
that the floor, for example, would have a lying as well as a walking
shade for the dog. Further, given Uexküll's astute observation that
dogs "learn to handle certain objects useful to human beings insofar
as [humans] make them into things of use to dogs," dogs' perceptions
of the room might vary widely based on their experiences, age, and
size (96). For a puppy, books and chair legs might have a chewing
shade, and for attention-seeking dogs, the sofa might have something
like a humans-at-petting-level shade. Dogs with messy or indulgent
owners might perceive the eating shade as extending from the plates
to the table, chairs, and surrounding floor, yet even the table lacks an
eating tone—perhaps because Uexküll assumes that the dog views
it only as an obstacle that bars the way to food. By contrast, Flush
is bewildered to see "that article of furniture, whose chief function
it was to provide shade, kicked on the floor" during a séance at the
Brownings' Florence home (Flush 155). While the table acquires
what we might call a spiritual-communion tone for Elizabeth during
her mystical phase, Flush quite reasonably perceives a shade tone.
Even in the relatively stable environment of Elizabeth's Wimpole
Street bedroom, objects' effect tones are in flux and not securely
tied to any practical value they might have for Flush. In contrast to
the relatively barren room Uexküll imagines for the dog, Elizabeth's
bedroom is filled with objects that fascinate Flush precisely because
their appearances fail to intimate their functions: "That huge object
 Kendall-Morwick 519
by the window was perhaps a wardrobe. Next to it stood, conceiv-
ably, a chest of drawers. In the middle of the room swam up to the
surface what seemed to be a table with a ring round it; and then
the vague amorphous shapes of armchair and table emerged. But
everything was disguised" (20). Even after he learns to "identify
[and] distinguish . . . all the different articles he saw there," their
effect tones remain contingent and unstable—particularly with the
(for Flush) intrusive arrival of Robert Browning (27). Even objects
that have only a symbolic connection to Robert—the bookcase and
busts of famous poets—become "alien" and "severe" in his presence
(56). Indeed, from Flush's predominantly olfactory perspective, the
entire room transforms anytime a visitor interrupts his "long hours"
of quiet seclusion with Elizabeth: "The handle was seen to spin round;
the door actually opened; somebody came in. Then how strangely
the furniture changed its look! What extraordinary eddies of sound
and smell were at once set in circulation! How they washed round
the legs of tables and impinged on the sharp edges of the wardrobe!"
(39). Whereas Uexküll pictures the canine Umwelt, like the human
Umwelt, as a collection of discrete objects, Woolf's characterization
of Flush's Umwelt as a swirl of smells suggests a different, potentially
less human-centric strategy for imparting truth to canine experience
(to adapt William Dean Howells's famous characterization of the
novelist's aim).
Insofar as Elizabeth and Flush inhabit the same space but per-
ceive dramatically different worlds, the text points to "vast gaps in
their understanding" that mark crucial distinctions in their Bildung
processes (36). Elizabeth cannot smell the distant mutton-bones and
passing dogs that prompt Flush to "tremble suddenly, and whimper
and start and listen," nor can he comprehend her reasons for spend-
ing "hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black
stick" (36). And while Elizabeth's reading and writing enable her
to cultivate a rich inner life and participate in a vibrant intellectual
community even while confined to her sickroom, Flush has no such
outlet. At first, he envies Elizabeth's access to the realm of language
so privileged in both traditional and modernist modes of Bildung:
"When he heard her low voice syllabling innumerable sounds, he
longed for the day when his own rough roar would issue like hers in
the little simple sounds that had such mysterious meaning. And when
he watched the same fingers for ever crossing a white page with a
straight stick, he longed for the time when he too should blacken
paper as she did" (38–39).
Here the narrator attributes to Flush a desire to speak and write
that might seem to affirm the humanist—and anthropocentric—ends of
the prototypical Bildung plot. Yet the text persistently challenges the
520 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
privileged status of human systems of signification: "'Writing,'—Miss
Barrett once exclaimed after a morning's toil, 'writing, writing . . . '
After all, she may have thought, do words say anything? Can words
say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies beyond the
reach of words?" (Flush 37–38). Woolf again anticipates Lacan in
proposing that language inevitably distorts the reality it purports to
re-present. The limits of language become glaringly apparent in the
narrator's attempt to describe Italy as Flush experiences it:

Here, then, the biographer must perforce come to a pause.

Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what
we see . . . there are no more than two words and perhaps
one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically
non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt
nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other.
The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet
it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love
was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and
architecture, law, politics, and science were smell. To him
religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experi-
ence with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power.
. . . Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that
to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happi-
est years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells.
(129–30)

This passage breaks with an entire humanist tradition that prizes lan-
guage as evidence of a human surpassing of the animal; as Derrida
observes, thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger,
Lacan, and Levinas "all say the same thing: the animal is deprived of
language" (32). Woolf's narrator, by contrast, posits language as a
confirmation of the finitude of the human Umwelt, turning on its head
the characterization of animal being as a state of deprivation. Viewed
in this way, language both reveals and compounds a human lack. By
affixing one of a paltry assortment of words to each smell within his
limited reach, the poet (Woolf offers Swinburne and Shakespeare as
examples) restricts his olfactory repertoire further still, effectively
plugging his nose to the "infinite" variety of smells that "lie beyond
the reach of words." Even the suggestion of a vast continuum of
smells ranging from pleasing to offensive reveals humans' limited
criteria for evaluating olfactory stimuli. Underscoring how language
both reflects and exacerbates humans' sensory impoverishment,
the narrator reports approvingly that "Not a single one of [Flush's]
myriad sensations ever submitted itself to the deformity of words"
(Flush 132).
 Kendall-Morwick 521
Woolf's emphasis on Flush's olfactory and tactile experiences
forms a crucial part of the text's critique not only of language but also
of existing models of Bildung. As Elizabeth Abel and her co-editors
argue in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, "The fully
realized and individuated self who caps the journey of the Bildung-
sroman may not represent the developmental goals of women, or
of women characters" (10). Building on this insight, Castle contends
that the "mutually embedded Bildung plots" (244) of Clarissa and her
daughter Elizabeth in Mrs. Dalloway challenge both the privileging of
male experience in the Bildungsroman tradition and the "socially prag-
matic Bildung deemed appropriate for young women" in the female
Bildungsroman (198). I would add that Woolf's strategy of embedding
the famed narrative of Barrett Browning's liberation from her domi-
neering father within Flush's own Bildung plot radically undermines the
status of human modes of identity formation as privileged—indeed,
exclusive—means of achieving Bildung. In addition to highlighting
how patriarchal structures hinder both characters' attempts at self-
cultivation, the narrator repeatedly compares Elizabeth's writing to
Flush's olfactory aesthetics, thereby marking their Bildung processes
as distinct but equally legitimate: "Where Mrs. Browning saw, [Flush]
smelt; where she wrote, he snuffed" (129).
Flush's Bildung plot accelerates in Italy, where the aesthetic
education he began under Elizabeth's tutelage takes a distinctly ca-
nine turn: "Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning
wrote regularly in another. . . . But Flush wandered off into the streets
of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell" (130–31). Roaming the
streets "with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence" (131),
he comes to "[know] Florence as no human being has ever known
it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either" (132). In addition
to developing a detailed olfactory and tactile knowledge of the city—
a nonhuman version of what Castle identifies as "an aesthetics of
everyday life" cultivated by Woolf's female Bildungshelds (236)—he
develops a "new conception of canine society" (Flush 116–17). The
mongrel dogs he encounters in the streets of Florence force him to
confront "the curious and at first upsetting truth that the laws of the
Kennel Club are not universal" (116)—a realization that ultimately
proves liberating when Robert takes a pair of scissors to Flush's coat
to combat a flea infestation, clipping away "the insignia of a cocker
spaniel" in the process (135). Like the modernist Bildungsheld, for
whom "Bildung so often turns out to be a dissent from social order,
from the bourgeois appropriation of self-cultivation," Flush rejects the
entrenched ideology of breed and embraces his rebirth as a mongrel
(Castle 24).
522 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
Flush, then, realizes a specifically canine form of Bildung by
shedding the "pedigree" thrust on him by human-authored breed
standards and embracing the species identity that unites him with the
mongrels of Florence—a shift that echoes Jack London's zoocentric
portrayal of canine development (134). Yet whereas London's Buck
cannot fully achieve Bildung until the deus ex machina of his master's
death severs the "last tie" binding him to humanity (London 86), "the
tie" that joins Flush and Elizabeth is "undeniably still binding" right up
to the moment of Flush's death in the novel's final paragraph (Woolf,
Flush 123). In declining to represent canine Bildung as a liberation
from human influence, Woolf refuses to reinscribe the nature/cul-
ture boundary that London's vision ultimately necessitates. Flush is
irrevocably transformed by the fact of companion-species entangle-
ments; his "flesh [is] veined with human passions" (133), and the
"pads of his feet" are "stamp[ed]" with the "proud Latin inscriptions"
that pave the streets of Florence (132). Far from eschewing human
society altogether, he comes to regard not only "[a]ll dogs" (117) but
"all men" (137) as "his brothers" (117, 137). Thus, Flush achieves
Bildung not by answering the call of a natural realm separated from
human culture but by immersing himself in the multispecies com-
munity of Florence, as portrayed in a vignette of the marketplace in
the novel's penultimate scene. Woolf's portrait of the aged Flush in
a broader scene in which the "snarling and biting" (157) of street
dogs blend with the "perpetual buzz and hum of human voices"
(158) reveals that, contrary to the anthropocentric assumptions of
traditional Bildung, the social configurations within which character
develops are never exclusively human.

