Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family [1 ed.] 1138832839, 9781138832831

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Animals in the Family: Pet Relations in Victorian Literature and Culture
1 Love Me, Love my Dog: The Role of the Pet in Rituals of Courtship, Domesticity, and Parenthood
2 Becoming Crazy Cat Lady: Women and their Pets in the Domestic Circle
3 Pets and Patriarchy: Bachelors, Villains, and their Animal Companions
4 Household Pets, Waifs and Strays: Children and Animals Inside and Outside the Victorian Home
Conclusion: Animals and their Families
Index

Citation preview

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian ­Literature and Culture

Addressing the significance of the pet in the Victorian period, this book examines the role played by the domestic pet in delineating relations for each member of the “natural” family home. Flegel explores the pet in relation to the couple at the head of the house, to the children who make up the family’s dependents, and to the common familial “outcasts” who populate Victorian literature and culture: the orphan, the spinster, the bachelor, and the same-sex couple. Drawing upon both animal studies and queer theory, this study stresses the importance of the domestic pet in elucidating normative sexuality and (re)productivity within the familial home, and reveals how the family pet operates as a means of identifying aberrant, failed, or perverse familial and gender performances. The family pet was an important signifier in Victorian familial ideology of the individual family unit’s ability to support or threaten the health and morality of the nation in the Victorian period. Texts by authors such as Clara Balfour, Juliana Horatia Ewing, E.  Burrows, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Dickens speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the home that both reify and challenge the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the Victorian period. This book highlights the possibilities for a familial elsewhere outside of normative and restrictive models of heterosexuality, reproduction, and the natural family, and will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and culture, animal studies, queer studies, and beyond. Monica Flegel is Associate Professor of English at Lakehead University, Canada.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature

  1 Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our Feverish Contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen

  9 Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels Eye of the Ichthyosaur John Glendening

  2 Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Jean Fernandez

10 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture Edited by Katharina Boehm, Anna Farkas, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein

  3 Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry F. Elizabeth Gray   4 Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era Lara Baker Whelan   5 Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road American Mobilities Susan L. Roberson   6 Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home Caroline Hellman   7 The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature Josephine Guy and Ian Small   8 Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction Novel Ethics Rachel Hollander

11 A Female Poetics of Empire From Eliot to Woolf Julia Kuehn 12 Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture Immersions and Revisitations Edited by Nadine BoehmSchnitker and Susanne Gruss 13 Dickens’ Novels as Poetry Allegory and Literature of the City Jeremy Tambling 14 Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family Monica Flegel

Pets and Domesticity in Victorian ­Literature and Culture Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family Monica Flegel

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of Monica Flegel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Flegel, Monica. Pets and domesticity in Victorian culture : animality, queer relations, and the Victorian ­family / Monica Flegel. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature ; 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Animals in literature. 3. Pets in literature. 4. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Home in literature. 6. Children in literature. I. Title. PR468.A56F58 2015 820.9'36209034—dc23 2014035424 ISBN: 978-1-138-83283-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73573-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Vickie

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Animals in the Family: Pet Relations in ­Victorian Literature and Culture

ix xi

1

1 Love Me, Love my Dog: The Role of the Pet in Rituals of ­Courtship, Domesticity, and Parenthood

17

2 Becoming Crazy Cat Lady: Women and their Pets in the ­Domestic Circle

56

3 Pets and Patriarchy: Bachelors, Villains, and their Animal Companions

96

4 Household Pets, Waifs and Strays: Children and Animals Inside and Outside the Victorian Home

139

Conclusion: Animals and their Families

183

Index

199

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List of Figures

4.1 “Two Kittens.” Cover illustration for Band of Mercy 10.117 (September 1888): 65. 4.2 “Grandpapa’s Four Pets.” Cover illustration for Band of Mercy 6.71 (November 1884): 81. 4.3 “They Grew in Beauty, Side by Side.” Cover illustration for The Animal World 21.245 (February 1, 1890): 17. 4.4 “Fast Friends.” Animal World 22.264 (September 1891): 129–144, 136.

142 143 144 148

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a long-term project for me, one that has undergone many transformations over the past few years, and which owes much to those who have supported and inspired me over that time. I am therefore grateful to my many friends and colleagues, who have listened, read, and provided feedback for me throughout this time, including Judith Leggatt, Jane Nicholas, Anna Guttman, Daniel Hannah, Chris Parkes, Scott Pound, Susan Goldberg, Rachel Warburton, Helle Moeller, Andy Weaver, Kelly ­Laycock, Susan Hamilton, Peter Sinnema, Kerstin Muth, Bernadette Flegel, and Jason MacLean. I am very grateful, as well, for the excellent work done by the editorial team at Routledge, and by the reviewers, with whom it was a great pleasure to work; thanks especially to Liz Levine and Andrew Weckenmann for their professionalism and enthusiasm. I want to thank both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Lakehead University for the financial support that assisted me with my research, along with the staff of the British Library, who make researching at that institution such an honour. Thanks also, particularly, to the staff of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books at the Toronto Public Library, who have all inspired me to do more research in this area, mostly for the pleasure of working with them again. Thanks as well to the librarians at Lakehead University, who were incredibly helpful throughout this entire process, and always lenient towards one who had a habit of returning ILL books disgracefully overdue. I want to thank the following journals and editors for granting me permission to use material in this manuscript that has been previously published, including the following: “‘Bend or Break’: Unraveling the Construction of Children and Animals as Competitors in Nineteenth-Century English Anti-Cruelty Movements,” first published in the Journal for ­Critical Animal Studies 7.1 (2009): 53–73; “‘How Does your Collar Suit Me?’: The Human Animal in the RSPCA’s Animal World and Band of Mercy,” first published in Victorian Literature and Culture 40.1 (2012); “Mistresses Voicing Female Power through the Subject Animal in Two as Masters: ­ Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies” in Speaking for Animals: ­ Animal Autobiographical Writing, edited by Margo DeMello (Routledge: 2013): 89–101; and “A ‘Strange Family Story’: Count Fosco, His Animal Children, and the ‘Safe’ Patriarch in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White”

xii Acknowledgments in Queer Victorian F ­ amilies: Curious Relations in Literature, edited by Duc Dau and Shale Preston (Routledge: 2015). Finally, thanks to the many pet companions I’ve lived with and met who, over the years, have taught me much about family and who have, in one way or another, all inspired this work, including Lulu, Trixie, Ziggy, Enzo, Reilly, Millie, Vickie, Bavvy, Ripley, Simba, Charlotte, Daisy, Cooper, Tallulah, B ­ abette, ­Creemore, Lola, Reuben, Cerise, Nazzy, Lily, Zuni, Domingo, Emily, Baxter, Felix, and Fanny (who is my favorite).

Introduction Animals in the Family: Pet Relations in Victorian Literature and Culture

In Clara Balfour’s 1861 English novel Drift, a rich, eccentric single woman named Miss Keziah Pendrainly indulges herself by taking in waifs and strays of the human and non-human variety. Embodying a stereotype that is no doubt wholly familiar to readers today, Miss Pendrainly lavishes love and affection on dog and child alike, but only in the most self-serving of ways. She is annoyed by their needs and their messiness, values them for their prettiness, and is completely unaware they are endangered by her own love and by the jealousy of her servant (who poisons them). The strange domesticity of Miss Pendrainly, in which child, dog, and women alike play roles that (the reader is meant to understand) harm them – dog as beloved, child as pet, servant as threat, and single woman as unproductive, ignorant, and ill-suited “mother” – serves as a distortion of the nineteenth-century domestic idyll. Lacking a proper patriarch and consanguinity, this home cannot represent the “natural family” as defined by census and fictional representation (Thiel 8). Because it mimics, in its relations among its motley members, the structure of the natural family, the dysfunctionality of Miss Pendrainly’s domestic arrangement works to uphold the superiority of normative domesticity, suggesting proper domestic relations are assured by adherence to normative sexuality, reproduction, and gender performance. However, constructed as it is on “unnatural” relations, with adopted and species-crossing progeny, boundary-crossing relations with servants, and gender-disrupting attempts at blending motherhood with patriarchy, Miss Pendrainly’s home is bound to fail, unstable to its very core. What such a representation of unnatural domestic relations works to deny, of course, is just how normal such species-crossing relations were to the ­Victorian home, particularly in regards to the role played by the domestic pet as de facto child and bourgeois “love machine” (Kete, Beast in the ­Boudoir 55). Balfour’s text presents us with a family shot through by desires, jealousies, and power-plays that is meant, through its unnatural configuration, to be set apart from the proper home. Nevertheless, it serves as the uncanny double of the family and, in so doing, revels in what the bourgeois home represses. Though the reader is meant to recognize Miss Pendrainly’s domesticity as perverse and damaging, the construction of her family nevertheless mirrors the middle-class Victorian home, centered as it is around child and pet as “cherished objects of emotional investment” (Pearson 57). In what

2 Introduction ways are we meant to distinguish, for example, between Miss Pendrainly’s seemingly pathological collapsing of animal/human relations and the tacit acceptance of and pleasure in animal/child proximity seen in the novel’s loving representation of Birdie, the adopted daughter? In this book I take on the companion animal in Victorian literature and culture in order to interrogate how pet relations worked to both constitute and disrupt domestic ideology, from couplehood, marriage, and reproduction to parent/child and sibling relations. In particular, I am interested in literary representations of companion animals who stand in as members of the family, specifically, pet cats and dogs.1 In my analysis of Victorian literary depictions of animals in the family, I practice what Michael Lundblad identifies as “animality studies” – that is, analysis that concerns itself with “questions of human politics … in relation to how we have thought about human and nonhuman animals at various historical and cultural moments” (497). Some of the pets and companion animals depicted here, particularly in the animal autobiographies I analyze, certainly are subjects in their own right and some, while not quite subjects, are at least characters, minor though they may be; as Ivan Kreilkamp describes, “Animals in the Victorian period … are often treated as semi-human in the realm of culture and as semi-characters in the realm of literature.” By this he means “certain privileged domesticated animals” are “invested with personality and individual identity”; nevertheless, “this state is unreliable and subject to sudden abrogation” (82). While I agree the animal characters are “subject to sudden abrogation” in the texts I analyze, I follow Kreilkamp in finding that abrogation an important part of the function they serve, particularly in terms of narratives of Victorian domesticity. What does the presence – and, sometimes, unexplained absence – of a beloved pet mean to the narrative of home and family? What role, if any, does the pet play in terms of delineating the “happy ever after” that governs so many domestic narratives or in representing its impossibility or lack? While such work may seem to privilege humans over animals in its focus on the role played by companion animals in human relations, I argue that examining the pet in relation to the home and family in the Victorian period reveals just how much animals are themselves caught up in human ideological and political relationships. In their depiction of “becoming-animal” in A Thousand Plateaus, theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari dismiss the “little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman” (244) from their category of the “anomalous” – that “phenomenon of bordering” that speaks to those oppressed, in revolt, and “on the fringe of recognized institutions” (245); likewise, they speak dismissively of the family pet as “the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle” (250). Donna Haraway notes, “Little house dogs and the people who love them are the ultimate figure of abjection for D & G, especially if those people are elderly women, the very type of the sentimental” (When Species Meet 30). Following Haraway, who wonders whether she can “find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging,

Introduction  3 incuriousity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of the flesh” (30), I question whether pets and those who love them are unworthy of closer consideration, particularly in terms of understanding domestic ideology and the role they play within it. As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, the persistent representation of such social and familial failures and outcasts as the cat-lady spinster, the spoiled “pet” (whether animal, child, or woman), the non-reproductive parents of the furry child, and the homo-socially oriented man with his dog demonstrates the extent to which families composed of humans and their pets could, rather than uphold the institution of the family, instead exist on “the fringe of recognized institutions” as challenges to or perversions of it. Nevertheless, pets do, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, also support the family as an organizing structure. There is nothing more exogamous than a pet, after all, and as ­“family-constituting beings” (Pearson 37), companion animals ably demonstrate that the family is not a fixed biological or cultural fact but is instead both “born and made” (Corbett 60). Far from being simply a straightforwardly Oedipal figure, however, the family pet instead reveals the contradictions and fissures within domestic ideology. I therefore want to examine all the ways that the family pet operated in the Victorian period within the family constellation – pets as children, as siblings, as companions, and as significant others. While Haraway challenges Deleuze and Guattari’s dismissal of elderly women and their little dogs, she herself rejects “all the names of human kin for these dogs, especially the name ‘children’” (When Species Meet 67). She insists, “To regard a dog as a furry child, even metaphorically, demeans dogs and children” (Companion Species Manifesto 37). Other animal-studies scholars and theorists seem to share a certain measure of distaste for the familial and the domestic when discussing companion species. Deleuze and Guattari, as we have seen, believe such animals “draw us into narcissistic contemplation … the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother” (40). They are not alone in this assumption, as John Berger sees such narcissism and control as in fact central to all pet-keeping: The pet completes [the owner], offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognises this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected. (14–15) For Berger, this reflection is essentially isolating, “since in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost” (15). As well, Yi-Fu Tuan, in Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, argues, “Domestication means domination: the two words have the same root sense of mastery over another being – of bringing it into one’s house or domain” (99). For Tuan, such domination is part and parcel of power relations writ large, toward

4 Introduction animals but also toward nature itself and other humans: “[H]ow great is the temptation for the powerful to reduce their pets (plant, animals, and humans) to simulacra of lifeless objects and mechanical toys – to the sort of frozen perfection that only the inanimate can attain” (4). Even Kathleen Kete, whose The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994) remains one of the best examples of the historicization of petkeeping, speaks dismissively of “the trope of the animal as child” in her introduction to A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire, dismissing it as a “phantasmagoria, a fantasy relationship of human and animal” (15), one that is “for most people ironic” (17). In expanding upon the role of the animal in the family as a means of, in part, addressing such dismissals of animals as kin as something more than a “mistake,” irony, or simple domination, I draw upon the fascinating work of scholars such as Marjorie Garber, Erica Fudge, and Alice A. Kuzniar, who approach “dog love” and “pet love” with careful attention to what Kuzniar refers to as “the affective, immediate ties between man [sic] and the four-footed” (Melancholia’s Dog 3). I also rely upon work that historicizes pet-keeping in relation to the domestic in the nineteenth century, such as Jennifer Mason’s Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (2005), Susan Pearson’s The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (2011), Kathleen Kete’s aforementioned The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in NineteenthCentury Paris, and Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). Erica Fudge asserts “pets are linked to the concept of domestic stability in many of the most pervasive and persuasive stories we tell ourselves about the West” (10), and it is therefore not surprising that pets play an important role in domesticity in the Victorian period. Jennifer Mason challenges the privileging of “wild” nature in discussions of nineteenth-century American culture, persuasively arguing that civil society depended more on interactions with animals within the home than it did on “exposure to wilderness and untamed nature” (12–13). She further argues that “understanding the dynamic relationship between people’s lived relations with animals, and the multiple, species-specific, and often markedly affective discourses relating to these animals is essential for understanding the contests for power in the human social order” (1). Likewise, in her analysis of the ways in which discourses of protection of both animals and children played a crucial role in delineating American liberal politics and identity, Susan Pearson treats the concept of pets as children and children as pets as an important narrative with implications for both animals and humans in nineteenth-century American society, one which allowed reformers to combine “sentimental with liberal language and private with public power” (8). Pets were clearly very much a part of family life for many in the nineteenth century when “what has been called the Victorian cult of the pet was firmly established” (Ritvo 86). While many companion animals were

Introduction  5 working animals during that period, the pet within the bourgeois home, then as now, could be subsumed within the family as almost human, almost immediate kin. Davidoff and Hall note that even when the family was understood as more capacious than the nuclear unit, “Specific categories of age, gender, and function were seen as necessary to staff a family. If these were not filled biologically, surrogates were found” (322). Though Davidoff and Hall do not refer specifically to animals, pets could fill in for “missing” members of a nuclear family and assure its “completeness” as a self-­contained unit. As Kathleen Kete observes of nineteenth-century Paris, “dogs may have functioned as ersatz humans for many individuals” (Beast in the Boudoir 37–38). Furthermore, through treasuring animals that often had little economic value and did not contribute to labor, middle-class families highlighted the rightness of their domestic arrangements through their relations with pets: “Their inclusion of the dog within their literal circle of affection testifies to their commitment to the affective priorities of home life rather than the economic principles of the market” (14). And teaching children to care for pets also served to support the middle-class home through naturalizing “an idealized version of family life” and preparing “their children to assume their future roles as tenderhearted, self-disciplined mothers and fathers” (Pearson 34). Nurtured and nurturing, pets could continually reflect back to their owners the principles of the domestic space as a refuge from the outside world, an affective space ruled by family hierarchy and the ordered relations of its members. If pets and companion animals as de facto members of the family played a central role in Victorian culture, so too did animals find their way into Victorian literature. Teresa Mangum notes that with the emergence of the SPCA in Britain in 1824, the Victorian focus on “character-driven ideologically charged narratives” featuring the “individual, interior life” (153) came to encompass not just the spectrum of human social life but also animals. As a result, “Animals inhabit the vast body of work we too simply categorize as ‘children’s literature’. … The bildungsroman, particularly in the first-person form, required readers to accept an animal as a protagonist, and the attachment to animals manifested in portraits of such animal protagonists motivated elegies for pets” (156). While many of these texts can be relentlessly anthropomorphic, resulting in narratives in which “the humanness of these genres and modes consume, sympathize with, and strain against animalness,” Mangum argues, “animal alterity also bites back, ripping at the human flesh of genres” (157). Colleen Glenny Boggs likewise argues that literature is where we as humans can encounter and confront the otherness of animal kind in ways that attempt to move beyond anthropomorphism (20). While literature does hold out the possibility of encountering or imagining animal alterity, it is also true, of course, that literature often uses animals as symbols, figures, and tropes, and this was certainly the case in many Victorian depictions of animals. In particular, the animal in the home was an important symbol of domesticity, not surprising given, as Kreilkamp argues,

6 Introduction the domestic novel and the domestic pet developed “not just in parallel but in tandem” to become, in the nineteenth century, vehicles for “the culture’s high valuation of sympathy and domestic life, and … known, worldwide, as a quintessential embodiment of English identity and a national self-image founded on an idealized version of home” (87). In other words, to love animals became identifiable as a distinctly English characteristic, one used to support English domination of and prejudice toward its neighbors and colonies. Through the depiction of English family life as the envy of all, with animals playing a very central role in that depiction, Victorian domestic fiction worked to establish England as embodying the height of civilization. Both Ivan Kreilkamp and Teresa Mangum question this ideology of English kindness, pointing out, “Those who ‘loved’ animals doomed most (the nonpets) to misery when they demarcated and exalted a few species as ‘pets’” (Mangum 18) and “Pet dogs, in British culture, typically possess a tantalizingly incomplete identity: they are granted a name and a place by the hearth in the family circle, but only temporarily, only as long as their human master permits it” (Kreilkamp 81). Nevertheless, as objects of emotional investment through which Victorians demonstrated proper affection, stewardship, conspicuous consumption, and domesticity, and as subjects of power relations who demonstrate the contradictions apparent in the valuing of some creatures over others within a supposedly coherent narrative of “kindness,” the animal in nineteenth-century domestic texts helped to define normative human relations. Further, as Laura Brown points out, literary depictions of animals can offer us something beyond either anthropomorphism and alterity by offering us animal/human relationships in “literary fantasies that verge toward the dissonant, the unconventional, the aberrant, and the unbounded” (2). I argue that depictions of animal/human families hold the potential to do just that – to stretch our narratives of family and domesticity in ways that acknowledge alternate sexualities, power structures, and ways of understanding time. I have chosen the Victorian period for my analysis of human/animal domestic relations both because it saw the height of the “natural family,” the status of which was, during the mid-Victorian period, “elevated … to that of an icon” (Thiel 2), and also because the end of the century saw the rise of a “trenchant antifamilialism that depicts families as impediments to individual fulfillment” and “magnifies and emphasizes the flaws of families, and revels in alienation from the norms of family life” (Hatten 14). By and large, the texts studied here support, specifically, bourgeois familialism, with “its advocacy of individual erotic autonomy, its patriarchalism, its celebration of powerful bonds of love and loyalty between the spouses, its stress on the need to privatize affective bonds, and its intense anxiety about the importance of containing and channeling sexual desire” (20). This is not to say, of course, that the texts analyzed here solely concern themselves with bourgeois subjects – Adam Bede, for example, depicts a very different class of people than does Agnes Grey – but instead to say familialism, as it is expressed in