Toward a Multispecies Model of Bildung

While species and sex differences mean that Flush and Eliza-
beth occupy distinct perceptual worlds and thus "[reach] different
conclusions in their voyages of discovery," their Bildung plots remain
deeply interdependent (122–23). Elizabeth plays a vital role in Flush's
education, but Flush's impact on her own deferred development is no
less profound. Just as his historical counterpart empowered Barrett
Browning to leave her sickroom—"[A]spiring to the pure heroic . . .
[I] called Flush, & walked down stairs & into the street . . . in glori-
ous independence"—Woolf's Flush becomes Elizabeth's co-conspirator
in defiance of the patriarchal codes embodied by the domineering
Mr Barrett (qtd. in Adams 35). Castle argues that in the case of the
intertwined trajectories of Clarissa and Elizabeth in Mrs. Dalloway,
"this mutual embeddedness testifies [to] the complexity of the rela-
tions between mothers and daughters" (244). The mutually embed-
 Kendall-Morwick 523
ded Bildung plots of Flush, I would add, testify to the complexity of
interspecies relations, reminding us that processes we have come to
class under the rubric of self-cultivation always take place within what
David Herman calls the "wider webs of creatural life" (94).
Indeed, the central insight Flush takes from "the bedroom
school"—as illustrated in the aftermath of his long-anticipated con-
frontation with Robert during the couple's courtship—is an under-
standing of character as contingent and relational. Enraged by his
rival's conciliatory offering of a parcel of cakes, Flush bites Robert
and subsequently finds himself falling out of Elizabeth's favor. After
Robert departs, Flush's conjectural train of thought includes the real-
ization that "things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning
he bit her too" (Flush 69). This realization prompts Flush to eschew
jealousy and "[swear] to love Mr Browning," a decision he signals to
Elizabeth by humbly consuming the now-stale cakes (72). The rare
shift to direct discourse in the passage that follows underscores the
multispecies model of Bildung presented in the novel as a whole: "I
need all the things that you both need. We are all three conspira-
tors in the most glorious of causes. We are joined in sympathy. We
are joined in hatred. We are joined in defiance of black and beetling
tyranny. We are joined in love" (73). Flush's epiphany, like the novel
itself, affirms not a narrowly humanist project of self-cultivation but
an ongoing process of intersubjective becoming that exceeds the
boundaries and potential of the individual human.
In this way, Woolf's portrait of canine experience epitomizes
what Castle regards as a distinctly "modernist . . . notion of 'Bildung'
as multiple and (de)constructed subjectivities," subverting not only
the phallic "I" of the traditional Bildungsheld but the fantasy of the
self-authored human subject that underwrites conventional notions of
literary character (197). Flush's observation that Elizabeth is chang-
ing "in every relation" (62) and that he, too, is no longer "the same
dog" following Robert's entrance into their lives echoes Clarissa's
reflections on human character in Mrs Dalloway (71):

Clarissa had a theory in those days . . . to explain the feeling

they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being
known. . . . [S]he said . . . she felt herself everywhere; not
'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat;
but everywhere. . . . So that to know her, or any one, one
must seek out the people who completed them; even the
places. . . . It ended in a transcendental theory . . . that
since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so
momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of
us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be re-
covered somehow attached to this person or that. (152–53)
524 Canine Bildung and the Critique of Anthropocentrism in Woolf's Flush
The question posed by Woolf's narrator during the first meeting be-
tween Flush and Elizabeth—"Could it be that each completed what
was dormant in the other?"—uncannily recalls Clarissa's observation
that to know someone, "one must seek out the people who completed
them; even the places." "Even the dogs," Flush seems implicitly to
add, expanding Clarissa's theory of character to account for the
companion species whose marginal status throughout much of the
literary canon belies their omnipresence in social configurations that
are by no means exclusively human. Woolf's diary entries following
Pinka's unexpected death in 1935 affirm dogs' place in the network
of relations that shapes "the unseen part of us": "8 years of a dog
certainly mean something. I suppose—is it part of our life thats bur-
ied in the orchard? That 8 years in London—our walks—something
of our play private life, thats gone?" (Diary 4: 318). The "intensity"
with which Woolf experienced the intermingling "sense of death" and
the "feeling of [Pinka's] character" signals her alertness to how the
entanglement of human and canine subjectivities undermines the
phallo- and anthropocentric subject of the traditional Bildungsroman
(4: 317). By publishing Flush despite her characteristic "fear of [the]
sentimentality" that pervades popular understandings of the human/
dog relationship, Woolf recognized the extraordinarily high stakes of
her experiment in animal biography, in which she uses the intimate
and vital role of companion species to engage in nothing less than a
radical reconceptualization of human identity itself (4: 317).

Notes
1. Frank Chapman, writing for The Granta, declared that the "deadly
facility [and] popular success" of Flush spelled "the end of Mrs Woolf
as a live force" (qtd. in Diary 4: 186n).
2. See, for example, Garber, Dog 47 and Griffiths 166–67.
3. Horowitz notes that while dogs persistently fail the mirror test, "there
are other dog behaviors suggestive of their self-knowledge," including
scent-marking and play behavior (220).

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