Introduction  7 mid-Victorian literature, primarily takes on bourgeois concerns. As Charles Hatten points out, In all its incarnations, familial writing has the character of a bourgeois class discourse. It is not that familialism was exclusively created by the bourgeoisie or that only members of the middle-classes accepted its values, but rather that literary famialism’s concerns and prescriptions were generally expressive of emerging bourgeois social norms and tended to promote bourgeois and individualist social relations. (20) When I speak of the normative family, then, I am referring to this model not as one that predominantly existed in nineteenth-century England but as one that was held up as the ideal and that formed the basis against which other family units and structures were measured. In terms of the structure of the family itself, I will refer often to the nuclear or “natural family” (Thiel 8), one composed of a “husband, wife, and children” (Behlmer, qtd. in Thiel 8). Not all families in Victorian literature or culture were composed of mother, father, and children, of course, nor were normative families (in the most capacious sense of that term) necessarily ­limited to that nuclear structure; Davidoff and Hall, for example, caution that “the definition of family was never rigid, its boundaries were indistinct and shifting. Kin could go unrecognized while friends could be an intimate part of family life” (321). Perhaps the best definition of family is that produced by Leonore Davidoff, who suggests family and kin be “understood as ongoing processes, flexible and variable, filled with contradictions and tensions” (5). Furthermore, even if we commit to the “nuclear” definition of family, the idea of family is still divided, as Mary Jean Corbett has pointed out, by the concept of “first” and “second” families: the one into which one is born and the one into which one is married. The similarities between the two, as well as the shared allegiance one owes to both, complicate a strictly narrow understanding of the nuclear family (60). This sense of the Victorian family as both more capacious and more diverse in its variations than the term nuclear family allows can be understood, in part, as a cultural contest between the wider family and the nuclear family. While the first has commonly been constructed as an earlier form of kinship, one displaced by the nuclear family, research has challenged both the late development of the nuclear family (Davidoff 20) and the supposed displacement of the wider family. Instead, as Brigid Lowe points out, there was in fact a continual tension in nineteenth-century discourse between the two: “nineteenth-century fiction,” she states, “provides illustrations so pointed and elaborate of the contest over the meaning and value of the family as to provide evidence of a specific cultural tension over the breadth of the family, as well as a fleshing out of the wider political implications of that tension” (161). These divergent constructions of family speak to the complexity of making generalizations about a unit that is fundamental to

8 Introduction both affective relations and, more broadly, to political structures. The family, in the Victorian period as now, was diverse in its structures and the representations of it in Victorian literature throughout the period speak to that diversity. Nevertheless, it is also true that “domestic fiction, replete with large claims for the spiritually and psychically restorative powers of families, was a culturally central and prestigious literary mode practiced by writers on both sides of the Atlantic” (Hatten 14). In order for the family, diverse as its actual forms might have been, to be constructed as “spiritually and psychically restorative,” it had to be presented as a recognizable ideal, one with clear enough boundaries to identify who was doing family right and who was doing family wrong. In particular, Victorian domestic ideology relies upon heteronormativity as an organizing force in familial life. As Barry McCrea describes, the Victorian novel “derives a sense of narrative rhythm around promises that paternity will be revealed and courtships will end in weddings” (5). This “sense of narrative” is a temporal one and is directly linked to heterosexuality: Biology … means that heterosexuality is the first and easiest account of these beginnings; my mother met my father, boy met girl, the primal scene. Marriage is the archetypal end of a narrative because it is also a symbolic return to these origins. Narrative may be about the creation of children, but it is also about the production of parents, whether old ones, through the revelation of secret paternity, or new ones, through the successful conclusion of a courtship. If we look at it this way, narrative, in its most basic, traditional form, appears to be almost mystically connected to genealogical origins and continuity, to the cyclical rhythm of childhood, marriage, and reproduction. (8–9) For all the various constructions of the family in the period, then, there is a recognizable privileging of marriage, family, and child-rearing that allows us to identify those whose performance of family casts them outside the frame of normative, familial ideology. A central concern of my study is what Lee Edelman has identified as “reproductive futurism” and the role it plays in setting limits around animal/human domestic relations in the Victorian period. According to Edelman, reproductive futurism is a key feature of domesticity, representing the unquestioning logic that we must all be on the side of “the Child” who stands in for futurity, a futurity always predicated upon heteronormativity “by rendering unthinkable, [and] by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (2). Opposite to reproductive futurism is Edelman’s neologism, sinthomosexuality, a term that combines Lacan’s “sinthome” – “the site at which meaning comes undone” (35) – with homosexuality, so as to signify the extent to which queerness is always linked with the death drive. As

Introduction  9 Edelman asserts, the social meaning of queerness “is always a function not only of what we do with our genitals but also of what we don’t do: a function, that is, of the envy-, contempt-, and anxiety-inducing fixation on our freedom from the necessity of translating the corrupt, unregenerate vulgate of fucking into the infinitely tonier, indeed sacramental, Latin of procreation” (40). With all of this talk of sex and reproduction, we might well ask: where does the family pet come into this? If theorists of animal/human relations have been uncomfortable with the trope linking animals and children, they have been even more so with examinations of affective relations between human and animals that focus on the sexual. Colleen Glenny Boggs observes that Even among scholars invested in examining affective relationships with animals, the subject of bestiality remains taboo. Alice Kuzniar has critiqued the work of Kathleen Kete, Harriet Ritvo, John Berger, Mark Shell, Yi-Fu Tuan and even Marjorie Garber for distancing itself ‘from the seriousness of pet love.’ Kuzniar’s work goes a long way toward impressing on us the seriousness and working out a complex model of alternative intimacy. But for all her own complicated and compelling insights into the topic, she persists in defining ‘pet love’ as everything except bestiality. (31) Boggs defines bestiality as “pointing to a spectrum of affective relationships that are subject to different forms of scrutiny and control” (31), and the sexual lives, or lack thereof, of spinsters or childless couples with pet-children, for example, certainly fall under “scrutiny and control” in ways that the sexual habits of married couples with both children and menageries of pets do not. In order to understand pets as both de facto children and as significant others, therefore, we need to examine that which, arguably, defines the natural family, namely the couplehood at the head of the home and the role of progeny within the home. Children were and are both a sign of their parents’ proper, religiouslyand nationally-sanctioned, reproductive sex and the symbol of the stability and futurity of middle-class endeavors, insofar as success is measured in progeny who carry on the patriarchal line and ensure the family business and the continuation of one’s class. However, pets as children and children as pets illuminate the troubled relationship between the home as site of proper reproductivity and center of domestic affections by specifically demonstrating that the second is not necessarily dependent on the first. Susan Pearson notes, “both domestic pets and children were positioned as family-­ constituting beings that attracted emotional investment and care and provided a channel for the performance of the middle-class family’s purported raison d’être: nurturance” (37). In fact, as Kathleen Kete reminds us, the domestic dog in particular was, in many ways, the child par excellence, at least in terms of

10 Introduction providing that affective center to the home: “Dogs were eternal children, captive outside of narrative, without a past, a future, or a culture. Dogs were uniquely malleable and controllable, nineteenth-century authors insisted, ‘they live an eternal childhood, a minority without end’” (Beast in the Boudoir 82). Continually confirming the purpose of the middle-class home, the domestic pet – and the dog in particular – could prove to be more than a child surrogate: a continually replaceable, and therefore seemingly permanent, child who would never grow up. By never leaving its place absent, the family pet can continually confirm the “completeness” of the family home, a role pets fill to this day: “It’s a commonplace to say that dogs are ‘like children.’ Does this mean they never grow up? Is there, ironically and perversely, something comforting about the fact that most dogs die at an age when children would start to leave home?” (Garber 77). But if both child and pet serve the affective economy of the home, they cannot play an equal role in the sexual economy of the home, in which the reproductive goals of the parents serve the larger productive capacity of the nation and the reproduction of the class/gender status quo. Pet as child can in fact expose the “parent’s” failed sexuality, operating as a sign of a man or woman’s inability to successfully achieve full adulthood (marked by marriage and reproduction) and/or as an indication of a queer sensibility, a desire to take pleasure in border-crossing relations that exclude reproduction in favor of non-productive intimacy and desire. I use queer theory here not to empty out the meaning of queer by applying it to any non-normative familial arrangement, though some of the figures I examine could defensibly be labeled “queer” in their own right; rather, I want to acknowledge the debt to queer studies that anyone working with “deviant” familial outcasts, such as the bachelor, the old maid, and even the orphan and stray, must acknowledge. But more than that, I believe there are lines of connection between queer theory and animal studies, as evidenced by recent publications such as Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird’s 2008 collection Queering the Non/Human, which has extrapolated on Edelman’s and other queer theorists’ work by linking it to animal/human relations. As Donna Haraway observes, “Queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting operation. That is crucial work and play” (“Companion Species, Mis-Recognition, and Queer Worlding” xxiv). Reproductive futurism, as Edelman theorizes it, is of particular importance when analyzing the role played by pets within the Victorian family in literature and culture, for within the “normal” category of the home, “queer” relations between humans and their pets threaten both the supposedly firm boundary between human and animal and the home as site of re/productivity. As Alice A. Kuzniar points out, “The potential for social oddity or queerness in dog love lends itself well to treatment in works on same-sex love: both kinds of attachment raise the issue of propriety and pit the intimate against the public” (207). As I will discuss, progeny, while safely enclosed

Introduction  11 within the “private” space of the home, serve to publicly display that the right kind of sex has taken place. Those who remain single or childless, by contrast, are open to question, their sexuality and choice of intimate/­physical relations subject to scrutiny, particularly when a pet vividly attests to the non-reproductive capacity of the home. Representations of single people or queer people and their pets, therefore, must be understood within a social construction of sexuality that is always tied to reproductivity, one that inevitably perceives “families” made up of a single human or a non-reproductive couple and their pets as a sign of social failure and deviant sexuality. But if Edelman compellingly argues that reproductive futurism preserves “the absolute privilege of heteronormativity” (2), he also rejects this imperative, arguing instead that, far from challenging the linkage of queerness with negativity, “we might … do better to consider accepting and even embracing it” (4). Such nihilism should not be presumed to be purely negative, at least in the sense of “undesirable”; rather, in my own analysis here, it speaks to desire, to the pleasures of the present, ones that cannot be subsumed into (re)productive goals and ends. Specifically, choosing an animal as a child or a companion and non-reproductive erotic pleasures over sanctioned, reproductive sex, ensures an end to the fantasy of oneself carrying endlessly into the future through one’s progeny and inheritors, a fantasy implicitly linked to the continuation of one’s race, class, nation, and species. Hateful as they are, representations of the bachelor and spinster lover of pets, particularly those figured as most misanthropic and antithetical to human society, might contain within them the means of questioning “what sexuality could possibly mean if the distinctions between the species collapse,” for “our affective life with its fluctuating sensual needs, devotions and obsessions can be complex and inconsistent in ways that call into question self-definitions based primarily on sexual preference” (Kuzniar 206). A study such as this is necessarily idiosyncratic in its choice of texts to discuss, as pets so often occupy the margins of both text and culture, and in combining pets and companion animals with bachelors, spinsters, and other social outsiders, I am certainly committed to an exploration of what are usually referred to as “minor characters.” Nevertheless, cats, dogs, and other companion animals are there if we look for them, in the pages of children’s stories, the popular press, and no-longer-read novels, as well as in the pages of canonical works of fiction. My choice of texts is not exhaustive, as pets and companion novels appear, if only tangentially, in many nineteenth-century texts, but I do believe the animal/human relationships analyzed herein are representative of stereotypes and tropes that performed important work for Victorian familial ideology, a point supported by the persistence of many of these tropes and the work they do today. Ivan Kreilkamp argues, “[A]nimals are a sub-proletariat of the novel: represented, but only in passing; given nicknames rather than true markers of identity; possessing no solid claim to recognition or memory on the part of the narrator or any other character” (82). Pets and Domesticity will not necessarily succeed in reversing the

12 Introduction minor status of animals in the texts in which they appear, focused as it is on their meaning and effects upon the characters and environment around them. Nevertheless, it seeks to bring them into clearer focus, and through an analysis of their significance, however seemingly small, to address the multitude of ways that pets operated within Victorian domestic fiction as signifiers of, participants in, and threats to family. My first chapter, “Love Me, Love My Dog: The Role of the Pet in Rituals of Courtship and Romance,” addresses the role played by the pet in aiding and abetting the development of normative romance and sexuality. I argue that the pet in texts such as Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) operates much like a romantic friend, a safe object of affections with whom an unattached man or woman may first develop their capacity for love. Structured as a temporary placeholder for future partner and/or child, the domestic pet offers the means for heterosexual men and women to “practice” their future roles before displacing their affection to appropriate human partners and children. But more than that, pets in novels such as Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) operate as the means of courtship, as complicated emissaries of affection in a world in which male and female relations were strictly controlled. Using the animal’s muteness to their advantage, the human lovers within these novels engage in flirtation through the animal, relying on a species hierarchy that renders the animal an object of use within human affective relations. Nevertheless, what these novels reveal is that the animals themselves disrupt or challenge their own supposed muteness, instead throwing into relief cultural restrictions on human speech and interaction. Finally, in an examination of the necessity for pets to disappear from the narrative once they have been successfully displaced by children, I argue that the persistence of a pet within a relationship operates narratively as a means of diagnosing failed gender and romantic relations. Chapter Two, “Becoming Crazy Cat Lady: Women and their Pets in the Domestic Circle,” examines the most commonly ridiculed pet-lover, the spinster and her pet. Focusing on the importance of reproduction in defining proper womanhood, I consider the Victorian popular press so as to address the social fears surrounding the figure of the spinster who, as Rita S. Kranidis­ argues, is simultaneously figured as a symbol of excess and of deprivation (4). Deprived of her “natural” role as wife and mother, the spinster was (and is) a dangerous supplement to the nation, a “superfluous” appendage to the family. Examining the very common linkage of spinsters with pets in the press and in novels such as Bulwer-Lytton’s My Novel (1853) and Clara Balfour’s Drift (1861), I analyze the oft-mentioned cats and dogs as symbols of the spinster’s womanly need for nurture that must be filled with a furry child or partner if no human equivalent can be achieved. Such depictions of the spinster and her pet work to “rescue” the spinster from her more misanthropic leanings, making her a more sympathetic figure so as to accommodate her as a useful member of society, one who has the potential

Introduction  13 at least to fill a nurturing role that might be of use to the wider family. By contrast, the spinsters in Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies (1876), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen (1879), and Betsey Rayner Parkes’s A History of Our Cat, Aspasia (1856) instead represent an alternative to the natural family, embracing as they do animal/human domestic relations that, in part, celebrate a partial separation from familialism in pursuit of womanly pleasures that cannot be accommodated within normative familial culture. Challenging the idea that women must find fulfillment only in love and nurture, the spinsters of these texts represent a significant threat, an alternative to domestic ideology that revels in animal/human proximity in ways that cannot be entirely subsumed within the idea of family. My third chapter, “Pets and Patriarchy: Bachelors, Villains, and their Animal Companions,” embraces those figures who reject or defy the family: the misanthropic and villainous male and his companion animal. The texts I examine – Marryat’s The Dog Fiend; or, Snarley-yow (1837), Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841), Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) – all depict male outcasts from or threats to domesticity. They are often linked with companion animals who likewise defy the status of “pet” and confirm the man’s outsider status. By specifically focusing in this chapter on those men and their pets who challenge domesticity through their relations, I illuminate the extent to which the companion animal shares with the Victorian male a fraught, divided identity, one defined both by an essential savagery and by a dependence upon love and familial relations. In their combined failure, or refusal, to fully accept the demands of masculinity and pethood and its role within the familial and domestic space, refusals that are linked to class, gender, and sexual performance, these men and their pets demonstrate that reproductive futurism enforces equal, if not greater, pressure upon men as it does upon women in Victorian culture. Making family with pets, rather than women and children, and displacing human love and affection with animal companionship and solidarity, these failed and reviled men illuminate the centrality of father, husband, and head of household to masculinity in the Victorian period in all its varied forms. But in their perverse relations with animals, these men also speak loudly to the repressive nature of domestic masculinity, their preference for the animal other illuminating a sexual and familial elsewhere for outcast men, one that both relies upon and rejects the role of pater familias as an organizing force in male lives. My final chapter, “Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays: Children and Animals Inside and Outside the Victorian Home,” deals with those figures who are most regularly linked together in discourse about animals in the family: the child and the pet. The alignment of child with domestic animal, so common in Victorian discourse, relied on a close association of the two, both in terms of the qualities they supposedly shared and the space they were meant to occupy in the home and family. Nevertheless, child and pet, while serving a similar role in the affective economy of the home, diverged in terms of the

14 Introduction futurity of the family, with children expected to become adults enjoying a higher status within the species hierarchy. Examining the discourse of anticruelty to animals journals aimed at children alongside texts for children such as Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen (1875) and A Flatiron for a Farthing (1872), I argue that shared relations with animals underline the complicated status children occupied within the home. Called upon to be “pets” within the affective relations of the family, children in the nineteenth century nevertheless also had to learn to be masters and mistresses, for too close an association with the domestic pet spelled disaster for the child’s eventual transition into proper, authoritative adulthood. Significantly, the child’s class status played an important role in terms of negotiating their supposed proximity to the animal world, with lower-class waifs and strays linked to animals both in their capacity for savagery and their potential to be salvaged through domestication. However, in my examination of texts such as L. T. Meade’s Scamp and I (1872) and Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders (1872), I argue that while the species divide between human and animal strays might serve to hold out the promise of the lower-class child’s eventual salvation, in the end human and animal strays alike represent a threat to the proper home and family that must be repressed. My conclusion, “Animals and their Families,” draws away from the role played by animals in human families in order to examine the literary representations of animal families. Reading the brief, abortive, and fragmentary representations of pets with their own blood relations that are present in texts such as Frances Power Cobbe’s Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867) and Lucy D. Thornton’s The Story of a Poodle (1890), I address the guilt that underlies these narratives of adoption, the brief recognition of the cruelty inherent in privileging animal/human relations while precluding or preventing relations between animals themselves. Such narratives, I argue, get at the heart of the concept of family as something that is both made and born, a structure laid upon existing relations and sometimes disrupting or destroying them in the process. Conversely, texts such as R. M. Ballantyne’s ChitChat by a Penitent Cat (1888) use the context of animal families as an opportunity to vividly denaturalize the normative family, instead presenting “natural” animal families whose own forms of love, affection, and interpersonal relations challenge the assumptions governing the middle-class ­Victorian home. Confronting the troubled crossings of boundaries in adult/child/animal relationships brings one face to face with cultural longing, embarrassment, and dismissal. From the pet dog who provides training to the young girl for future motherhood, to the pet hoarder who seemingly displaces proper maternal love with improper animal collection, to the couple who neglect their child in favor of their animals, narratives constructed around the animal within the home provide the means of policing social norms and delineating appropriate affective relations in the domestic sphere. This book seeks to analyze and explain the ways narratives of animal/human

Introduction  15 companionship both regulate and defy boundaries of species, gender, sexuality, and class in that complicated structure we know as the family. NOTE   1 Victorians certainly enjoyed a wide variety of animals as pets and companion animals, including hedgehogs, birds, and exotic species such as monkeys and wombats, and memorably, in the case of the Duke of Edinburgh, an elephant (Simons 46–50). However, cats and dogs feature most frequently in literary depictions of pets, particularly as members of the family, which is why I choose to focus upon them here.

REFERENCES Balfour, Clara. Drift: A Story of Waifs and Strays. Glasgow: Scottish Temperance League, 1861. Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Boggs, Colleen Glenny. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Davidoff, Leonore. Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Fèlix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2004. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Giffney, Noreen and Myra J. Hird. “Introduction: Queering the Non/Human.” Queering the Non-Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 1–16. Hatten, Charles. The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. Haraway, Donna. “Companion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding.” Queering the Non-Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. xxiii–xxvi. ———. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Kete, Kathleen. “Introduction: Animals and Human Empire.” A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire. Ed. Kathleen Kete. Oxford: Berg, 2007. 1–24. ———. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

16 Introduction Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.1 (2005): 87–110. Kranidis, Rita S. The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Kuzniar, Alice A. “‘I Married My Dog’: On Queer Canine Literature.” Queering the Non-Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 205–226. ———. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lowe, Brigid. Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. London: Anthem Press, 2007. Lundblad, Michael. “From Animal to Animality Studies.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 496–502. Mangum, Teresa. “Narrative Dominion or The Animals Write Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts.” A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire. Ed. Kathleen Kete. Oxford: Berg, 2007. 153–173. Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. McCrea, Barry. In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Simons, John. Rossetti’s Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals in Victorian London. London: Middlesex University Press, 2008. Thiel, Elizabeth. The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven and ­London: Yale University Press, 1984.

1 Love Me, Love My Dog The Role of the Pet in Rituals of Courtship, Domesticity, and Parenthood

In this first chapter, I take a closer look at literary representations of domestic animals at all stages of “normative” coupling according to Victorian familialism, from identifying a proper mate, to courtship, to marriage, to parenthood. As beings that allowed for physical affection and open declarations of attachment, pets in texts such as Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) act as surrogate partners for the young single person, occupying a similar position, I argue, to the romantic friend. Carolyn Oulton describes romantic friendships in the nineteenth century as bonds that were “associated almost automatically with the young, whose passionate energy was directed towards love of friends either in place of, or in preparation for, expected marriage” (30). Given that romance between members of the opposite sex in the middle classes was often strictly supervised, the pet provided an opportunity for passionate attachment that was meant, particularly for women, as practice for conjugal and maternal love. The cherished pet as a “lovemachine” (Kete 55) worked to open the affections of the young, and thus teach them both romantic feeling and proper care of dependents. The depiction in novels such as Agnes Grey and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874) of young women embracing their role as care-givers with loveable dogs therefore demonstrates these women are at their most marriageable, just as their less nubile sisters are revealed through their failed interactions with domestic pets or their too-close identification with the wrong kind of pets. As (mostly) mute arbiters of romantic feeling, pets in the texts studied here are put to use in romantic communications, expressing on behalf of their masters and mistresses the complex emotions involved in intimate relationships that could not easily be expressed within the parameters of polite society. I argue further that the pet occupies a much more complicated position than a simple love machine in courting and romance rituals, instead also lending itself as a means of expressing all the fraught emotions that accompany courting, such as eroticism, jealousy, violence, and possessiveness. While relations with pets can operate as a sign of a young man or woman’s ability to feel affection and nurturance, they can also be, as is the case in novels such as Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), a sign of a serious flaw. An overinvestment in a pet, for example, might speak to a primary narcissism making one unsuited to marriage and parenthood, while a pet

18  Love Me, Love My Dog treated with cruelty might serve as a means of demonstrating the violent disruption of romantic bliss. As barometers of affections within the home and between partners, pets are as apt to reveal disharmony as they are to register familial affection. These multi-faceted roles played by the domestic pet in human romantic relationships speaks, in part, to the fraught relationship we have with our pets: Do we love dogs the way we love erotic partners or spouses? Or do we rather love them the way we love children – or even, as some have implied, as masters ‘love’ their servants or their slaves? … Do we ‘love’ dogs not only because they ‘love’ us, but because the power relation between a human being and an inferior loving subject is intrinsically pleasurable? (Garber 125) These questions invite us to acknowledge, I suggest, the extent to which these vexed relations also have the power to throw into high relief the presence of similar inter-relations of power and eroticism within human familial relations, revealing those fractures and fault lines that exist underneath the surface of domestic relations. “IT IS A BEAUTY LIKE THAT OF KITTENS”

Identifying Appropriate Romantic Partners through Pet Analogies and Pet Relations Pets come into play in nineteenth-century texts at the very beginning of romantic attachment, playing a role in distinguishing what are constructed as good and healthy romantic choices from those that spell out future unhappiness and marital disharmony, both through analogies linking humans with animals and through representations of human/pet relationships that are meant to stand in for or presage human attachments. The use of animal analogies in nineteenth-century novels continued a practice that has a long history: “From Aristotle to Darwin down to the present, naturalists have credited bees with monarchies, ants with honesty, and dogs with tender ­consciences. … In many cultures, the fundamental moral and prudential ­lessons of human life are taught via myths about animals, such as Aesop’s fables, which have been told and retold for millennia” (Daston and ­Mitman1). Domestic pets, particularly cats and dogs, were often used in English culture to represent the vices or virtues of their masters but, even more so their mistresses, because women have in many cultures been configured as “playthings and pets” (Tuan 123). As Laura Brown observes of eighteenth-century England, for example, pet-keeping “suggests a special role for gender in the imaginative i­nvolvement with animal-kind, since women are constitutive” of the “distinctive, domestic representation

Love Me, Love My Dog  19 of human-animal conjunction” (65). In the texts studied here, what matters most in terms of predicting what kind of wife a woman will be is the kind of pet with which she is associated. Kittens in particular were often linked to attractive young women, their frolicsome beauty ably capturing all that was beguiling and tempting in a nubile girl. In describing Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot uses analogies with kittens as a means of capturing Hetty’s particular power: “… there is one order of beauty which seems to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens … – a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind to which it throws you, [sic] Hetty Sorrel’s was that kind of beauty” (84). Kittens, with their combination of helplessness and attractiveness, perfectly convey Hetty’s childish and beguiling beauty and the disordered state of mind into which she throws those, like Adam, who are caught in her orbit. Similarly, in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), young Gilbert Markham finds himself drawn to the local coquette, Eliza Millward: “Her voice was gentle and childish, her tread light and soft as that of a cat; – but her manners more frequently resembled those of a pretty, playful kitten, that is now pert and rogueish, now timid and demure, according to its own sweet will” (23). Descriptors such as “gentle,” “soft,” and “timid” fall well within appropriate femininity here, but there are clear indications that Eliza’s affections are perhaps more sexual than they are strictly feminine, “pert” and “rogueish” as she is. Both Hetty and Eliza are clearly seductive creatures, and a large part of their attraction is their confusing, indefinable nature, which likewise infects those who are drawn to them with a state of emotional turbulence. In Hetty’s case, her beauty is such that it arouses both care and violence, and with Eliza, her kittenish beauty speaks to the fleeting and changeable nature of her own moods. These young women are in a state of sexual nascence, caught between girlhood and womanhood, and their flirtatious attractions speak to a sensuality that is not yet determined or confined within marriage, one that is still playful and polymorphous. While their kittenish qualities capture all that is attractive about the flirtatious, sensual young women, it is these very attributes that exclude Hetty and Eliza as good choices for a mate. In nineteenth-century English texts, woman as pet sits uneasily within the middle-class expectations of wife as moral center of the home and rearer of children. When a woman is represented as sharing too close an association to the pet, such proximity represents her own selfish, inward-turning admiration rather than her ability to undertake the care and affection of others. Cat analogies in particular, which often operate as coded references to female sexuality, indicate a woman whose desires are perhaps more libidinal than maternal. The link between women and cats has a long history, particularly the “association of the cat with rapacious feminine sexuality” (Kete 119). For example, cats were often linked to female prostitutes, as both were seen as “aggressively

20  Love Me, Love My Dog sexual animals that constantly groomed themselves” (118), leading one nineteenth-century French commentator, as Katharine M. Rogers relates, to suggest “both animals are e­ ssentially ‘­antipathetic to marriage,’ are ‘keen on maintaining [their] appearance,’ are silky and shiny, eager for caresses, ardent and responsive, graceful and ­supple, make night into day, and shock ‘decent people with the noise of [their] orgies’” (119–120). Constructed as vain, ­deceitful, and manipulative, the cat’s “domesticity was a sham. Kittens, especially, could be appealing, even gentle, but ‘at the same time, they have an innate malice, a falseness of character, a perverse nature, which age augments and education can only mask’” (Kete 118). The association of cats with rampant female sexuality means that when a woman is compared to cats in a nineteenth-century novel, she probably possesses a sexual independence or, at the very least, a selfishness that makes her unsuited for her role as domestic angel. Eliza Millward’s kittenish behavior, for example, serves as a red flag to back up the warning Gilbert Markham’s mother gives him in regards to choosing Eliza as a romantic partner: “You’ll soon tire,” she says, “of petting and humouring your wife, be she ever so charming. …” (Brontë, Tenant 56). As a source of playful flirtation, woman as pet is just fine, but as a future wife, the defiance that is captured in the description of Eliza’s “own sweet will” (23) speaks to a character trait that will require her husband to serve her needs, rather than the patriarchally approved reverse. Eliza is later proven, in her role as vicious gossip, to be every bit as “catty” as her role as bewitching pet suggests. This correlation of women with cats as a means of signaling a woman’s unfitness for marriage is present also in George Eliot’s description of Hetty Sorrel, “that distracting kitten-like maiden” (Adam Bede 85) who causes such grief through her narcissistic, bewitching beauty. Though Eliot concedes Hetty’s beauty is enticing, in part because it suggests a fragility and delicacy that is like catnip to the young (and old) males of the text, her seeming meekness is disingenuous; her beauty is instead a “false air of innocence” (85), one that masks a “coquettish tyranny” (99). As well, though her beauty is a source of pleasure to others, it is also problematically a source of joy to herself, and as such represents an inward-turning female vanity, a sexuality that is “aggressive,” rather than receptive, and focused on sexual pleasure rather than the wifely duty of love and reproduction. When Eliot writes, “Hetty did not speak, but Adam’s face was very close to hers, and she put up her round cheek against his, like a kitten. She wanted to be caressed – she wanted to feel as if Arthur were with her again” (359), she uses the connection with the cat, who is often represented as seeing primarily to her own needs and wants, to demonstrate that this young girl’s sexuality exists for her own sake, because she takes affection from one man while fantasizing about another. Tempting but treacherous, kittenish women are “spoiled” women, those who are unsuited for service to others in marital and parental relationships. F ­ urthermore, Hetty might be soft and pretty but, like a kitten, she also has claws and is capable of great callousness: “Hetty would have been glad to hear that

Love Me, Love My Dog  21 she should never see a child again; they were worse than the nasty little lambs that the shepherd was always bringing in to be taken special care of in ­lambing time; for the lambs were got rid of sooner or later” (154). ­Hetty’s hatred of young things speaks, of course, to her own unfitness for the role of wife and mother, which will be supported by the later infanticide of her outof-wedlock infant. Bewitching, self-satisfied, and self-satisfying, the ­kittenish woman and the domestic cat were the anti-wife and the anti-pet, disruptive to domesticity rather than constitutive of it. Dogs fare better as arbiters of married bliss, though lapdogs in particular have not always enjoyed a good reputation, being often associated with wealthy, carnal women; to this day, “The idea that little dogs both stand for and take the place of humans as objects of a wealthy woman’s affection informs the most common derogatory stereotypes of small dog breeds” (McHugh 85). As a symbol of female desires, and as a non-human partner with whom a woman might reveal her capacity for relationships with another, lapdogs occupied a complex position, with some early commentators suggesting that such pets went beyond arousing the affections to being used to satisfy their mistresses’ more carnal appetites. Susan McHugh refers to Abraham Flemyng’s Of English Dogges (1576), in which “Fleming waxes ministerial, even poetic, as he condemns dogs of ‘dantie dames’ or ‘wanton women’s’ toys as ‘instruments of folly for them to play and dally withal, to trifle away the treasure of time, to withdraw their mindes from more commendable exercises, and to content their corrupted concupiscences with vaine disport’” (86–87). Lest one thinks Fleming alone in his suspicion of lapdogs, Marjorie Garber observes in Dog Love that Edward Ward’s “Panegyrick upon my Lady Fizzleton’s Lap-Dog” of 1709 notes that the lady “Kindly rewards the little Four-legg’d Beau/ For secret Service he performs below,” and Robert Gould’s 1682 satire on women, Love Given O’re, links lapdogs and dildos as providers of women’s pleasure in their private apartments: “Where flaming Dil----s doe inflame desire,/And gentle Lapd----s feed the am’rous fire: Lap-d----s! to whom they are more kind and free,/Than they themselves to their own Husbands be.” (143) The lasciviousness of these women and the dogs with whom they are associated speak to the double role played in dog analogies. While often prized for loyalty and affection, dogs are equally associated with unbridled sexuality and, as such, can operate much like the cat in representing a woman’s affection and sexuality that is as onanistic rather than productive. That the woman’s sexuality should instead exist for her male partner is made clear in these texts by the jealousy of the male observer, who feels the lapdog has taken the place that should rightly be occupied by a male, or in Fleming’s more broadly castigating text, by “more commendable exercises.” Certainly the dog in all of these texts has served to bring out the affections of the

22  Love Me, Love My Dog woman, but has done so in ways unsanctioned by patriarchy – both of the lesser creatures, woman and dog, have found ways to bring pleasure to each other but neither is serving or servicing the master, who looks on in envious disapproval. Rather than showing everything that is “kind and free” to the husband, a woman’s kindness and freedom are spent upon the animal and herself, leaving the man, it would seem, out in the cold. Laura Brown identifies the “lady and the lapdog” as “a staple trope of the antifemale verse satire of the first half of the eighteenth century,” a trope that relied on “a set of allied images of female sexuality: the woman’s bed, the breast, the nap, the lap, sometimes the gaze, and especially the kiss” (71). Of poems such as Edward Stephen’s “On the Death of Delia’s Lap-Dog” (1747) and Isaac Thompson’s “The Lap-Dog” (1731), Brown suggests “the lapdog seems to be both an inappropriate or perverse sexual partner for the woman, and also a metonym for female sexuality – a dynamic that places the animal simultaneously within and outside the realm of the human, or – from another perspective – places the women both within and outside the realm of the animal” (72). This linkage of women and women’s sexuality with animals and animal bodies continues throughout the nineteenth century and to the present day, supporting what Cora Lansbury identifies as a shared discourse between animal vivisection and pornography1 and what Carol J. Adams has labeled the “sexual politics of meat.” While readings linking women and animals are certainly supported by Victorian texts, the domestic animal in Victorian novels is not necessarily or solely associated with the woman. Tess Cosslett notes that pets in Victorian fiction could also be used to demonstrate “the affinity between animal and child” (74) and between animals and servants (83). I further argue that even as pets stand in both for the woman and for the eventual and seemingly inevitable offspring, pets also act as a signifier for the male, serving as a proxy for the future husband. Rather than displacing the male and providing the woman with sexual and emotional satisfaction outside human coupling, the pet dog in stories of successful coupling instead prepares the woman for and is eventually displaced by the male husband. The ability of the pet dog in nineteenth-century texts to represent woman, man, and eventual child in the Victorian family has much to do with lapdogs enjoying a better reputation in the nineteenth century than they did in the eighteenth, with their ability to arouse the emotions more clearly and carefully linked to those feelings associated with proper domesticity rather than with sexual satisfaction. By the nineteenth century, “More than other beasts, pets displayed ‘a generosity, gratitude, fidelity, and affection worthy of imitation.’ The pet encapsulated the virtues of the heart, unsullied by sceptical calculating intellect” (Turner 76). No longer furry dildos, pets became instead both small romantic companions and babies-in-training, as seen, for example, in the role played by pet-keeping in the training of children in compassion and care. As Kete observes, “The dog trained the children in ethical life. The dog had ‘the gift of exciting sentiments of good, of humanity, of love among

Love Me, Love My Dog  23 children’” (48). The feelings of love and kindness elicited in childhood also prepared young men and women for the further development of those emotions into romantic attachment later in life. In her analysis of a short story about two lovers brought together by a young man’s dog, appropriately entitled “Marrying for the Dog,” Susan Pearson notes Just as children might learn proper “heart culture” through their pets and practice ideal family relations with them, so too adult families are both completed and formed through emotional investment in the pet-child. Every family ought to have a dog, wrote another author on the same theme, “for it is like having a perpetual baby in the house.” To have a perpetual baby was, in the context of nineteenth-century bourgeois family ideals, to continually enact the family’s emotional constellation and reason for being. (38) Dogs in particular, from large working animals to lapdogs, came to be “family-constituting beings” (37) in this period and as such played an ­ important role in the domestic novel in terms of signaling the readiness of male and female characters for a heteronormative future. Thus when young and lonely Agnes develops an attachment to a small dog in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847), we are meant to understand her heart is ready for a romantic relationship, a point supported by the many parallels between her little terrier and her eventual mate, Mr. Weston. Agnes starts out the novel as a “pet,” spoiled by her parents to be “too helpless and dependent, too unfit for buffeting with the cares and turmoils of life” (17), making her “not many degrees more useful than the kitten” (24). As Maggie Berg observes, “This is eloquent of Agnes’s lack of agency in the family, and provides the motive for her seeking employment” (“Women and ­Animals” 179). I would further add it is indicative of a potential consequence of Agnes being “spoiled”: she could, like the kitten, remain a pretty but not-fully-marriageable girl. Unlike Eliza Millward and Hetty Sorrel, however, Agnes says goodbye to her kitten, “romp[ing] with her for the last time” (Brontë 30), before setting off to be a governess and making her way in the world, a move that demonstrates the strength of character required for someone planning to be a wife, mother, and moral center of a future home. Once she becomes a governess, Agnes often finds herself isolated and alone, ensconced within the families for whom she works but is not truly a part. Her only consolation is her pet Snap, “a little rough terrier” rejected by Matilda, her wealthy and selfish charge, as “fit for nothing.” Matilda is “tired of so helpless and troublesome a nurseling,” but Agnes, “by carefully nursing the little creature from infancy to adolescence, of course, had obtained its affections” (178). The difference between Matilda and Agnes, measured through their ability to care for the unprepossessing dog, represents the greater maturity of Agnes and her burgeoning readiness to take on the charge of “carefully nursing” the young “from infancy to adolescence.”

24  Love Me, Love My Dog Her ability to love a scruffy but devoted animal speaks also to her gift for perceiving worth that lies beneath the surface, a skill that makes her appropriately value the seemingly unattractive Mr. Weston while her flighty charges throw themselves at vain and unsuitable men, such as the odious Mr. Hatfield. Berg argues there are “obvious links with the little terrier and Agnes” (“Women and Animals”190), with both of them occupying abject positions in the Murray household and a similarly coded lower-class status: “The pure breeding of pets took off at the same time that the hierarchy of human beings was celebrated; terriers, like governesses, were somewhere near the bottom” (191). However, Snap is also a proxy and preparation for Agnes’s eventual suitor. Mr. Weston is depicted by Agnes’s vain pupil, Miss Murray, as “an insensate, ugly, stupid blockhead” (Brontë 127), but Agnes feels that while his face is “too square for beauty” and his “eyebrows  … too projecting,” yet his eyes are “strikingly brilliant, and full of expression” (157), making Mr. Weston similar to Snap, who is “rough-visaged, but bright-eyed, [and] warm-hearted” (229). Both dog and man are similarly stolen from Agnes by her jealous charges, who deprive her first of her beloved dog: “Snap … the only thing I had to love me, was taken away, and delivered over to the tender mercies of the village rat-catcher, a man notorious for his brutal treatment of his canine slaves” (229). The dog is dispatched largely because Matilda resents Snap’s allegiance to Agnes, who was meant instead to be Matilda’s dog: “she affirmed it was fit for nothing, and had not even the sense to know its own mistress” (178). Similarly, the girls decide to deprive Agnes of her nascent relationship with Mr. Weston by blocking her intercourse with him and attempting to woo him for Miss Murray’s own flirtatious fun: “She embraced every opportunity of meeting him, tried every art to fascinate him, and pursued him with as much perseverance as if she really loved him and no other” (220). Resenting the attention given to a lowly governess by man and dog alike, Matilda and Miss Murray reveal the linkages between suitor and pet as dual sources of jealous competition between women, meaningful in an affective economy in which women are judged by their fitness for loving and being loved. As moneyed young ladies, Matilda and Miss Murray should outstrip Agnes, who is beneath them in class and dignity, yet the novel argues she surpasses them in true wifely qualities: her kindness, her affection, and her ability to see beneath the surface to judge true masculine quality. Just as Snap gives his affection to Agnes in preference to his supposed mistress, Mr. Weston also does not fall for the girls’ entrapments, and man and dog alike are restored to Agnes in the end: Presently, I heard a snuffling sound behind me, and then a dog came frisking and wriggling to my feet. It was my own Snap – the little, dark, wire-haired terrier!. … Almost as much delighted as himself, I caught the little creature in my arms, and kissed him repeatedly. But how came he to be there? He could not have dropped from the sky … I

Love Me, Love My Dog  25 looked round, and beheld – Mr. Weston! “Your dog remembers you well, Miss Grey,” said he. … (288–89) Both dog and man reward Agnes’s devotion and affection by returning her love after denying it to the women who did not truly value it. Further, in his kindness to Agnes’s pet by rescuing it from a life of misery, Mr. Weston likewise demonstrates his own compassion that shows he is well suited for his future role as protector and guardian of the household. While the ­hateful Mr. Hatfield demonstrates his vanity and mean-spiritedness by “with his cane, administer[ing] a resounding thwack upon [Snap’s] skull” (179) and by knocking a poor lady’s cat off his lap (148), Mr. Weston saves both the cat and the dog, thus cementing his character as a man of sentiment, kindness, and proper paternal feeling: “Weston’s superiority to all other male characters in the novel is signified by the fact that neither governesses nor cats are beneath his notice” (Berg, “Women and Animals” 189). Distinguished from the higher-classed, more-refined “gentlemen” in the novel by his sincerity, honesty, and kindness, Weston represents the Evangelical model of the mid-Victorian man, who based his authority not on an “undue respect for the worldly standards implied in the notion of ‘reputation’” but instead in “‘character,’ by which they meant the internal urgings of a man’s conscience” (Tosh, Manliness 93). In respecting those who have no social value to others, Weston proves he has that most manly of qualities, individualism, and that most necessary quality of a father, protection.

“He knew me as well as it did – probably through its means”: Human Courtship via Pet Mr. Weston’s use of Agnes’s former pet as an intermediary in his courtship speaks to another role played by domestic animals besides that of preparing young women and men for romantic love. Through the dog, Mr. Weston also finds a means to restore his former acquaintance and establish himself on more intimate terms with Agnes, not an easy task for two people unconnected by kin or social circle. It is significant that the dog provides an opportunity for Mr. Weston to meet with Agnes outside the parameters of social events, without the presence of chaperones, because in the midnineteenth century, “The rules governing propriety were such that young people of the middle and upper classes often had few opportunities to form friendships with members of the opposite sex who were not somehow connected to them by blood. …” (Gordon and Nair 137). In a society in which love-making and courtship were not always easily facilitated and were often subject to “careful monitoring” (Davidoff and Hall 323), the dog as means of introduction or, in this case, reintroduction represents a plot device that is simultaneously a purposeful device on the part of the courting male. It is noteworthy that Mr. Weston, however gallant, tells Agnes, “‘I won’t offer

26  Love Me, Love My Dog to restore him to you, Miss Grey,’ said Mr. Weston, smiling, ‘because I like him’” (Brontë, Agnes Grey 293). Weston’s bald statement here again underlines his essential manliness, revealing as it does a man who employs speech that is not polite but instead “direct, honest and succinct. Its purpose was not to please, or to shield listeners from the disagreeable, but to convey meaning without equivocation” (Tosh, Manliness 87–88). In laying claim to Agnes’s former pet and refusing to restore him, Weston may well smile because he knows Snap has in fact restored Agnes to Mr. Weston, a claim she supports when relating to her mother, “he knew me as well as it did – probably through [the dog’s] means. …” (295). The dog has provided the means by which Weston and Agnes are brought together but, for Berg, this resolution is not necessarily a happy one: “… Agnes’s obvious links with the little terrier at the end of the novel suggest that she does not make a straightforward discovery of autonomy and equality; rather, like Jane Eyre after her, she discovers the ‘new servitude’ of a ‘good master’” (190). While Brontë’s conclusion is not necessarily a liberating one, it is an ending very much in keeping with good Victorian middle-class domesticity. Agnes has learned to love and nurture and to be loved in return; Weston has proven his manly ability to be both protector and master; and both are well on their way, through their shared care of Snap, to being the parents they later fully become in the novel’s conclusion. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, we see a similar but arguably more complicated example of courtship via dog when Gilbert Markham uses his dog Sancho as a means of gaining access to the object of Gilbert’s affection, Mrs. Graham – who, unbeknownst to him, is actually Mrs. Helen Huntingdon, in hiding from her abusive husband. Gilbert initially feels Mrs. Graham’s scorn for him, recognizing that she sees in him an “impudent puppy” (22). After her son Arthur forms an attachment to Sancho, Gilbert uses the gift of a puppy to advance his interests: “My first pretext for invading the sanctum was to bring Arthur a waddling little puppy of which Sancho was the father, and which delighted the child beyond expression and, consequently, could not fail to please his mamma” (68–69). He continues his assault upon the “sanctum” with a second excursion, noting “an apology for invading the hermitage was still necessary; so I had furnished myself with a blue morocco collar for Arthur’s little dog …” (69). Arthur’s use of the term “invade,” combined with his depiction of Mrs. Graham’s home as a “sanctum” and “hermitage,” lends his manipulations via pet a more disturbing tenor than Mr. Weston’s seemingly more innocent, and possibly accidental, tactic. Gilbert’s employment of the pet as means of invading Helen’s private space speaks instead to a canny recognition on his part that the pet has a more nimble social status than he does, an ability to come from the outside world and inhabit immediately the inner circle of the family on which Gilbert, an “impudent puppy” himself, wishes to capitalize. In using the dog as a seemingly innocent interloper within the home – a clear representation of his own wished-for

Love Me, Love My Dog  27 role  – Gilbert, consciously or not, relies on a collapsing of boundaries central to pet-hood: If all animals were excluded from the home then the boundaries that the home symbolizes – between inside and outside, friend and stranger, private and public, and so on – would seem to be always firmly in place and security would appear to be assured. The existence of a group of animals that live inside the human home, then, might be read as a challenge to such boundaries … (Fudge 19) Gilbert uses his relation to the pet dog to indicate to Mrs. Graham that he is harmless, charming, and safe to be around children, that he is someone to allow into the “sanctum,” yet the instability of the pet as something wholly enclosed within the home and family ironically signals Gilbert’s own troubled status. He has not yet, at this point in the novel, demonstrated whether he is “friend or stranger,” safe bet or dangerous threat. In a text that vividly portrays the violence of marital relations and the necessity of looking beyond a charming façade to detect the treachery underneath, Gilbert’s actions mark him as an indeterminate choice of mate, linked with the pet as a charming but not necessarily housebroken interloper. While Maggie Berg’s reading of the text clearly identifies Gilbert as “little better than that scoundrel of a first husband, Arthur Huntingdon” (“Violence” 23), her analysis is rightfully supported by a reading that links Gilbert as hunter to Helen as prey. Reading Gilbert as the puppy, invader of the sanctum in search of a place within the domestic sphere, adds a different dimension to his role in the novel. Gilbert as stray dog, hoping to become a family pet, underlines Helen’s role as domesticator in the novel, the one who tames the wild side Gilbert betrays in his fits of temper and his violent attack upon her brother. Through relaying to Gilbert the tale of her alcoholic husband’s self-imposed downfall and bad death, Helen guides Gilbert to the self-knowledge that prevents him from following a similar path: “Brontë allows Gilbert simply to read Helen’s journal, learn about the mistakes of his predecessor, and correct them through his own behaviour” (Hallenbeck). Gilbert does become housebroken and, through Helen’s example, learns what her first husband did not: “Oh, Helen, if I had listened to you, it never would have come to this!” (Brontë, Tenant 390–91). As we have seen, pets can be read as stand-ins for their owners, as arbiters of affection, and as ersatz lovers and children. They are ­over-determined and, as such, can be complicated tools of communication in already-fraught rituals of courtship. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea’s aversion to lapdogs is made painfully evident when she is presented with one by her (unknown to her) suitor, Sir James Chettam. Her distaste for toy breeds is a meaningful dislike on her part, one that clearly establishes her serious nature and dislike of frippery in all its forms and

28  Love Me, Love My Dog speaks to her “theoretic” mind and her love “of intensity and greatness” (Eliot 10). Nevertheless, these qualities also mark her as a problematic love match as they, according to the novel’s narrator, “tended to interfere with her lot” as a “marriageable girl” and “hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection” (10). The inclusion of “merely” in “merely canine affection” rightfully suggests this might be a poor means of finding a mate. Arguably, it is Dorothea who is also being mocked here; her seriousness and ambition are not necessarily objects of scorn, but her lack of common sense is. Her grandiose nature is central to her appeal as a character but it is also clearly linked to her disastrous decision to marry the uncongenial but seemingly worthy Casaubon, rather than the kind-hearted, if unimaginative, Sir James. Her rejection of a gift of a “tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature’s most naïve toys,” a “little petitioner” (31), as Sir James Chettam names it, illustrates the complicated position occupied by both men and women engaging in courtship in a society in which much is implied but often not stated outright and in which strict gender roles cannot account for the complex reality of individual human beings: “It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,” said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as opinions will) under the heat of irritation. “Oh, why?” said Sir James, as they walked forward. “I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy. They are too helpless: their lives are too frail. … I like to think that the animals about us have souls something like our own, and either carry on their own little affairs or can be companions to us, like Monk here. Those creatures are parasitic.” “I am so glad I know that you do not like them,” said good Sir James. “I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of these Maltese dogs. Here, John, take this dog, will you?” The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had better not have been born. (31) Both Sir James and Dorothea prefer working dogs like Monk, Dorothea’s St. Bernard, yet in this moment he has brought her a Maltese because “ladies usually are fond” of them. That is, though Sir James had become attracted to Dorothea because of her personality and their shared interest in agricultural improvement, yet he has in this moment treated her less as an equal and as someone who will share his interests and more as a species set apart from him, a “lady” who will treasure an animal in whom he sees no value. Dorothea’s dislike of the “parasitic” nature of the lapdog instead voices her separation from the kinds of “ladies” of whom Chettam speaks, a “species”

Love Me, Love My Dog  29 of women who are in fact a central concern of the novel. Rosamond Vincey, for example, stands as a warning of what a woman might become when she is trained, like a lapdog, to be merely a beautiful plaything. Dorothea argues that companions in pets and, implied, in marriage must be more than pets and playthings – they must not be “helpless” but instead self-sustaining, with “souls of their own.” While Sir James claims he is “so glad” to know Dorothea does not like lapdogs, as her dislike demonstrates a shared mind-set between them, yet his alliance with the pet suggests shared interests alone will not sustain a relationship between him and Dorothea. Despite his use of the dog as a mere thing, something he despises himself, the dog and he share space together – the “little petitioner” is in fact petitioning for him, acting as an enticement to her as something she may love, with the idea she will eventually love Sir James in return. Though voiceless and seemingly disposable, the dog occupies a highly complicated role in this exchange, with the Maltese representing both weak and spoiled femininity and man as pet, as someone who requires a woman to spoil him and put his interests first. Dorothea’s sister, Celia, in contrast to her, “likes these small pets” (31) and she is unsurprisingly someone who responds well to Sir James as petitioner, recognizing as she does that Dorothea “was rude to Sir James sometimes; but he is so kind, he never noticed it” (56). With her ability to see Sir James as a man who requires tender handling, Celia earns her place as Sir James’s future wife, for as another neighbor observes, “Between ourselves, little Celia is worth two of her, and likely after all to be the better match. … I can see that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to be admired” (58–59). Celia’s ability to admire (and coddle) a man, which is clearly linked to her ability to care for “small pets,” enables Sir James to love her in return because “the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers” (61). Like the good dog he is, Sir James does not bite the hand that feeds him, returning proper romantic attention to the woman most capable of cherishing and spoiling him. Dorothea, “unlike Celia … neglects to see things from what the narrator calls ‘the proper feminine angle,’ a feminine perspective which … stresses the visibility of hearth and home, husband and child” (Ogden). Dorothea’s unsuitability for marriage and maternity at this moment in the narrative is related to her failure to appreciate small petitioners, as captured in her description of a “tiny terrier” Celia once owned, of which Dorothea observes, “It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it. I am rather short-sighted” (Eliot, Middlemarch 31). Dorothea’s ­“short-sightedness” toward things, like husbands and babies, who require care and affection, makes her incapable of seeing the advantages of the match offered her (or even that a match is being offered), and her fear she would tread upon the creature captures the extent to which she is, in her obliviousness to Sir James’s affections, treading on his heart and ego. Though Dorothea might be short-sighted, yet her desire for companionship

30  Love Me, Love My Dog is not perhaps as shallow as the love between Celia and Sir James, based as theirs is on ­perhaps “merely canine affection.” Nevertheless, her belief, in Sir James’s eyes, that the dog he offers her “had better not have been born” signals the never-conceived nature of his and Dorothea’s romantic relationship, as well as her unfitness at this point in the novel for domesticity and reproductivity. Her relationship to the much-older Casaubon, which ends both in death and in a will that seeks to prevent her future romantic relationship, stands in stark contrast to Sir James’s successful coupling with Celia, “who felt that Dorothea’s childless widowhood fell in quite prettily with the birth of [her and James’s child] little Arthur. … ‘Dodo is just the creature not to mind about having anything of her own – children or anything!’ said Celia to her husband” (510–511). Celia is wrong, of course, about what Dorothea wants, and Dorothea does manage to attain a somewhat self-sacrificial wifehood and maternity in the end, but as much as her rejection of the Maltese – and Sir James – speaks to a desire for more from life, a desire that is linked to her “finely-touched spirit” (795), yet her disgusted rejection of the puppy can be read as the novel’s first sign of Dorothea’s failure to accept her womanly lot as wife and mother, as someone who must, in the end, be reconciled to the fact that her “finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible” (795). In Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898), a similarly complicated relationship is played out via pets, in this case between the pets of both the male and female engaged in courtship. Written at the end of the century, Ward’s novel captures the changing realities of heterosexual courtship, in which the restrictions faced by women and men at the mid-point of the century had been somewhat relaxed but in which new roles for women and men complicated old scripts of romance and domesticity. In her exploration of the fraught and ultimately tragic relationship between the titular character, an ascetic Catholic aristocrat, and his sister’s stepdaughter, an atheist New Woman, Mary Ward uses the pets belonging to each as gauges of the changeable and complex emotions Helbeck and Laura feel for each other. At the novel’s beginning, Helbeck is depicted walking his land, greeted only by his beloved sheepdog, Bruno, who “sprang out upon him, leaping and barking joyously” (5). The narrative reveals the sheepdog is his only true company, for Helbeck “had been solitary for many years, and had loved his solitude” (6–7). In linking the solitary and even misanthropic Helbeck – moved only by his connection to tradition and his love for his Catholic faith – with his dog companion, the novel participates in a discourse rooted in Romantic sensibilities. Laura Brown writes, “As the literary representations of pet keeping develops in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, the male human figure enters the picture in a new way. In the romantic period, dogs come to be seen as companions to solitary male characters – wanderers, hunters, shepherds, hikers, and poets especially” (77). Though Ward’s novel is written at the end of the nineteenth century, yet the Romantic construction of Helbeck is fitting, as the conflict

Love Me, Love My Dog  31 between he and Laura is played out as a battle between conservatism and radicalism; he identifies entirely with the past, in sharp contrast to his sister’s daughter-in-law who perceives herself as a thoroughly modern woman. Both women have come to live with him while his sister Augustina recuperates from illness, but Laura plans her own sojourn to be brief: “I must take up a profession. I have a little money, you know – from papa. I shall go to Cambridge, or to London, perhaps to live with a friend” (Ward 17). The clashes between Helbeck and Laura, fueled by his desire for solitude, her desire for escape, and their antagonistic views on religion, speaks to a central conceit of Ward’s novels, which center upon “her heroines’ competing needs for love and autonomy, which are aligned with faith and skepsis regarding patriarchal religious, political, and social authority” (Argyle 941). Both Helbeck and Laura immediately use their pets as tools for negotiating their enforced domesticity, wielding dogs as tactics and weapons in a growing battle fueled by repressed mutual attraction. Laura’s very first meeting with Helbeck is marked by her dog’s resentment of Helbeck’s approach toward her mistress: “How do you do, Mr. Helbeck? Don’t touch my dog, please – she doesn’t like men. Fricka, be quiet!’ For the little black spitz she held in a chain had begun to growl and bark furiously at the first sight of Helbeck” (Ward 7). Fricka’s barking not only speaks of her jealous possessiveness of her mistress but also aptly represents her mistress’s feelings. Fricka expresses Laura’s own distaste for patriarchy and her desire to maintain her autonomy through warding off men. Helbeck himself also aligns Laura with her pet, observing to himself after their arrival: “‘Horrid little wretch!’ thought Helbeck. ‘Denton will loathe it. Augustina [his sister] should really have warned me. What shall we do if she and Denton don’t get on? It will never answer if she tries meddling in the kitchen – I must tell her’” (11). Denton, the housekeeper, already loathes both woman and dog, having “surveyed both dog and mistress with equal disapproval” (8), but it is the slippage represented by Helbeck’s elision of Laura and her dog that I find most interesting here. The “horrid little wretch” is aimed at “it” but he immediately moves on to “she,” making his exclamation speak to woman and dog alike. Helbeck continues in this vein when he ventriloquizes his own feelings through his pet: “Suddenly a bark from overhead made the dog start back and prick up its ears. ‘Come here, Bruno – be quiet. You’re to treat that little brute with proper contempt – do you hear? Listen to all that scuffling and talking upstairs – that’s the new young woman getting her way with old Denton. Well, it won’t do Denton any harm. We’re put upon sometimes, too, aren’t we?’” (12). The barking of Fricka and the “scuffling and talking” of the women are linked, both noises alike speaking to a female intrusion into a male sanctuary, an unwonted clamor characterized by the “yapping” of the lapdog so often associated with female loquaciousness. But just as Fricka’s dislike of men represents Laura’s desire for autonomy, so too is Helbeck’s order for Bruno to “treat that little brute with proper contempt” indicative

32  Love Me, Love My Dog of his own desire to uphold his position and maintain his power, threatened as it is by a woman who is “getting her way.” His one concession – “it won’t do Denton any harm” and “We’re put upon sometimes, too, aren’t we?” – suggests, perhaps, that Helbeck has not always been the lord and master of the house he wishes himself to be; “put upon” by female servants and now by a female interloper, Helbeck uses his dog to shore up his authority through creating a shared masculine space of loyalty and companionship. Laura, however, disrupts this dynamic by quickly winning Bruno over: “‘Oh! you darling! – you darling!’ Helbeck opened his eyes in amazement. Miss Fountain had sprung from her seat, and thrown herself on her knees beside his old collie Bruno. Her arms were round the dog’s neck, and she was pressing her cheek against his brown nose” (17). Coming immediately as it does after her vehement declaration of her desire to leave as soon as possible, Laura’s passionate interjection might well catch Helbeck by surprise, revealing as it does a softer side to his house’s new denizen, a side focused upon his sole companion and (to this point) assumed compatriot. Laura’s positioning of herself in regards to Bruno is caught up in her use of him as a proxy for Helbeck, much as Helbeck aligns her with Fricka. For example, while questioning Helbeck about the possibility of her visiting her cousins, neighbors with whom Helbeck has no contact and shares much mutual enmity, Laura uses Bruno’s body to represent her own turbulent emotions toward Helbeck: “She sat up very straight and pushed the dog from her. ‘By the way,’ she said in a shrill voice, ‘there are my cousins the Masons. How far are they? … I shall go there at once – I shall go tomorrow,’ said the girl with emphasis, resting her small chin lightly on the head of the dog, while she fixed her eyes – her hostile eyes –upon her host” (18). When Laura pushes Bruno away, she employs his body as a means of expressing her defiance of Helbeck and of any restrictions he may seek to impose on her. In a reversal of the association between women and dogs, in which “the structures of protection and dominance surround women with those of pet ownership” (Surridge 9), the large sheepdog is here conflated with the man, while the woman exerts control over the animal body as a means of rejecting patriarchal power. But her next move, resting her body against the animal while fixing her “hostile” gaze upon Helbeck, is more complicated. There is coquetry in her actions, with her close physical proximity to the dog providing a strong contrast to her arms-length approach to her host. As someone who is represented throughout the novel as capable of flirtation if somewhat unaware of its dangerous consequences, Laura here, perhaps but probably not unconsciously, recognizes that her defiance of her host is one enacted across sexual and political lines. Refusing human contact and embracing celibacy, Helbeck is discomfited by her physicality and eroticism: “‘You dear, dear thing!’… (the caressing intensity in the girl’s young voice made Helbeck shrink and turn away) …” (Ward 17). Employing the dog as an erotic partner in a power play in which her physicality and affection directly challenge Helbeck’s asceticism and control, Laura unites

Love Me, Love My Dog  33 herself with the dog in ways that seek to undermine Helbeck’s masculine ­domestic space, displacing the homosociality he shared with the animal with a charged, female-controlled sexuality.

“What a pity! – isn’t it, Bruno?” Speaking For and Through the (Mute) Pet Part of Laura’s rebellion is enacted through speech, specifically through the disruption of the speech patterns of the home by giving voice to those who are traditionally silenced. Laura’s own powers of persuasion, which are focused on Bruno, seek to outweigh Helbeck’s commands: “‘… now you won’t kill my Fricka, will you? She’s curled up, such a delicious black ball on my bed – you couldn’t – you couldn’t have the heart! I’ll take you up and introduce you – I’ll do everything proper!’” (17). Laura’s labeling of Fricka as a “delicious black ball” encourages Bruno to see the fellow animal quite differently than Helbeck’s depiction of her as a “little wretch” (11) and “little brute” (12), challenging Helbeck’s masculine denigration of the lapdog and displacing it with a far more polymorphous depiction of Fricka. In so doing, Laura recognizes that dogs might value and relate to each other in ways unsanctioned by their owners, reflecting her own radical politics. For Helbeck, Bruno is the means of controlling male solitude; the dog exists to guard against and ward off intrusion and to provide masculine companionship in the bachelor space. For Laura, Bruno is an animal who might enjoy the company of another animal; her use of “delicious” to describe Fricka playfully acknowledges the double-edged nature of animal relations in which Bruno is as likely to find Fricka a tempting treat on which to prey as he is to see her as a sexual partner. Her speech patterns to Bruno therefore provide a sharp contrast to Helbeck’s earlier commands, both in content and in tone. His “Come here,” “Be quiet,” and “do you hear?” speak to Helbeck’s ingrained patriarchal command over his pet, while Laura’s “caressing intensity” is marked by promises – “I’ll do everything proper” – and beseeching – “will you?” Through her depiction of their relationships with their dogs, Ward clearly identifies her protagonists in gendered ways that construct them as opposites and opponents, even while she links them together as kindred spirits through their shared habit of speaking to their companion animals. When people talk to animals, of course, such speech is not always entirely meant as communication for the dogs; instead, people often speak through animals in ways that are pointed at human listeners. In “Speaking for Dogs,” Clinton R. Sanders and Arnold Arluke observe that “those who live with companion animals routinely define them as minded coactors, as virtual persons whose abilities are quantitatively different, but not qualitatively different from those of humans” (64). In speaking to or on behalf of animals, pet owners “actively incorporate their mute companions into the ‘language community’” (64). Arguably, Laura’s “I’ll take you up and introduce you – I’ll

34  Love Me, Love My Dog do everything proper!” (Ward 17) can be read as such an attempt on her part to recognize Bruno’s status as a member of the household who deserves politeness and formality as much as (or perhaps more than, in the case of Helbeck) do the human occupants. Nevertheless, her “I’ll do ­everything proper” also suggests Helbeck has failed in this regard. As host, it was his responsibility to handle all introductions, and her speech to the dog therefore is aimed at Helbeck, puncturing his most highly valued sense of propriety. She is engaging, in other words, in what Sanders and Arluke i­dentify as “triangling”: “Essentially, turning the speaking for process around, the speaker presents the virtual voice of the animal to express his or her own orientation, desires, or concerns” (66). At one point, Laura talks to the animal as a way of both criticizing Helbeck and excluding him from the discussion: “‘Don’t you like – society?’ He laughed with some embarrassment. ‘I don’t get much of it,’ he said simply. ‘Don’t you? What a pity! – isn’t it, Bruno? I like society dreadfully – dances, theatres, parties – all sorts of things’” (Ward 17). What Bruno might feel about his owner’s lack of society is not entirely clear, of course, but by speaking for Bruno and, more importantly, inviting Bruno’s opinion as one that is aligned with hers and opposed to his master’s, Laura seeks to shame Helbeck for his social backwardness and demonstrate for him that she is capable of winning over what little canine companionship he currently enjoys. When she “occupie[s] herself entirely with the dog, talking a sort of baby language to him that left Helbeck absolutely dumb” (17), she in fact reverses the language structures of the home, inviting Bruno to engage with her in speech while consigning Helbeck to the disempowered position of muteness. Though Laura’s speech is somewhat indirect, triangulated as it is through Bruno, the confrontational nature of her speech can be seen in its contrast with earlier representations of triangulation, as seen particularly in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), in which Dora uses her dog Jip to express her feelings. Though equally frustrated with her dependency, Dora’s use of her dog to question her social position further underlines her powerlessness: “You are not very intimate with Miss Murdstone, are you?” said Dora. –“My pet.” (The two last words were to the dog. Oh, if they had only been to me!) “No,” I replied. “Not at all so.” “She is a tiresome creature. … I am sure I don’t want a protector. Jip can protect me a great deal better than Miss Murdstone, can’t you, Jip, dear? … We mean to bestow our confidence where we like, and to find out our own friends, instead of having them found out for us – don’t we, Jip? … Never mind, Jip. We won’t be confidential, and we’ll make ourselves as happy as we can in spite of her, and we’ll tease her, and not please her – won’t we, Jip?” (278)

Love Me, Love My Dog  35 Through her “conversation” with Jip, which largely consists of tags inviting his agreement at the end of her statements – “can’t you,” “don’t we,” and “won’t we” – Dora ventriloquizes her feelings toward her current state of supervised, extended adolescence and her own bid for independence. Such declarations of self-direction and intent on her part are highly complicated through her use of the dog to vocalize them. Dora does not directly state her own feelings but instead invokes a “we” to give added force to her words, demonstrating her own powerlessness through her need to shore up her opinions with an even less empowered personage than herself. The fact that they are primarily questions, rather than statements, further speaks to her lack of power. While Laura asks Bruno for an opinion, and then immediately supplies her own, using his muteness as an opportunity to fill in the gaps with her own speech, Dora follows her statements with questions to Jip, seeking approval and/or support for the declarations she does not feel fully capable of making on her own. Nevertheless, Jip does provide Dora with a space to speak what she cannot and a relationship in which she has some measure of control. Jip empowers Dora to show David she is interested in finding a “friend” of her own, suggesting her openness to being courted by David, and the vague directedness of the appellation “pet” speaks to a carefully masked, but nevertheless present, flirtation. Even her “I don’t need a protector” can be read as a sign there is a vacancy in this role, given it is only currently being held by Jip. But her “we’ll tease, and not please her” does not include David and instead reveals a camaraderie between woman and lapdog of which David is very much an outsider, a throwback to earlier representations of the “lady and the lapdog” and one which indicates Dora might be more invested in her play with the dog than in companionship with David. Later on, Dora proclaims, “I’ll make Jip bite you” (381) to David and “I’ll make Jip bark at you” to David’s aunt (525), thus aligning herself with the animal against her chosen partner and his family. Jip operates therefore as a complicated tool in Dora’s power negotiations with her husband-to-be and in-laws, representing both her powerlessness in her use of such a ridiculous creature to fight on her behalf, as well as her own ventriloquized but nevertheless heart-felt rebelliousness. The ventriloquization of human wants and needs through a mute animal reveals complicated power relations which on the surface, disempower the animal, but also speak to unequal and disempowered positions occupied by humans. On the one hand, Dora’s use of Jip and Laura and Helbeck’s use of their dogs as a means of communication ultimately silence the pets because the humans use the animals’ “muteness” to speak for them. The problem of the “mute” animal is a central concern in animal-rights-based discourse, of course, which has often highlighted the all-important link between the ability to self-represent and political and social power. Animals were and are often constructed as “dumb,” with their lack of human speech making them both difficult to read and, conversely, eminently useful as objects to

36  Love Me, Love My Dog be written upon. This muteness was and is often directly linked to animals’ lack of power and agency in human society; as Erica Fudge summarizes, “We disavow (exclude, silence) the animal in order to constitute (make) ourselves” (7). But animal companions are not always helpless conveyors of human meaning, a point alluded to in Eliot’s Adam Bede when Dinah observes, “‘I’ve a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to ’em because they couldn’t. I can’t help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there’s no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can’t say half what we feel, with all our words” (118). Her observation “we can’t say half we feel, with all our words” gestures toward speech not as a source of empowerment but instead as an impediment – as something that regulates the expression of true feeling rather than allowing it to be expressed, to be open to others with whom one wants to communicate. As James Eli Adams discusses in his analysis of animals as “mute choric figures” in Adam Bede, “The inability to articulate one’s most profound feelings and thoughts may be an obstacle to heightened consciousness … yet the same failure may also be evidence of the depth of one’s feelings” (228). As a result, “utterance which is inarticulate and incoherent may confirm the authority of the feeling it cannot directly express” (228). Adams’s linkage of inarticulation to depth of feeling draws upon a long history linking speech not solely to truth but also to sophistry and dissembling. Thus, in her discussion of Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt; or, Sir Oran Haut-ton (1818), Laura Brown observes, “Sir Oran [an orang-utan] embodies the modern question of the role of speech in defining the human, or, more broadly, the nature of language in relation to human and nonhuman being. Peacock’s text follows verse and line of contemporary debates on language in recounting that Sir Oran lacks speech but has the physiological organs and full potential for learning to speak, that he does not yet speak because speech is ‘highly artificial’” (5). In Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier (1848), Bob explains further: “Dogs, indeed, cannot speak, and therefore they do not flatter; but they can feel obligation, and express it, without the intervention of language” (Weir 48–49). Helbeck, Laura, and Dora might, that is, be disempowering their animals by employing them as tools in a complicated debate they are h ­ aving between themselves and others, but their very use of the “mute” animal exposes their own disempowerment. Much of what they wish to express, from the eroticism of “you darling!” and “my pet” to the violence of “little brute” and “I’ll make him bite you,” cannot be directly said by them. They are rendered at least partially mute by structures of gender, politics, and sexuality, structures that cause them to speak vicariously through their pets. Humans have speech, but speech is as likely to be restricted by the rules of society as it is to express what humans feel. Indeed, as seen in Agnes Grey and Adam Bede, dogs at times possess the ability to “speak” when their masters and mistresses can or may not. In both

Love Me, Love My Dog  37 novels, Agnes and Adam are witnesses to scenes of love-making they find difficulty disrupting. Walking home with his dog Gyp, Adam unwittingly happens upon an intimate meeting between his upper-class friend and patron, Arthur Donnithorne, and the woman Adam believes he loves, Hetty Sorrel: “He remained as motionless as a statue, and turned almost as pale. The two figures were standing opposite to each other, with clasped hands, about to part; and while they were bending to kiss, Gyp, who had been running among the brushwood, came out, caught sight of them, and gave a sharp bark” (Eliot 297). It is very tempting to read Gyp’s vocalization here as an expression of Adam’s own feelings. Adam may be “motionless” and silent, but through his dog his desire to yell out is actualized and has the wonted effect of disrupting the interaction between the two illicit lovers. Gyp here has the power to do what, momentarily, his master does not. Adam is in a complicated position not only because he is an accidental trespasser upon a private scene but also because Arthur is his social superior and Adam’s own desired claim to Hetty has never been stated outright. By comparison, Gyp knows nothing of the dynamics involved and simply expresses his presence to all and sundry. Not being aware of the politics or emotions involved, Gyp has the power to speak while his master is momentarily silenced. Tellingly, Arthur Donnithorne assumes Adam will remain silent because “he was a sensible fellow, and would not babble about it to other people” (298). Like a master with a dog, Arthur assumes Adam’s ability to speak or not speak is his to command. Nevertheless, by transforming the private moment into a public scene, Gyp in fact reverses this power dynamic, for in transforming Adam’s position from that of secret observer to witness, Gyp removes at least part of the social injunction keeping Adam from speaking, allowing Adam to express the feelings of righteousness and rage brought about by Arthur’s actions. Agnes Grey occupies a much more helpless social position, and her ­powerlessness is particularly poignant because she is in fact expected to guide and control her young charges. Unlike Adam, however, who despite his lower-class status is nevertheless empowered to speak by the privilege accorded his stalwart, rustic masculinity, Agnes’s rightful authority is continually undermined both by her social class and her gender. Upbraided by Mrs. Murray for neglecting her duty of supervision, Agnes is ordered to interrupt the daughter’s “accidental” unsupervised meeting with Mr.  ­Hatfield, proving again that dogs are not the only ones subject to orders: “Well, go – go, there’s no time to be lost” (Brontë 180). Though she is quick to follow orders, Agnes does not possess the power to enforce them: Here was a poser for me. It was my duty to interrupt the tête-à-tête – but how was it to be done? Mr. Hatfield could not be driven away by so insignificant a person as I; and to go and place myself on the other side of Miss Murray, and intrude my unwelcome presence upon her without noticing her companion, was a piece of rudeness I could not

38  Love Me, Love My Dog be guilty of, neither had I the courage to cry aloud from the top of the field that she was wanted elsewhere. (180) Agnes is here rendered literally unable to speak, to “do her duty” (though supposedly empowered to do so), by the complexities of her social position and her own perceptions of propriety. Her “duty” is to do what she has been trained as a well-brought-up young woman not to do: “interrupt” and “intrude” on a conversation, however illicit that conversation may be. For her, the choices are either to engage in a “piece of rudeness” or to “cry aloud,” neither of which she feels capable of doing. Constrained by her gender, which positions her as able to upbraid Miss Murray but not her male companion, and by her social position, which causes her to be so “insignificant” as to not warrant attention by Mr. Hatfield and to be “unwelcome” to her charge, Agnes is frozen between what she has been commanded to do by her employer and by what she cannot do without breaking social custom and violating her own timidity. Snap, however, is not likewise constrained: “But Snap, running before me, interrupted her in the midst of some half-pert, half-playful repartee, by catching hold of her dress, and vehemently tugging thereat. …” (181). Maggie Berg’s reading of Snap as an alter ego for Agnes is very much supported by this scene, as she asserts, “The verb to ‘snap’ … is precisely what Agnes cannot do” (“Women and Animals” 191). While I agree Snap can be read in this light, I also want to acknowledge his status as an admittedly minor character in the novel, one whose actions are made to mean something by those around him but who is not necessarily reducible to a symbolic representation of the human character’s feelings. Being the dog he is, Snap recognizes Miss Murray as someone with whom he is familiar, and the tone of voice used by this person is perhaps one that suggests she is open to play. Unconstrained by either Agnes’s timidity or Hatfield and Miss Murray’s half-measures – “half-pert, half-playful” – Snap disrupts the delicate negotiations in which all the human parties in this scene are engaged with a refreshing lack of consideration for how his advances will be met – ­ironically, as it turns out, as he is the only one who faces actual physical repercussions for his actions, being met with a “resounding thwack” (Brontë 181) upon his head by the reverend’s cane. Snap may run headlong into situations that human social rules make far more complicated, and though he might be unwelcome and unwelcomed, yet he is at least not frozen into inaction by competing social rules and gender norms. This distinction between pets as actors within the plot and pets as symbolic representations of repressed human emotions is also evident in a scene from E. Burrows’s Neptune: or, the Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog (1869). In this animal autobiography, which closely details the training and discipline of a large Newfoundland dog by his beloved but autocratic mistress, the control of the large male dog’s body by his small, delicate, but strong-willed mistress provides the central tension of the text. While

Love Me, Love My Dog  39 Neptune at various points in the narrative rebels against his mistress, and certainly has the physical power to do so, yet Miss Kate Roscoe always overcomes his resistance: “… my mistress, leaning into the kennel, seized me by the collar, dragged me out into the yard, and flogged me with a whip she held in her hand till the breath was almost out of my body. … I was thunderstruck, stupefied, bruised, and sore. But my bodily discomfort was nothing to my mental discomfiture. I was cowed and conquered” (33). In a contest of wills between human mistress and pet dog, Neptune is clearly demonstrated throughout to be rightfully disciplined by his female master, his punishments providing both an expected display of human dominance over animals and a less-than-expected representation of female authority and power.2 But in a scene in which Miss Roscoe is confronted by an unwanted sexual advance, it is Neptune’s ability to speak that is crucial: I had just come out of the water, and was giving myself a most satisfactory shake to restore my circulation, when I heard a low whistle, which I knew was my mistress’s call when she did not wish to excite observation. … I bounded off to her side, reaching her just in time to see a tall, powerful-looking man, dressed as a gentleman, leaning over her, and evidently saying something she did not like. … my mistress passed her finger lightly through my collar, and, leaning over me, whispered, “Growl; growl low, Nep. …” Full and round and deep came my voice, saying as plain as growls could say – “Be off yourself, man, or you and I will try which is master.” It was a fair challenge, which the man had not the pluck to accept, and, with an angry imprecation upon my head, he turned and walked away. “Good dog – good Nep,” said my dear mistress, the moment he was out of sight. “Good, good old Nep; you do not know what you have saved me from. Good dog; good dog;” and, leaning over me, she kissed me, till I was half out of my wits with joy. (41) Miss Roscoe does not speak in this situation – at least not to the man who is “saying something she did not like” – and in a text in which she is a dominant figure, always in control, her lack of voice is striking. Her actions are also uncharacteristically furtive; she whispers and does “not wish to excite observation.” Her wonted authority is reversed or, more accurately, revealed as qualitatively different when viewed through the different lens of human/ human relations. With her dog, she is a powerful and enchanting mistress, a figure of mingled awe, fear, and love, one who it is a combined obligation and pleasure to serve and obey. With the man, however, she is merely a woman, someone who he may approach, proposition, and threaten. No

40  Love Me, Love My Dog longer a person who is fully empowered to represent herself, Miss Roscoe must instead speak through her dog, with Neptune arguably becoming her voice, the means by which her desires – to tell the man to “Be off” – can be conveyed. But the inclusion of Neptune’s interior voice complicates a reading of Neptune as solely a representation of Miss Roscoe’s repressed desire for the power to fight back against her male oppressor, making it unclear whether or not Neptune is simply speaking for her or whether it is ­Neptune who is instead empowered in this moment to lay claims on her that he wishes to make. For Neptune, this is a battle of masculine power: “Be off yourself, man, or you and I will try which is master.” The mistress is somewhat erased here in a battle between males over who will be master and who will have rights to the spoils of this conflict, namely, the woman over whom they are fighting. Neptune’s role as sexual rival to this unwonted suitor actualizes the erotic desires he betrays for his mistress throughout the text: “I have looked into many a lovely face since then; I have been caressed by many a soft white hand, but no face has been to me like Cousin Kate’s sweet face, no hand but hers has ever been so soft and white” (12). In this moment of confrontation, therefore, he is both following his mistress’s orders by acting as her voice and using his own voice to lay claim to his mistress’s affections and revel in the vanquishing of a “tall, powerful man” (41). In so doing, Neptune somewhat compensates for his loss of power to a small, “sweet” and “soft” woman. Reading ­Neptune only as a representation of his mistress’s voice and power would fail to acknowledge the complicated gender and species power relations that occur in a scene such as this. The barking, decidedly non-mute animal who acts as a rival for human suitors is in fact a central motif of the “lady and the lapdog” trope, in which “the lapdog’s proximity to the lady is contrasted with his comic distance from those around her … and is seen as a substitute for a natural or normal human connection” (Brown 84). Reading David Copperfield (1850), Brown argues, “During David’s courtship of Dora, Jip elicits the envy of the displaced human lover, and Dora’s treatment of the dog reproduces the language of immoderate love, with its caresses, its erotic ‘punishments,’ and its licking tongue” (83). At the early stage of their courtship, David clearly wishes to take Jip’s place for, as with Neptune and the male “suitor,” Jip and David are locked in a battle for their mistress: He was mortally jealous of me, and persisted in barking at me. She took him up in her arms – oh my goodness! – and caressed him, but he persisted upon barking still. He wouldn’t let me touch him, when I tried; and then she beat him. It increased my sufferings greatly to see the pats she gave him for punishment on the bridge of his blunt nose, while he winked his eyes, and licked her hand, and still growled within himself like a little double-bass. (Dickens 278)

Love Me, Love My Dog  41 Here, the dog becomes the means by which David reveals his own desires for submissive puppy-hood, his own wish to be both coddled and punished by a playful yet powerful mistress. David is clearly envying the dog’s mingled discipline and petting by his mistress, but such a state of submissiveness does not accord with the gender roles he and Dora will occupy once they are married. In a successful romance, such as that of Agnes and Mr. Weston, David should displace Jip as the center of Dora’s affections, taking the place of master and sometimes pet, with the dog displaced by human progeny. At a decisive moment in his courtship of Dora, David does appear to unseat the dog, performing appropriate mastery to great effect: “‘Jip, you naughty boy, come here!’ I don’t know how I did it. I did it in a moment. I intercepted Jip. I had Dora in my arms. I was full of eloquence. I never stopped for a word. I told her how I loved her. I told her I should die without her. I told her that I idolized and worshipped her. Jip barked madly all the time” (345). David thinks he has succeeded in asserting his claim to Dora, “intercepting” his rival and combating Jip’s “mad barks” with his own “eloquence.” Speech seems to trump animal “muteness” in this moment; David “never stopped for a word” and the scene ends with he and Dora “sitting on the sofa by and by, quiet enough” with “Jip … lying in her lap, winking peacefully at me” (345). While all seems to be well in this moment, David’s acceptance of Jip as someone with whom he shares Dora demonstrates David has not fully mastered this situation, as evidenced in a later scene in which he and Dora enter their marital home for the first time. David wants “to carry Jip” (oddly, instead of his wife) but is prevented by Dora, who feels “she must carry him, or else he’ll think she don’t [sic] like him any more, now she is married, and will break his heart” (448). David’s continued capitulation to Dora’s whims, represented in his acceptance of Jip as a significant other in their relationship (even on his and Dora’s wedding night) and combined with Dora’s insistence that Jip’s feelings take precedence over David’s desires, reveal a couple still caught up in the playful erotics of pet-hood, a power dynamic that should be superseded at this point by more heteronormative gender roles and power relations. Furthermore, rather than David displacing Jip as the center of Dora’s affections, the narrative instead clearly aligns Dora with Jip as a petted creature, one that friends and family, to David’s discomfiture, “all seemed to treat … in her degree, much as Dora treated Jip in his” (427). With wife and dog as pets within the home, and with both disrupting and undermining David’s mastery, David’s needs as man of the house are not met, a point supported by the novel’s loving detailing of Dora’s disastrous housekeeping and home management. “AND NOW I THINK I HAVE SAID SUFFICIENT” DISAPPEARING, DYING, AND DEAD DOGS What Jip has failed to do at this point in the narrative is to fade into the background, and his continued presence in the narrative is, I argue, a crucial

42  Love Me, Love My Dog sign of the marriage’s impending doom. If pets are meant, within stories of courtship and heteronormative coupling, as stand-ins for prospective partners and eventual progeny, then their stubborn refusal to shift themselves and make way for their human replacements suggests the “natural family” that is meant to come into being is threatened, whether through a failure to achieve the purposed goal of marriage and parenthood or because the ­animal has succeeded in being a rival for human affections. As David relates, Jip becomes a literal obstacle in the marital home: I could not have wished for a prettier little wife at the opposite end of the table, but I certainly could have wished, when we sat down, for a little more room. I did not know how it was, but … I suspect it may have been because nothing had a place of its own, except Jip’s pagoda, which invariably blocked up the main thoroughfare. … There was another thing I could have wished, namely, that Jip had never been encouraged to walk about the tablecloth during dinner. I began to think there was something disorderly in his being there at all, even if he had not been in the habit of putting his foot in the salt or the melted butter. (454) David’s home should be his castle, a space of retreat to relieve David’s struggles to make his way in the public sphere. According to the middle-class ideology of the home, “The husband was to govern, the wife to manage; the husband to provide, the wife to distribute; the husband to inform, the wife to nurture” (Tosh, A Man’s Place 47). Despite the supposed gendered separation of public and private, “The Victorian ideal of domesticity was in all respects the creation of men as much as women” (50) with the home “determined by the needs of men” (48). In the home, David wants to be (like Sir James Chettam) petted, nurtured and nourished by a wife who manages and orders the domestic space. But there is no room for him. While he sits at the head of the table, his wife’s pet disorders it and has been encouraged to do so, and the entrance to David’s home, which should welcome him in from his soul-deadening efforts in the public sphere, is instead blocked by a home set up for Jip’s comfort. Jip’s pagoda, representative of a foreign presence in the domestic sphere, makes it clear this is Jip’s castle, not David’s, a point that underlines David’s powerlessness to enforce proper domesticity. Furthermore, Jip’s pagoda speaks to the linkage between home and nation: David’s failed patriarchy undermines the English home and the role it plays in supporting English imperial authority. Rather than disappearing, Jip is the pet David should be, Dora’s “favourite” (454), and Jip’s continued reign within the home spells doom for the future, because the other figure Jip should be displaced by is, of course, the child of David and Dora. However, her mismanagement of the home and her over-investment in Jip represent Dora’s failure to leave childhood behind and become the mid-century ideal of the angel of the home. David

Love Me, Love My Dog  43 expresses his hope that “lighter hands than mine would help to mould her character, and that a baby-smile upon her breast might change my ­child-wife to a woman” (495), but miscarriage ensures the “child-wife” of the novel remains in a perpetual girlhood, locked with Jip as her only partner and progeny. At this point in the novel, “Jip’s special intimacy with Dora is emphasized at the time of her decline and death” (Brown 84), with Dora observing Jip’s growing age while those around her observe her growing weakness. When David’s aunt suggests Jip might be replaced, Dora’s response is telling: “I couldn’t have any other dog but Jip,” said Dora. “It would be so unkind to Jip! Besides, I couldn’t be such friends with any other dog but Jip; because he wouldn’t have known me before I was married, and wouldn’t have barked at Doady when he first came to our house. I couldn’t care for any other dog but Jip, I am afraid, aunt. … You are not so old, Jip, are you, that you’ll leave your mistress yet?” said Dora. “We may keep one another company a little longer!” (Dickens 498) For Dora, Jip is a link to the past, to girlhood and her pre-marital state; his value lies in being the companion who barked at David, thus warding off, perhaps, her fateful future in which attempts at fulfilling a womanly, wifely role seem to literally kill her. David’s fear “that the day may never shine, when I shall see my child-wife running in the sunlight with her old friend Jip” (541) is quite spectacularly brought to fruition when Jip and Dora drop dead virtually at the same time. Dora’s failure to move on from pet to husband and child, from child-wife to womanly wife and mother, finds no ­better expression than in her near-simultaneous demise with the beloved pet she failed to leave behind. For Laura Brown, the combination of Dora’s innocence and the narrative’s sentimentality means this moment cannot easily be subsumed within the “suggestion of an awakening or excessive or perverse female sexuality” (85) so present in eighteenth-century “lady and the lapdog” texts. Instead, Dora and Jip’s relationship speaks to “immoderate love … an idea of a realm outside the bounds of the normal, which emerges from the relationships of inversion and reversal that characterize this imaginative encounter with animal-kind” (85). However, I argue that Dora’s bond with Jip does speak to “perverse” or, perhaps more accurately, non-normative female sexuality. However sentimental their passing, Dora and Jip are punished narratively for the failure they represent, excised from a text that celebrates proper middle-class domesticity and which has used the two of them to speak to gender and species dead ends. Dora’s “immoderate love” for Jip, viewed in terms of mid-­Victorian familialism, speaks to her role as a childish woman, one trapped in a ­self-focused, self-serving relation with a non-human animal that excludes and ignores the needs of her husband and prevents her from fulfilling her role as mother.

44  Love Me, Love My Dog By contrast, the pet that disappears from the narrative demonstrates that the pet has successfully served its purpose and is no longer required. In Agnes Grey, for example, Snap simply vanishes from the plot once Mr. Weston and Agnes come to an understanding. While it is convention in the Victorian novel to often provide the reader with some closure on major and minor characters, extending the fantasy of realism by showing us the future lives of characters that exist beyond the narrative, yet this is not the case with pets; beloved as he is, Snap merits less attention in terms of being granted a conclusion to his story than do the other minor characters in the text. Human characters might go on to after-lives, but pets, once they have achieved the end for which they were introduced, cease to narratively exist. Berg is correct that Snap is left at home on the occasion of Mr. Weston’s proposal to Agnes, as “she symbolically replaces Snap. Leaving his dog at home that day, Weston arrives declaring his intention to take Agnes out for a walk” (“Women and Animals” 192). Significantly, Agnes also does not require the companionship of Snap now she has Mr. Weston; no longer is the dog “the only thing I had to love me” for Agnes (229) as she has found something better: a husband and, as the narrative assures us, future children, “Edward, Agnes, and little Mary” (302). Her story ends with “And now I think I have said sufficient” (302), and indeed she has – with the attainment of a fully complete “natural” family, all beloved former companions are no longer necessary. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the pet dog’s disappearance is seamless, with the narrative carefully replacing dog with child in ways that beg us to see Gilbert’s ascension from pet-owner to father figure. After being separated while Helen has dutifully attended her dying husband’s deathbed, Helen and Gilbert are reunited, but fail at first to make their feelings for each other clear. In this fraught and tense meeting, child and dog work to relieve the tension between the adults while also serving to highlight Gilbert and Helen’s emotions: There was a pause of which Arthur thought he might venture to avail himself to introduce his handsome young setter and show me how wonderfully it was grown and improved, and to ask after the welfare of its father Sancho. … Helen immediately pushed the book from her and after silently surveying her son, his friend, and his dog for a few minutes, she dismissed the former from the room under the pretence of wishing him to fetch his last new book to show me. The child obeyed with alacrity; but I continued caressing the dog. (Brontë 421) The dog plays a strange role in this exchange, operating as it does as the link between Gilbert and Arthur in defiance of Arthur’s mother, who has not yet ascertained the status of her relationship with Gilbert. In ordering her child from the room, Helen declares obliquely her desire to get at the heart of the matter, using Arthur’s absence to ask, “Gilbert, what is

Love Me, Love My Dog  45 the matter with you?” (421). But it is Gilbert’s statement, “but I continued caressing the dog” that seems particularly meaningful to me. Helen has succeeded in clearing one obstacle, her son, from the scene of her rapprochement with Gilbert, but Gilbert keeps the dog there, seemingly as a defiant sign of his right to be on intimate terms with this family. This action on his part is proven correct, for once he and Helen fully understand each other, the dog can rightfully be replaced with the proper filial figure, who has returned with his book: “… now I affectionately stroked his curling locks, and even kissed his ivory forehead: he was my own Helen’s son, and therefore mine; and as such I have ever since regarded him” (427). Having pre-emptively established a kind of paternity by giving his chosen paramour’s son the puppy of his dog, Gilbert now completes the circle, bringing human father and son together, fur-stroking replaced with hair-caressing. Needless to say, in the final paragraphs of the text detailing their future together, Sancho and the puppy do not merit a mention. Similarly, in Adam Bede, the faithful Gyp no longer plays a role in the narrative once Adam and Dinah successfully come together, a somewhat surprising development given Gyp’s centrality to constructions of home, love, and companionship. Early on, Gyp is established as a key figure in Adam’s life, appearing in the opening pages of the novel in the first descriptions of Adam in his workplace. Through Gyp, we are made cognizant of the softer side of the stalwart Adam in regards to his family, and of the extent to which others come to know Adam through Gyp. His brother Seth observes, “Thee’t like thy dog Gyp – thee bark’st at me sometimes, but thee allays lick’st my hand after’” (12), a point supported by Adam’s changing demeanour: “‘What, art ready for the basket, eh Gyp?’ said Adam, with the same gentle modulation of voice as when he spoke to Seth” (14). Through his relationship with Gyp, Adam is shown to be an admirable candidate for future fatherhood, possessing the ability to show care and gentleness to his domestic circle even while employing a rugged hardiness at his place of work. Adam and Gyp are in fact so closely tied in the minds of his family that Adam’s mother treats the dog as proxy for her sometimes difficult and emotionally absent son: “… she got up and called Gyp, thinking to console herself somewhat for Adam’s refusal of the supper she spread out in the loving expectation of looking at him while he ate it, by feeding Adam’s dog with extra liberality” (44). As she later tells him, “‘Thee needsna be gi’in’ th’ dog,’ said Lisbeth: ‘I’n fed him well a’ready. I’m not like to forget him, I reckon, when he’s all o’ thee I can get sight on’” (238). Gyp, that is, provides the means by which all the members of the family show love and affection for each other; their rustic, stoic ways making open affection more difficult, they find expression for their love through the animal, truly employing Gyp as a “family-constituting being” (Pearson 37). Like other dogs mentioned earlier, Gyp also serves to sanction Adam’s future mate, Dinah: “… he trotted towards her, and put up his muzzle against her hand in a friendly way. ‘You see Gyp

46  Love Me, Love My Dog bids you welcome,’ said Adam, ‘and he’s very slow to welcome strangers’” (118). In turn, Gyp serves to make Adam’s romantic feelings visible to those around him through comparison to Gyp’s own example of loyalty and love: “Thee’t fonder on her nor thee know’st,” Adam’s mother claims, “Thy eyes follow her about, welly as Gyp’s follow thee” (502). Important as he is as a representation of Adam’s relationship to his family and Adam’s future relationship to his wife, one would expect Gyp to receive some ending of note, but such is not the case. Instead we are presented with the inevitable sign of Dinah and Adam’s successful coupling: happy, roundcheeked, decidedly non-furry children who complete the family circle and fulfill the promise held out by Adam’s taciturn but kindly relationship with his now completely absent dog: “‘See, Addy,’ said Seth, lowering the young one to his arm now, and pointing, ‘there’s father coming – at the far stile.’ Dinah hastened her steps, and little Lisbeth ran on at her utmost speed til she clasped her father’s leg. Adam patted her head and lifted her up to kiss her …” (582). Young Addy and Lisbeth, running to meet Adam on his way home from work, successfully displace the watchful Gyp, whose role it was to always walk along beside Adam, carrying his master’s lunch basket and receiving his master’s affection in return. While it may seem to be asking too much to expect some mention of a dog at this point in the narrative, some moving scene of the place where he is buried with an empty lunch basket marking the spot, I argue that this absence is meaningful; Gyp has, after all, played an incredibly significant role in the text as representative of family, care, and mute depth of feeling. If he is no longer here, it is because he is no longer needed, with Adam having attained the family for which poor Gyp was only a temporary place-holder. All of these instances of disappearing pets suggest that, narratively, pets play a different role than they did culturally. While a pet within the home, as discussed in the Introduction, served an important function in terms of teaching children affection and training children in their future domestic roles, the pet within the domestic novel plays a different role. Rather than a member of the natural/nuclear family, the pet in domestic fiction is often instead a plot device and place-holder. He or she may bring the romantic couple together and may serve as a place-holder and/or symbol of the children they will have, but once that function is complete, the pet no longer has a place in the narrative. While the disappearances of Snap, Sancho and the puppy, and Gyp all speak to their erasure by the human partners and progeny for whom they were simply preparation, the disappearance of the pet dogs in Helbeck of Bannisdale is instead a sign of the proposed marital relationship’s failure and the death of a (reproductive) future. Written as it is at the end of the century and speaking to a decline in literary representations of familialism in favor of a “rejection of the celebratory and prescriptive treatment of families so common in Victorian literature” (Hatten 14), Ward’s novel is nevertheless conservative. Though it, like other late and early twentieth-century novels,

Love Me, Love My Dog  47 “depicts families as impediments to individual fulfillment, magnifies and emphasizes the flaws of families, and revels in alienation from the norm of family life” (14), Ward’s text also represents the loss of familialism as tragic, one that dooms the protagonists to isolation and loneliness and which is measured, in part, through the disappearance, rather than displacement, of their pets. Helbeck and Laura, divided by religion, nevertheless come together in a passionate relationship, one that is aided and abetted by their dogs. Helbeck’s monk-like devotion to his church has thus far displaced the full development of his sexuality because “for the Church’s sake, he had now remained unmarried some fifteen years. He lived like an ascetic in the great house … he spent all his income – except a fraction – on the good works of a wide district; when larger sums were necessary he was ready, nay, eager, to sell the land necessary to provide them. …” (134). Helbeck begins to come alive to sexuality and the future it promises through Laura’s influence, a point supported by Laura’s continual association with the dogs and the natural, living world: “Laura began to run; the two dogs leapt about her; her light voice, checking or caressing, came back to Helbeck on the spring wind. He watched her and her companions so long as they were in sight – the golden hair among the trees, the dancing steps of the girl, the answering frolic of the dogs” (Ward 60). Closed inside his decaying familial home, largely unfurnished as a result of his expenditures, the celibate Helbeck is invigorated by the effervescent Laura and their dog companions, and through their influence he is newly able to envision a vibrant future: … he perceived a small figure sitting on a stone seat in front of him. It was Miss Fountain. She had a book on her knee, and the two dogs were beside her. Her white dress and hat seemed to make the centre of a whole landscape. The river bent inward in a great sweep at her feet, the crag rose behind her, and the great prospect seemed spread there for her eyes alone. A strange fancy seized Helbeck. This was his world – his world by inheritance and by love. Five weeks before he had walked about it as a solitary. And now this figure sat enthroned, as it were, at the heart of it. (145) Laura, dressed with virginal, bridal potential, surrounded by rising crags and sweeping river, with two dogs beside her, is the virtual symbol for marriage and parenthood, promising to displace dying religion, needy orphans, and empty hallways with burgeoning life, sexuality, and communion with nature. Laura and the dogs hold the possibility of disrupting ­Helbeck’s self-­annihilating, ascetic aestheticism, displacing it instead with the socially accepted and demanded acquiescence to futurity as represented by ­“inheritance … and love” (145). Laura, that is, represents life and reproductive power, in stark opposition to Helbeck’s rejection of reproductive futurism in favor of devotion

48  Love Me, Love My Dog to his mostly dead family and his church’s past glory. Like other miserly, ­misanthropic nineteenth-century figures such as Ebenezer Scrooge, Helbeck in the early portions of the novel experiences real pleasure in his “stingy, reclusive, and anticommunitarian ways” (Edelman 42). Helbeck rejects not just reproductive sexuality but also the very fantasy of family and lineage, of nation and community, as seen in his decision to gut his inheritance for the sake of non-related orphans (themselves representative of death and disrupted family lineage) and in his fractured relations with his Church of England neighbors. He similarly rejects life itself in his strict, ascetic diet, according to which he sits with no food in front of himself while feeding his guests. His proposed union with Laura, negotiated through their dogs, disrupts this dead future, awakening within him his deadened sexuality and an awareness of his waning years: “… when she caressed the dogs, her tones had the note in them which had startled him on her very first evening under his roof. It was the emergence of something hidden and passionate; and it awoke in himself … the passing surge of an old memory long since thrust down and buried. How fast his youth was going from him!” (Ward 139). The continual association of Laura with the dogs speaks to their potential to be, like Sancho and Snap, representatives of future fecundity. Furthermore, Laura’s ability to bring Fricka and Bruno together despite Helbeck’s efforts to keep them apart is a triumph of heterosexuality over homosociality, of union over isolation, one that symbolically presents Helbeck with the option of choosing spring time, frolic, and future progeny over “thrust down” “old memory” and waning years. This promise of nature, futurity, and fecundity is never fulfilled, however, in large part due to Laura and Helbeck’s failure to properly perform their gender. Laura, as an atheist New Woman, is unable to embrace Helbeck’s religion, and her refusal to bend to what is required for their union embodies the threat that her political views represent to marriage: “By the end of the century, gender relations and gender identities were … in a state of flux. Female skepticism about marriage and women’s growing sense of independence led to a ‘crisis in masculinity’, and to the social construction of homosexualities” (Gordon and Nair 175). By refusing Helbeck, Laura fails to provide him with the means of combining faith and futurity, sentencing him instead to a life of homosocial, anti-reproductive relations. That she and the dogs initially represent a different option is made clear in a scene in which a young Jesuit whom Helbeck has sponsored responds to “a picture – recently taken – of Miss Fountain sitting on the settle in the Hall with the dogs beside her. … The young man was conscious of a strong movement of repulsion” (Ward 302–03). Mr. Williams represents a specific affront to the class and sexual politics of the novel, as he is a peasant whom Helbeck has raised through aiding his conversion to Catholicism and entrance into the Jesuit brotherhood, thereby establishing him as an equal within a homosocial fraternity. The repulsion this young man feels for Laura and the promise of Helbeck’s heterosexual union, as represented by the dogs, is no less than

Love Me, Love My Dog  49 Laura’s repulsion for him as both a rival for Helbeck’s allegiance and as a lower-class upstart, unequal to Helbeck’s patronage. Nevertheless, a future of homosociality within the confines of the Catholic church is what Laura sentences Helbeck to in her ultimate rejection of him, with the novel ending with Helbeck becoming a Jesuit. If all had been well for Laura and Helbeck’s future, her close association with the dogs would have been properly displaced by a caressing passion for Helbeck, resulting in frolics with their children upon their invigorated and renewed land, the empty aristocratic house once again transformed into the reproductive site of Helbeck’s family, class, and social station. But Helbeck’s religion and Laura’s skepticism win out; unable to convert, Laura breaks their engagement and flees from his home and, despite a brief reunion, the two are forever parted when Laura kills herself. Significantly, the dogs that had played such an important role in their courtship are conspicuously absent, appearing not at all in the closing scenes of Helbeck’s and Laura’s relationship. Instead, the last mention of a dog is at Laura’s funeral: “One of those wonderful Westmoreland dogs was barking and gathering the sheep on the crag-side, while we stood there” (463). With no children to replace them, as had been the case in Agnes Grey, Adam Bede, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the disappearance of the pets in Helbeck of Bannisdale speaks not to a proper ascension from pet-keeping to parenthood but instead to the death of the possibility of future life. Rather than dog standing in for future child, we have here dog as psychopomp, “a Greek word meaning one who acts as a guide on the passage between the worlds of the living and the dead. Throughout the world, myths and folktales depict dogs in this role as they help souls find their way between the two worlds” (Adams, Maureen 257). Ushering Laura into the realm of death, this dog, combined with the disappearance of Fricka and Bruno and all they represent, signals the end of futurity and the failure to displace dog with progeny. F. Anstey’s3 The Black Poodle (1884) takes a decidedly more comical approach to the role of the dead and disappearing dog in presaging doomed romantic relationships, even while it participates in a similar, ­late-nineteenth-century discourse of failed gender performance. The narrator of the tale, Algernon Weatherhead, identifies himself as “an only son” who lives “at home with [his] mother” (2). This unpromising beginning is further worsened by Weatherhead revealing that his poor health has required a move to the country, where he and his mother reside within a home in which the landlord has hanged himself in the attic. In terms of the narrator’s romantic prospects, this is not a hopeful start. Sickly, living with his mother, and dwelling within a home from which even the domestics flee, Weatherhead is no convincing specimen of manhood and his dwelling no fit space for domestic comfort, despite his own endorsement of it as “a pleasant house” (3). Nevertheless, Weatherhead forms a passion for his neighbor Colonel Currie’s niece, losing himself “in pleasant anticipations of a time not far distant when the wall which separated us would be (metaphorically) levelled” (3–4).

50  Love Me, Love My Dog Far more of an obstacle to Weatherhead’s successful courting of Lilian Roseblade than the walls that separate them is the Curries’s dog, a black poodle named Bingo. Unlike Gyp, whose sanctioning of Dinah opens the way for Adam to see her as a future wife, Bingo stubbornly refuses to endorse Weatherhead: “… it was a serious obstacle in my path that I could not secure Bingo’s good opinion on any terms. … I did try hard to conciliate him. I brought him propitiatory buns – which was weak and ineffectual, as he ate them with avidity, and hated me as bitterly as ever, for he had conceived from the first a profound contempt for me and a distrust which no blandishments of mine could remove” (9). The narrator’s depiction of his action as “weak and ineffectual” is revealing, for while it is meant to describe the ineffectiveness of the deed, it speaks also to the man. Not only is he guilty of submitting to the dog in a vain attempt to curry favor, thus reversing the proper hierarchy of man as master of the animal world, but he is also, as the narrative reveals, cringingly afraid of the animal: “He made me intensely uncomfortable, for I am of a slightly nervous temperament, with a constitutional horror of dogs” (4). Failing to act in a manly manner, as presaged by his domestic arrangements and ill health, Weatherhead allows himself to be lesser than the poodle, a figure who views him with “contempt and distrust,” rather than the fidelity and worshipfulness supposedly owed to man by doggy-kind. That Weatherhead’s masculinity is furtive, rather than open, cowardly rather than manly, is evidenced by his hunting – to disastrous effect – the neighborhood cats. As further sign of his ineffectuality, his home has become a space of congregation for said animals, disrupting his mother’s sleep. Purchasing an air gun, the narrator congratulates himself on possessing “something of the national sporting instinct” (11), a point belied by his purchase of a silent weapon due to his assiduous attention to his “mother’s repose” (11) and his fear of “scandal” (11). No true sporting man, Weatherhead lets down the nation and his mother when he fails to kill any cats. After striking an animal and running out “with the calm pride of a successful revenge” (11), he instead finds he has slaughtered Bingo. Unable to assert his wonted authority and thus sentenced to ineffectual and wrong-headed violence, Weatherhead recognizes that the death of Bingo signals the end of his marital prospects: But that night my sleep was broken by frightful dreams. I was perpetually trying to bury a great gaunt poodle, which would persist in rising up through the damp mould as fast as I covered him up. … Lilian and I were engaged, and we were in church together on Sunday, and the poodle, resisting all attempts to eject him, forbade our banns with sepulchral barks. … It was our wedding-day, and at the critical moment the poodle leaped between us and swallowed the ring. … Or we were at the wedding-breakfast, and Bingo, a grizzly black skeleton with flaming eyes, sat on the cake and would not allow Lilian to cut it. (18)

Love Me, Love My Dog  51 Here the dead dog quite spectacularly signals the death of heteronormative futurity, continually rising up to place himself between Weatherhead and his proposed bride at every stage of courtship and marriage. The images of death throughout, with the “gaunt poodle,” his “sepulchral barks,” and his “grizzly black skeleton with flaming eyes,” suggest Bingo is a gothic double, a violent return of the repressed whose deathly presence, “rising up through the damp mould,” destroys Weatherhead’s hope of futurity. And what is it that Bingo represents? While he does, as I have argued, clearly evoke Weatherhead’s failed masculinity and inability to assert himself as master over a lesser species, Bingo also suggests a queer sensibility within Weatherhead, an inverted sexuality the text castigates, even while it treats Weatherhead’s cowardly ineffectualness with humor. The dog itself is, after all, despite its ferocity and battle scars, also a pampered, coiffed creature: “… he was shaved in the sham-lion fashion … but the barber had left sundry little tufts of hair which studded his haunches capriciously” (4). Weatherhead’s inability to escape the impositions of the animal within his dream reflects his failure to move beyond dog to mistress in the first place: “I wooed that inflexible poodle with an assiduity I blush to remember” (9). A source of secret shame, Bingo and his relation to Weatherhead continue on as a buried secret that haunts Weatherhead’s eventual actual engagement to Lilian. Forced to lie and to present himself as a heroic figure who searches everywhere for the “lost” Bingo in order to restore him to his ­family, ­Weatherhead engages in a false relationship to his proposed in-laws, one based on a performed masculinity that is active rather than furtive, heroic rather than weak. While I will not argue that the text definitively outs Weatherhead as a repressed homosexual engaged in illicit relations with a poodle, I do argue that his forced furtiveness, and his entrapment within a performance of masculinity that is always at risk of being spectacularly revealed as false, participate in what Eve ­Kosofsky Sedgwick has identified as the “structural residue of terrorist potential, of blackmailability, of Western maleness through the leverage of homophobia” (Sedgwick 89). Weatherhead represents a cautionary tale of the shame and guilt that must accompany failed masculinity, as well as the ugly consequences that will arise from unsanctioned and improperly negotiated relations. Weatherhead’s erotic wooing of the both violent and (coded) working-class dog, who is simultaneously a pampered and effeminate poodle, an animal who is then placed in a position to feel contempt for him, vividly enacts the kind of lower-class/upper-class male alliances that haunted late nineteenth-century England’s political and social landscape, alliances perceived as a distinct threat to proper masculinity, class relations, domesticity, and the nation. Outed at last by Frank Travers, a “rising young Common Law barrister” (30), and by the exhumation of Bingo by a dog whom Weatherhead has attempted to pass off as the original, Weatherhead is left to “writhe impotently” and “tingle with humiliation” (43) at the revelation of his secrets and the unveiling of his true masculinity. It is not accidental that Frank Travers, emblem of professional masculinity, ends up winning the girl, nor that he purchases

52  Love Me, Love My Dog for her “a fox terrier,” one they “take ostentatiously elaborate precautions to keep … out of [Weatherhead’s] garden” (45). Closed off in his failed domestic space while still figured as a potential threat to the dog who we can only assume is a stand-in for Travers and Lilian’s future progeny, Weatherhead can only give in to his isolation and ineffectuality: “… I laid my head down on the table amongst the coffee-cups and cried like a beaten child” (44). CONCLUSION In serving as the means by which Weatherhead’s inverted and child-like sexuality can be revealed and socially ostracized, Bingo participates in the larger discourse I have identified here, that of pets as the means of negotiating and instantiating heteronormative sexuality and coupling. Both Bingo and Weatherhead represent the waste product of the normative family, failed as they are in fulfilling the roles demanded of them. While Weatherhead is an unsuccessful man, Bingo is an equally problematic pet, combining as he does ferocity with an unwonted and ill-fitting pampering. As Weatherhead observes, “He seemed to be the centre of their domestic system, and even lovely Lilian revolved contentedly around him as a kind of satellite” (6). While Weatherhead’s untrustworthiness might make the reader doubt the truth of his depiction of Bingo’s family as Bingo’s “infatuated proprietors” (6), there can be no doubt that Lilian is better off in the end, devoted to the man who purchases her a pet rather than to the pet who must approve or disapprove her choices. Bingo’s violent death and Weatherhead’s public shaming underline the role played by the domestic pet in English literature throughout the nineteenth century as a necessary but ultimately expendable means of identifying, courting, and standing in for proper, normative, male/ female marital relations. Moving aside to make room for human attachments once their work is done, pets who disappear support a species hierarchy that envisions them as a useful means of practicing love and nurture before one graduates to the “real thing.” The violent expulsion of Bingo at the hands of a pretender who had once wooed him effectively closes off the gender and species confusion both Bingo and Weatherhead represent. While Weatherhead’s violent killing of the domestic pet signals the end of his hopes for a normative domestic future, the killing of a spinster’s cat in R ­ obert Gray’s “Miss Jemima’s Cat” instead reverses this conclusion, restoring the seemingly lost Miss Jemima to a life of love and social inclusion. In the opening pages of the story, published in 1872 in The Round Robin, a journal for children, Miss Jemima Trotter represents the epitome of the unattractive old maid: She presented a somewhat remarkable appearance, for she was one of those thin, scraggy, straight up-and-down sort of persons, without, [sic] a single projection to relieve the flatness of the surface, that is, so far as her figure was concerned …

Love Me, Love My Dog  53 Miss Jemima Trotter was just as stiff and unbending as she looked, and she had … distorted ideas of human nature, and … an intense horror of the male sex. … (617–18) With her unwomanly figure and her fear of the opposite sex, Miss Jemima Trotter seems doomed to a life of unfulfilled potential, one signaled by her obsession with her cat, who operates as a clear substitute for romantic and maternal affection: “There was one object on which Miss Jemima Trotter lavished the whole of her affection, and this was a large white Tom-cat, very sleek, and fat, and comfortable-looking; for he was well fed and well cared for. …” (619). Taking the place of a husband as the object of Miss Jemima’s domestic attentions, Tom keeps Miss Jemima in a state of singlehood until the fateful day when he is killed by the bachelor neighbor’s pet dog: “there was a growl, a snap, and a shake, and in a moment her favourite cat lay warm and lifeless at her feet” (621–22). Far from being a moment of tragedy, however, this act of violence against a household pet paves the way for Miss Jemima’s salvation, signaling the role played by dead cat and live dog as improper and proper agents in their owners’ sexual identities. While Miss Jemima threatens to sue Mr. Lobb on her cat’s behalf, she is instead wooed by him, a change in power relations that transforms her from feisty and transgressive social agent to suitably passive object of male affection: “From that day forth, Mr. Lobb was a frequent visitor at Primrose Villa, and Miss Jemima Trotter became quite a changed character. She discarded her faded print-gown and mushroom-shaped hat, paid more attention to her corkscrew ringlets, and assumed a youthful and jaunty air” (623). Having no more care for her former favorite than to instruct the gardener to burn the body, Miss Jemima emerges from her life of isolation and social disdain to one of approbation within her community, marrying Mr. Lobb to the astonishment of “the world in general” (619). Mr. Lobb recognizes to whom he owes this change in fortune, for on the eve of winning Miss Jemima over, he “went chuckling to bed; not, however, without patting his dog on the head, and giving utterance to the following remarkable sentence, ‘Jupiter, you’re a brick’” (619). Disposing of the cat, who had been an unacceptable object of female affection, and celebrating the violent and aggressive dog, who both asserts male mastery and provides the means for his owner to assert male sexuality, “Miss Jemima’s Cat” again proves how essential the domestic pet was in the nineteenth-century imagination as a tool of interaction between the sexes and as a means of identifying non-normative sexual and gender performances that must be violently punished for the sake of social cohesion. As we will see in the next chapter, however, spinsters and their pets do not always fall so easily as do Miss Jemima and her Tom, existing instead as disruptive figures of human/animal companionship, both defined by and counter to the constructions of normative domesticity discussed here.

54  Love Me, Love My Dog NOTEs   1. For example, she observes, “… a number of gynaecological textbooks of this period refer to [the removal of ovaries] and similar operations as ‘spaying’” (89); similarly, “The language of pornography is the language of the stable, with women being made to ‘show their paces’ and ‘present themselves’ at the command of the riding master, who flogs and sees them into submission” (99).  2. For more on this text and its representation of female authority, see Flegel, ­Monica. “Mistresses as Masters: Voicing Female Power Through the Subject Animal in Two Nineteenth-Century Autobiographies.” Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. Ed. Margo DeMello. New York: Routledge, 2013. 89–101.   3. The pseudonym of Thomas Anstey Guthrie, an English novelist and journalist.

REFERENCES Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. Adams, James Eli. “Gyp’s Tale: On Sympathy, Silence, and Realism in Adam Bede.” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 227–42. Adams, Maureen. Shaggy Muses: The Dogs who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007. Anstey, F. “The Black Poodle.” 1884. The Black Poodle and Other Tales. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904. Argyle, Gisela. “Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Fictional Experiments in the Woman ­Question.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43.4 (2003): 939–957. Berg, Maggie. “‘Hapless Dependents’: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey.” Studies in the Novel 34.2 (2002): 177–197. ———. “‘Let me have its bowels then’: Violence, Sacrificial Structure, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 21:1 (2010): 20–40. Brontë, Anne. Agnes Grey. 1846. London: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. London: Arcturus, 2010. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Burrows, E. Neptune; or, the Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog. London: Griffith and Farran, 1869. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Daston, Lorraine and Gregg Mitman. “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. Eds. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Love Me, Love My Dog  55 ———. Middlemarch. 1874. New York: Modern Library, 1984. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Gordon, Eleanor and Gwyneth Nair. Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Gray, Robert. “Miss Jemima’s Cat.” The Round Robin: A Gathering of Fact, Fiction, Incident and Adventure. Thursday, August 1, 1872. 616–622. Hallenbeck, Sarah. “How to Be a Gentleman Without Really Trying: Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 1 (Winter 2005): n.p. http:www.ncgsjournal.com/issue1/gilbert.htm. Hatten, Charles. The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Lansbury, Coral. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. McHugh, Susan. Dog. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Ogden, Daryl. “Double Visions: Sarah Stickney Ellis, George Eliot and the Politics of Domesticity.” Women’s Studies 25.6 (1996): n.p. Oulton, Carolyn W. De La L., Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Rogers, Katharine M. Cat. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Sanders, Clinton R. and Arnold Arluke. “Speaking for Dogs.” The Animals Reader. Eds. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald. Oxford: Berg, 2007. 65–71. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Surridge, Lisa. “Dogs’/Bodies, Women’s Bodies: Wives as Pets in Mid-Nineteenth Century Narratives of Domestic Violence.” Victorian Review 20.1. (Summer 1994): 1–34. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven and ­London: Yale University Press, 1984. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Ward, Mary. Helbeck of Bannisdale. 1898. John Murray: London, 1911. Weir, Harrison. Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier. Supposed to be written by himself. London: Grant and Griffith: 1848.

2 Becoming Crazy Cat Lady Women and Their Pets in the Domestic Circle

In her introduction to Selections from The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880–1907, Terri Doughty discusses an 1894 cartoon from the paper entitled “The Child: How will She Develop?” Describing the side by side panels, Doughty notes the “good girl” finds a “happy and productive life as wife and mother” while the “bad girl” is “disliked at school and wastes her time reading what appears to be a French novel, a standard code for lack of morality since the eighteenth century; she ends up discontented and alone with her cat” (9). Doughty wryly observes that “some stereotypes have had a long life” (9). The association of the lonely, embittered spinster with pet ownership has indeed had a long life, represented in everything from folklore to nineteenthcentury novels as an unsubtle coded reference to the wasting of proper female potential. Connected to witchery in its earliest forms, and captured in the infamous “crazy cat lady” so prevalent in current popular discourse, the linkage of single woman with beloved pet constructs spinsters and other female familial outsiders as unproductive, aberrant, and often immoral. Mistaking or replacing domestic pet for human progeny, and eschewing or failing to achieve proper male attachment and guardianship, the female who makes a family of herself and her pet threatens femininity and its role within the home, family, and nation. The central issue of female households composed of women and their pets, as opposed to heteronormative households, is, of course, the eschewing of reproductivity. Novels such as Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen (1879) and Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies (1876), for example, while providing quite different depictions of spinsters with cats – one a figure of ridicule, the other of tragic heroism – both represent these women as sexual and familial dead ends, connecting them explicitly to a bygone past, cut off from a living present or a productive future. I argue that what I call “reproductive time” is continually invoked in representations of unmarried women, which refers both to Edelman’s reproductive futurism and to the supposed productive use of one’s time in the present, particularly for women, in relation to the nurturance and care of progeny. For old maids, the very term of which suggests those frozen between youth and age, pet kindred emphasize the troubled status of the spinster in relation to reproductive time, with pet as progeny operating simultaneously as the perpetual baby who will never

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  57 grow up and as the failed progeny on whom no future can be built. These depictions of female/pet relations are often connected to the fear of women engaged in the wrong form of reproduction and in improper uses of their time: female scholars, for example, engaged in the production of knowledge, or female heads of households engaged in the production of power relations. As such, the female/pet family operates within a constellation of inter-related narratives expressing social anxiety about aberrant womanhood: woman as (failed) scholar, woman as (failed) mother, and woman as (failed) bastion of familial, and therefore social, decency and morality. In my analysis of women, the pets they love, and the family they make with them, I address these figures both as objects of fear and scorn, and as representatives of an alternative form of family. It is true women and their pets are often, in nineteenth-century discourse, worthy of disgust at worst and pity at best. Nevertheless, in my reading of spinsters in the popular press and in literature, I argue that the very outcast nature of the female/pet family opened up possibilities for challenging gender and ­species norms by imagining power structures, love relations, and ways of being that, if not entirely separated from, were at least distinct from dominant male/female relations.

“I’LL BE AS STILL AS TH’ OULD TABBY”: PETS AND THE SINGLE WOMAN While spinsters have long been constructed as “a social anomaly, usually as objects of pity” (Gordon and Nair 168), the tone of social discourse on unmarried and never-married women took on alarmist tones in the nineteenth century: By the nineteenth century – particularly the second half of the century – spinsterhood had come to be regarded as a serious social problem. The Census reveals a large “surplus” of women over men, a “surplus” that was apparently increasing. In 1851 official statistics recorded more than a million unmarried women over the age of 25. Attention became focussed [sic] on the problem of “surplus” or “redundant” women as never before. (Hill 2) The idea that spinsters were “surplus” and “redundant” speaks to the central paradox they embodied in nineteenth-century discourse and culture. As women, they were meant to be “emblems of domestic bliss,” a “cherished object” within the home, and yet by failing to achieve their proper role as wife and mother, they became an “un[re]productive and superfluous” ­(Kranidis 4) excess to the home that denoted a national problem. Many spinsters were, in fact, essential members of the family; as Bridget

58  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady Hill notes in Woman Alone, far from being a problematic surplus, spinsters in the family often served a primary role: “In many families with an only ­daughter the parents looked on her as a companion, nurse and housekeeper for their old age. … From the 1780s, ‘in large families the younger daughter was frequently expected to remain single in order that she might look after her parents in old age’” (69). What this practice suggests is that spinsters were caught in a gender dilemma based on structures of age and family. As daughters, they were able to fulfill the role set out for them in middleclass gender ideology, because “Girls capable of sacrifice, of subordinating their desires to others’ good, were demonstrating their purity, which in turn was considered to be a potent source of moral influence” (Nelson 107). As adult women, however, particularly after the death of the parents for whom they might have provided care, spinsters suddenly became an excess, a dangerous supplement to the family and the nation. As W. R. Greg infamously wrote in his “Why Are Women Redundant?” (1869), these were women “who, not having the natural duties and labours of wives and mothers, have to carve out artificially and painfully sought occupations for themselves, who, in place of completing, sweetening and embellishing the existence of ­others, are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own” (5). The “independence” of spinsters was constituted as a financial threat to the nation, either because they “were unable to support themselves” (Gordon and Nair167) or because “they could and did choose to support themselves” (168) and thus threatened both the male “breadwinner wage” and constructions of female dependence. This threat of female economic independence was intimately connected to female sexuality: Bourgeois respectability required that women live in a state of social and economic dependence on men. … Those women who did not live under the protection of a man and who were not attached to a family were regarded as a social problem, prey to the twin dangers of poverty and sexual impropriety. At worst, they could be seen as presenting a sexual threat to the married: at best, they were viewed as ‘incomplete’ and probably embittered if they were unable to fulfil their biological destiny as wives and mothers. (168) The spinster’s sexuality, then, was often constructed as aberrant, though the nature of the abnormality shifted according to which stereotypes were being applied and the social functions these stereotypes were made to serve. The spinster could be perceived as dangerously unsexed, withered, and “desiccated” (Nelson 133), signs the woman had missed out on her biological calling: “Motherhood, rather than sex, was the urge that spinsters were primarily supposed to be sublimating. However … the two were virtually inseparable, and there was a subtext which tacitly acknowledged the ­dangers of suppressed sexuality” (Gordon and Nair 174).

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  59 Representations of women who had lost their bloom and become ­ ithered thus participated in a broader discourse that (somewhat) carew fully addressed the necessity of good heterosexual sex to the development of full womanhood and proper fecundity. Conversely, as Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair point out in Public Lives: Women, Family, and Society in Victorian Britain (2003), spinsters could also be figures of excess: excess sexuality, excess time, excess emotion. Free from the boundaries of marriage and the healthy, reproductive sex found therein, the spinster was sometimes understood as a “sexual threat” (168), a frightful figure of deranged sexuality perfectly captured in Eliza Lynn Linton’s monstrous old maid: “Painted and wrinkled, padded and bedizened, with her coarse thoughts, bold words, and leering eyes, [the wrong kind of spinster] has in herself all the disgust which lies around a Bacchante and a Hecate in one. … Such an old maid as this stands as a warning to men and women alike of what and whom to avoid” (qtd. in Nelson, 133). Harkening back to the association of spinsters with witches, who, like the cats often linked to them, enjoyed illicit and satanic sexuality, such a spinster as Linton’s is a sharp reminder of what can happen to women whose sexuality is not safely confined within the marriage bed. But the superfluity of the spinster went beyond issues of sexuality; her (supposed) lack of domestic duties also led to representations of women engaged in “meaningless occupations that merely constitute time … thus posing a threat to the projected cultural organicity of the nation” ­(Kranidis 5). For pro-vivisectionists such as Dr. Elie de Cyon, writing in the Contemporary Review in 1883, the excess time (and, implicitly, misplaced sexual and maternal energy) of old maids led them to be pathologically attracted to fanatical causes such as, according to him, anti-vivisection. “Is it necessary,” he asks, ‘to repeat that women or rather old maids, form the numerous contingent of this group? Let my adversaries contradict me, if they can show among the leaders of the agitation one young girl, rich, beautiful and beloved, or one young wife who has found in her home the full satisfaction of her affections!” (232). Rather than achieving “satisfaction” within the private space of the home, suggesting obliquely both sexual and maternal fulfillment, these “hysterical old maids” instead take their love of animals into two spheres that are far less appropriate, the political and the scientific. The assumption that women deprived of maternal and wifely duties would spend their time inappropriately was also invoked in discussions of spinsters as models of scholarly excess, with the pursuit of learning and the production of knowledge wrongfully displacing more feminine pursuits and reproduction. While one nineteenth-century commentator observes “it is, indeed, a commonly received opinion, that literary women ought not to marry” (“Old Maidism” 70), Bridget Hill notes, “In the same way all the opprobrium that spinsters attracted was by a curious quirk of reasoning transferred to the learned lady. She was assumed to be unmarried and, whether married or not, lacking all the domestic virtues, ignoring home,

60  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady husband and children” (81). Hill provides ample historical evidence that educated women did, in fact, sometimes choose to remain unmarried so they could focus on their pursuit of knowledge (82), but the representation of the spinster in Victorian fiction tends to represent such knowledge production as eccentric at best and wrong-headed and ill-begotten at worst. Companion to the spinster in her many guises was the domestic pet, a central and defining figure of spinster domesticity as either parody of or alternative to the “natural” family. The linkage of spinster with cat in particular makes a great deal of cultural sense when one considers their shared role as supplements to the family. Both were required to do essential work within the home and family, but both also challenged the integrity of the home through their independence from normative structures of power, with the cat challenging species order through its failure to acknowledge inferiority and the spinster challenging gender relations through her failure to be dependent upon a man. As Kathleen Kete observes (quoting Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, a noted cat-hater), “In contrast to the dog, the cat was a perfidious animal, an ‘unfaithful servant,’ that one kept only out of absolute necessity, as the lesser of two evils, ‘to control another enemy of domestic life still more discomforting, which we are unable ourselves to hunt’” (117–118). Buffon’s hatred for the cat who, as he rightly observes, was for many years and in numerous cultures kept more as a form of pest control and less as a member of the family, speaks to the supposed greatest flaw in the cat as a potential loving companion – namely, the cat is suspected of being independent, perhaps even sneakily superior, thus rendering humans the dependent ones in the relationship. Erica Fudge suggests,“Cats seem to disdain humans in a way that dogs do not: they are not pack animals; they are nocturnal in habit. Dogs on the other hand can be trained to become part of the human family, to live by its rules” (81). Dogs need humans, or so their often desperate-seeming adoration suggests, whereas cats represent a “necessity” for humans, taking on as they do a task of which, as Buffon resentfully notes, “we are unable ourselves.” Worse still, the cat does not take on the task of pest control for the sake of the humans in the household but because it is an action that serves the cat’s own desires: “The fact that the cat hunts for itself rather than for human gratification supports the prevailing idea that it selfishly pursues its own interests, in contrast to the dog, who serves and supports man” (Rogers 28). While the cat’s “self-contained aloofness” (9) and ability to live in the household “without acknowledging any inferiority” (50) made it a creature worthy of suspicion, this should not lead us to ignore the many ways cats have been firmly ensconced within the domestic space and rehabilitated as symbols of bourgeois domesticity, particularly in the Victorian period. Though not necessarily always linked closely to the family and often understood as a “less homely” animal than dogs (Fudge 79), cats have also long been linked to the home, “notoriously faithful to the house, not the person” (Kete 117). Nineteenth-century English animal lovers challenged the

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  61 construction of the cat as somehow unattached to their human ­owners, even as they agreed cats were particularly connected to the domestic hearth. As the anonymous author of the 1877 Animal World article, “The Stray Dogs of London,” opines, “Cats live with him in his house, purr and sing at his feet, and sleep peacefully before his social English fire; they love him intensely, grieve during his absence, and sometimes even sicken and die when they lose a dear human friend – sicken, when despair succeeds hope; die, when the fever of ceaseless watchfulness burns down into the socket” (146). The construction of kitty as one who lives to “purr and sing at his feet, and sleep peacefully before his social English fire” links the cat with women in ways not so much about aggressive and insatiable sexuality but instead about both as beautiful ornaments for man’s enjoyment, most happy when ensconced within the home. In Cat, Katharine Rogers describes how Growing affection for cats and the tendency to sentimentalize away their aloofness and potential for fierceness led to identifying them with the Victorian ideal of home. The cat was still economically important as a rodent catcher … but most writers preferred to present it as a hearthside spirit rather than a killer of household pests. It became an embodiment of domestic virtue – a high calling at a time when the pure and harmonious home was idealized as never before. (97–98) Ironically, rendering invisible the cat’s employment while still highlighting the cat’s supposed “domestic virtue” is similar ideological work to that of erasing the labor of women within the home, by which the economic value of women’s domesticity was and is often elided through a focus on their supposedly soft guidance and comforting nature. Therefore, when Adam’s mother compares herself to a cat in Adam Bede as a means of re-envisioning herself within the new configuration of family she anticipates upon her son’s planned marriage, the analogy she uses relies on a fairly complicated construction of the cat and its role in the home, particularly in relation to the single woman: For when he told his mother that Hetty was willing they should all live together, and there was no more need of them to think of parting, she said, in a more contented tone than he had heard her speak in since it had been settled that he was to be married, “Eh, my lad, I’ll be as still as th’ ould tabby, an’ ne’er want to do aught but th’ offal work, as she wonna like t’do.” (362) For Adam’s mother, a widow, the alignment of herself with “th’ ould tabby” is about imagining herself as both essential and unassuming; like the cat, she will be an inconspicuous, undemanding, and yet crucial part of the domestic scenery. And unlike representations of the cat that focused more on domestic virtue and less on domestic labor, Lizbeth clearly sees her future role

62  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady as one of “pest control” – her value to her future daughter-in-law, from whom she cannot expect to find devotion or fellow feeling, will simply be that of doing what needs to be done that others will not want to do. Like the cat, she will be central to the domestic sphere and yet a repressed and silent member of it, an abject figure who speaks to the unpleasant realities of the household that more idealized (or, in Hetty’s case, more fanciful) views of the home must keep silent. Both cat and mother are part of the wider family who will constellate around and service, but not impinge upon, the nuclear center. Linked together in life and in fiction, cats and single women are over-determined as supplements to the home, necessary to its functioning but also, at times, dangerously independent of it or, as in the case of Adam’s mother, always at risk of being excluded from it. That cats and women should form alliances, both real and fictional, therefore fits within the cultural logic that sought to understand female-led households as either attempting to compensate for a perceived lack of proper reproductive domesticity or as twisted deviations from the norm, as signs of the spinster’s, widow’s, or lesbian’s desire to imagine different ways of constructing home and family. “SOMETHING YOU MUST LOVE”: PETS AS FAMILIAL REPLACEMENT While spinsters and cats were (and are) often linked, particularly, as I will argue later on, with those spinsters who most seem to reject marriage and family, pets such as dogs also perform somewhat similar functions for the spinster in popular discourse and literary fictions as they did for the single, marriageable women discussed in Chapter One. Pets, particularly dogs, could be a sign that the spinster’s heart was open to love, but the single woman’s pet was also, by contrast, often presented as a proxy for the family she had failed to produce, small furry children meant to compensate for natural children never born. Such pets support gender ideology through reminding us that women’s natural role is motherhood and that, deprived of this goal, women will find the means to fulfill it outside the species if necessary. In her “Chapter on Old Maids,” Eliza Cook begs her reader to have patience toward the old maid and her pet, because Surely those to whom circumstances, or their own sense of right, have denied the station of wife and mother, may expend a portion of the stifled love throbbing within their womanly hearts; and which, had they married, would have formed an inexhaustible provision of tenderness for some sweet infant, or may be, a whole rosy little troop of boys and girls, – surely they may at their pleasure bestow this objectless affection upon a faithful dog, intelligent parrot, or gentle, domestic cat. (333)

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  63 The assumptions underlying Cook’s representation of the old maid’s love for her pet are many, but one point is utterly clear. The kinds of pets Cook identifies as best suited for an old maid are ones that most easily stand in for proper human companions; rather than the anti-social, predatory and/or independent cat, Cook specifically sanctions, alongside the obvious choice of the “faithful dog,” both the “intelligent parrot” and, specifically, the “gentle, domestic cat.” These kinds of animals are chosen because they can best respond to and be worthy of the “stifled love” that old maids have “within their womanly hearts” and, if they had married, would have spent itself in “inexhaustible … tenderness” for proper human objects of affection. Cook’s description of the role played by the pet in servicing the old maid’s feminine faculties demonstrates how central the unmarried woman was to defining proper womanhood. Through her state of lack, the single woman shores up what is hoped to be essential to all women: an ever-tender, ever-loving heart that desires nothing so much as to nurture others. There is no room here for a woman who may not feel “inexhaustible” love for her little ones, or whose heart is not necessarily filled to the brim with love for others, stifled or otherwise. The old maid with her pets works to assure us all women have an endless capacity for giving to others and this “natural” urge must find an outlet. Cook’s allowance that “Their friends are not bound to like these pets, nor even to approve of them” does seem to set the spinster apart as someone engaging in something at best socially awkward and at worst worthy of disapproval. Nevertheless, the linkage of pet with natural child also reminds us that a mother’s “inexhaustible provision of tenderness,” while worthy, might be out of keeping with the actual progeny who others are not always obliged to value as highly as does their mother. Women’s love, that is, should be spent endlessly not because the object of that love is worthy of it but because the very act of loving without reason is central to a woman’s role and being. When it comes to old maids and their pets, as Cook notes, “though others may see nothing to admire in them, [these pets] touch their lone hearts, and are perhaps the means of preserving in its living and purifying flow the well of sweet waters therein” (333). Cook’s words suggest that while spinsters might “lose their bloom” through a lack of good, heterosexual sex, they can at least preserve the “living and purifying flow” of love within their hearts through an emotional attachment to an approximation of the product of reproductive sexuality, the children who are the evidence of sexual fecundity. With sexuality (somewhat) displaced by love, just as children are somewhat displaced with pets, Cook can speak approvingly of “the woman who in the absence of all legitimate outlets of her overflowing affection, fondles and carefully tends a favourite dog” (333). For some defenders of spinsters, a focus on the reliance of old maids upon pets could speak not solely to the spinster’s lack of appropriate human love but also to the social prejudices that made such isolation occur. One article from 1842 cries out, “Dear amiabilities! can we wonder that you are kind

64  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady nurses – or that you are fond of cats, dogs, parrots …? Is it not thus that you are forced to display your pent-up sensibilities? Something you must love – your hearts are overflowing with milk and honey” (M., 99).1 Like Eliza Cook, the author of this article from The Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music, and Romance sees pets as the only outlet of a woman’s “pent-up sensibilities,” with an almost overt acknowledgement of maternal displacement in the use of the metaphor “your hearts are overflowing with milk and honey.” But the reliance on pets here speaks also to social isolation brought on by unreasoning prejudice; old maids may be “fond of cats, dogs, [and] parrots” in ways that speak well of their innate kindness but such a displacement of human affection is represented here as a last resort, a lesser form of sociality to which old maids are forced through the loss of human companionship.2 Nevertheless, not all felt spinsters found true compensations in their furry kin for the supposed loss of human contact (or seemed to recognize spinsters might have both humans and pets in their lives). In an article entitled “Patience,” which bemoans the “sad, sad story” of the “lonely creature” depicted in an accompanying illustration, the author suggests that the spinster pictured dwells not in a “home, but a mausoleum of dead fancies and half-faded recollections. …” (121). While there is clearly a living cat in the picture, the author dismisses this as a true companion for the spinster because “(the cat asleep upon the cushion) is happy but in the selfishness of its instinct, the sloth of its artificial existence” (121). That selfish, ­slothful creature who lives an “artificial existence” must be set apart from the companion animals who are capable of keeping alive the spinster’s ability to love. Unlike the pets discussed in Chapter One, the spinster’s pet, particularly the spinster’s cat, is not a real substitute for husband and children and, in literature, the cat is often undeveloped even as a minor character. While dogs such as Snap and Gyp are given personalities and a minimum of characterization that is, and are shown to invite and be able to elicit reciprocal (if not equal) feeling in those who care for them, many of the representations of the spinster’s pet, as will be seen throughout this chapter, provide far less detail and next to no characterization of the companion animal. Instead, like the cat depicted here, the spinster’s pet is often little more than furniture. The implication of this is that, unlike the couples described in the previous chapter, the spinster is mistaking the pet for a companion. While Snap and Gyp have enough personality to make them adequate stand-ins and practice for romantic partners and future children, by and large the spinster’s pet does not; instead, the pet – cats in particular – are often represented as absent presences, speaking to the spinster’s lack and isolation. Future partners and parents might require a companion animal to prepare them for domesticity, but the spinster is ultimately shut out from companionship entirely, sunk into a solipsistic relationship with an animal who has nothing to give back. Rather, the spinster’s pet, instead of representing an Other with whom the woman can form ties of affection, stands in for the spinster herself, its ­“selfishness” speaking to her failure to perform her role as a wife and mother.

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  65 Cut off from human affections, their own “natural” urges toward motherhood and wifehood withering away, spinsters can only, such texts suggest, remain trapped in a strangely eternal space, separated from real community and from women’s proper reproductive time in a “mausoleum” instead of a familial home. Continually, the passage of time or the failure of time to pass as it should is invoked in discussions of the old maid, as in the article “Patience,” which describes “the impulses of [the spinster’s] very being, meant to swell the ocean of universal love which flows throughout the world, frozen midway in the channels they had made for themselves … leaving her ice-bound in an endless winter of regret” (121). There is a paradox here, with the old maid both “frozen” and “bound” in the present moment and yet strangely on-going, “endless,” projected forever into the future. Another commentator in the popular press observes it is remarkable that the old maid is never very old; as a general rule, she is not met with above the age of sixty; should she survive that period of life she changes, probably, into something else – into a grandmother all at once perhaps, who knows? – at any rate, she changes into an old woman, and that is something different altogether from an old maid. If she is not very old, she is certainly not very young, she may be verging on forty, and from that onward score of years or so; and the most mysterious part of the matter is, that she never has been young, retains no traces of geological remains of youth, either in her face, or sentiments, or manners, from which a skilful antiquarian might reconstruct and draw a picture of her in her youth, as naturalists can draw from a few withered bones the figure of their original owner in all its former beauty. (“Old Maids,” The Lady’s Newspaper, 100) The old maid is presented here as a scientific oddity, a figure outside both time and the rules governing it. Unlike everything else upon the earth, both natural and geologic, she stands apart as a mystery. Neither young nor old nor ever able, this article suggests, to become old and always in a state of never having been young, the spinster violates the very laws of nature. The article “Our Old Maids” suggests they even stand outside history itself, for We can go back to the history of Adam to find the first old bachelor; but I have no record of who the first old maid was, or where she came from. … Still, if we consult modern history, we may be able to find the pedigree of more than one. They are a great deal like the historical mule – They never die, just vanish. It seems to me that they must be terribly lonesome during their existence on this mundane sphere, and their life must be a “barren ideality” … There are several reasons why old maids exist, but to explain them would be a task that is beyond my power. They live now, and will until the end of time. (5)

66  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady Clearly, the representation of the old maid as somehow in excess of ­historical time and unbound by the laws of nature is implicitly connected to her nonreproductivity. Other human beings are related to their species through patrilineal relation to the Biblical Adam, but spinsters have a separate “pedigree.” With a life that is “barren,” and connected here to the mule who cannot reproduce, spinsters are sentenced to both “vanish” into nothingness and live a “lonesome … existence … until the end of time.”3 The association of the spinster with extinction rather than change makes painfully evident the connection between marriage and reproduction as choices in the lifestyle of an individual and their place within the perceived natural development of the species. Old maids might well bond themselves to domestic animals as such discourse suggests they are only tangentially related to the human race. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s My Novel (1853) participates in this discourse of the spinster and her pet as outside of reproductive time, with the resident spinster, Miss Jemima Hazeldean, representing a woman whose thwarted natural affections become twisted into a shared obsession with her pet, her hatred of men, and her intense focus on a pending apocalypse. The narrator assures us Miss Hazeldean is “indeed one of the most kindly and affectionate of beings feminine; and if she disliked the thought of single blessedness, it really was from those innocent and womanly instincts towards the tender charities of hearth and home, without which a lady, however otherwise estimable, is little better than a Minerva in bronze” (50–51). Associating spinsters with the virginal goddess of learning and, even more appropriately, with a frozen, fixed casting of the goddess, Lytton participates in a discourse that sees spinsters as cut off from life, fecundity, and family; nevertheless, he hints to us that Miss Hazeldean has at least the capacity for true womanhood, though at this point, it is sadly spent upon “a small canine favourite, true Blenheim, with a snub nose. It was advanced in life, and somewhat obese. It sate on its haunches, with its tongue out of its mouth, except when it snapped at the flies” (51). Clearly, this is not a particularly prepossessing animal, one only a spinster could love, and with her obesity and implied laziness, Flimsey is the very picture of excess. Like her dog, Miss Hazeldean is herself the model of a wasted life. Her spinsterhood has resulted in her body losing “all the undulating grace which movement and animation bestow on the fluent curves of the feminine form.” As a result, “that same unfortunate pensiveness gave to the whole a character of inertness and languor; and when Miss Jemima reclined on the sofa, so complete seemed the relaxation of nerve and muscle that you would have thought she had lost the use of her limbs” (112). Dog and woman are here bound together in a relation that drains the life from both of them, with the dog a pampered and spoiled product of the woman’s endless time and the woman herself wasting away, seemingly also from lack of proper use. That both dog and woman are harmed by her wrong-headed overinvestment is made clear in Miss Hazeldean’s account of a love triangle between her, her former dog, and another spinster. Defending her current

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  67 dog as a “lady dog,” thus confirming she carries her “aversion to the ­gentlemen even to lapdogs” (63), Miss Hazeldean details her last experience with a male dog: I had a gentleman dog once – a pug! – pugs are getting very scarce now. I thought he was so fond of me – he snapped at every one else; the battles I fought for him! … I left Bluff – that was his name – with Miss Smilecox. … Will you believe it, I say, when I returned to Cheltenham, only three months afterwards, Miss Smilecox had seduced his affections from me, and the ungrateful creature did not even know me again. … I have never had a gentleman dog since – they are all alike, believe me – heartless, selfish creatures. (64) Like Snap in Agnes Grey, Bluff stands in both as partner and as progeny. While Snap is easily displaced by Mr. Weston, however, Bluff is the end product of Miss Hazeldean’s and Miss Smilecox’s wooing – unable to find a male partner, the women waste their efforts on a “heartless, selfish” pet. And while the focus on “seduction” places Bluff as a lover, it is also possible to see him as a child, one who despite his ill-mannered behavior receives only protection, rather than hearty discipline, from the spinsters who rely upon his affection. This depiction is in keeping with narratives of spinsters as somehow unable to manage both children and animals. Elizabeth Thiel notes that in Victorian children’s literature, “unmarried aunts are shown to have little or no skill in establishing a domestic idyll” (102), in part because they are constructed as inherently childish; the spinster’s “immaturity is displayed through the favoritism, petulance and jealousies that might be deemed inevitable in an untutored, unsocialized child, but that ill befit a grown woman” (127). As we see in the competition between Miss Hazeldean and Miss Smilecox, a sad parody of women competing on the marriage market, these two women fill their time engaged in petty battles for spoiled dogs, signifying both their own wasted potential and the disastrous products of their over-investment. And just as she wastes her time on unattractive and ungrateful animals who cannot repay the love she invests, so too does Miss Hazeldean expend her (as the novel depicts) not very great intellect on the “decided and lugubrious belief that the world was coming to an end” (51). The novel makes clear that this belief on her part is spurred on by her own hopeless marital prospects and barren affections. Seemingly failed in her aspirations to win the heart of Dr. Riccabocca, the resident Italian noble in hiding, Miss Hazeldean throws herself into a study of the impending end times, “many signs of … which, while the visit of Riccabocca lasted, she had permitted herself to consider ambiguous, now became luminously apparent” (178). Cut off from reproductive time by her failure to attain the status of wife and mother, Miss Hazeldean instead embraces the opposite of reproductive futurism, a pleasurable will toward the death drive that bespeaks a “primal negativity”

68  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady (Edelman 53). Of course, her studies of the dissolution of all things are depicted as of the most inane kind, based far more on an excess of imagination on her part than on any founded scientific fact: “The leading articles spoke, with the obscurity of a Pythian, of an impending CRISIS. Monstrous turnips sprouted out from the paragraphs devoted to General News. Cows bore calves with two heads, whales were stranded in the Humber, showers of frogs descended in the High Street of Cheltenham” (178). Images of failed reproduction abound here, with “monstrous turnips sprouting” and cows giving birth to deformed offspring, suggesting clearly that Miss Hazeldean is a woman whose intellect and emotion, divorced from proper reproductivity, instead sprout into a monstrous hobby, one that dwells upon abominations. Using her mind, rather than her heart, and focused on animals and end times rather than engaging in reproductive time dedicated to husband and child, Miss Hazeldean is a woman wasted on and twisted by her obnoxious pets and her apocalyptic imaginings, a mutation who might well be moving further away from the human species.4 “But,” the narrator assures us, “once admitted to their proper soil, it is astonishing what healthful improvement takes place” (179). Miss Hazeldean becomes, through the course of the novel, something truly outside the natural order: a spinster saved to a life of proper domesticity. I argue that her choice of a lapdog, rather than the supposedly anti-social cat, is a sign of Miss Hazeldean’s potential, for as Laura Brown has pointed out, while female relationships with lapdogs were often represented as holding the potential for a “perversion of kinship” (79) in which the lady showed “immoderate love” (79) in her preference for dog over human kin (as Miss Hazeldean does in the first part of the novel), yet lapdogs, as discussed in Chapter One, were also seen as appropriate objects for opening female affection and “as a means to regulate female behavior and preserve female character” (78). Such is the case with Miss Hazeldean. While she has been somewhat wasted as a spinster, her relationship with Flimsey also partially develops her motherly spirit and keeps her ability to give affection alive. Needing a wife in order to raise his child, Dr. Riccabocca condescends to release Miss Hazeldean from her life of intellectual deformity and animal offspring, displacing permanently the animal who he had once displaced more literally, sitting as he had “in the place rightfully appertaining to Flimsey, who this time was fairly dislodged, to her great wonder and discontent” (111).5 Seemingly overnight and presumably mostly through the power of heterosexual sex and a now productive use of her time, the transference of her love from female dog to male husband results in the transformation of Miss Hazeldean, now Mrs. Riccabocca: She became even sprightly and gay, and looked all the better and prettier for the alteration. She did not scruple to confess honestly to Mrs. Dale, that she was now of opinion that the world was very far from approaching its end. But, in the meanwhile, she did not neglect

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  69 the duty which the belief she had abandoned serves to inculcate – ‘She set her house in order.’. … In a word, the fair Jemima became an excellent wife. (219–220) Freed from dogs and homosociality and happily embracing motherhood and wifehood, Jemima is freed to productivity and from her false intellect, observing without irony (or the censure of the narrator), “You see I am so stupid. … I never knew I was so stupid till I married” (261). Clara Balfour’s Drift: A Story of Waifs and Strays (1880) similarly presents us with a spinster caught up in failed domestic relations with her animal progeny. In her depiction of Miss Keziah Pendrainly’s6 obsession with and failure to nurture or care for animal and child pets alike, Balfour links the spinster’s failed reproduction with the decay and fall of the Pendrainly family and estate.7 Squire Pendrainly’s family is notably “trans-normative,” to use Elizabeth Thiel’s phrase for “the state that exists in opposition to the ‘natural’ and ‘complete’ family of husband, wife and children” (8), being made up as it is of the Squire, who “deliberately resolved on being a bachelor” (86), his spinster sister, and his two orphan nephews. This family is neither productive nor reproductive, and its composition of single people dedicated to drink or, in the case of Miss Keziah, pets speaks to its inability to operate as the foundation of English nationalism, as represented by its command of the district of Boveycum in which the Squire’s influence is eventually replaced by that of the teetotaling Dr. Franks, just as the village pub is transformed into “a place of sober resort” (328). Though not the most blame-worthy of her kin (though she does own the village pub) and the only one who is salvageable enough to find a place in the new sober life of Boveycum in the finale, Miss Keziah is nevertheless the reader’s introduction to the Pendrainly family, and her obsession with pets, rather than the family’s addiction to alcohol, is the first indication we are given of her family’s decadence. Improper pet-keeping, if not precisely a gateway drug to rampant alcoholism, is perhaps a more telling sign of familial rot, a symbol for a family that has no future, thus preparing the reader for the debauchery to come later in the narrative. We are told that Miss Keziah Pendrainly’s favourite lap-dog – a very beautiful Blenheim spaniel – had gone mad, and was obliged to be shot. … Miss Kizzy, as she was generally called, was unfortunate in her dogs: two in succession had died suddenly; and now this was a dreadful case, for he might have bitten his mistress. Indeed, the very thought of what he might have done had made Miss Kizzy so ill that she had taken to her bed with fright and vexation. Mrs. Gribber, who performed the duties of lady’s maid, housekeeper, and general factotum, at “Cum’bry,” as the house was called for shortness, assured Mrs. Stillwell that “the way in which her lady grieved and went on about that dog was a sight to see.” (72–73)

70  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady This passage has all the signs of what is to come for the Pendrainly family. The dog gone mad foreshadows the “decrepid [sic], befooled old squire” (192) in the last stages of his life, a fate shared by his nephew Vesey, similarly brought to a sad death by alcohol (234). The dog, raised only to threaten to bring pain upon its care-giver, speaks to the terrible legacy of the Pendrainly family. Owning the village pub, the Pendrainlys are represented as the root cause of the village’s many social problems, and because “The squire, his sister, and nephew, have used their influence for evil,” Dr. Franks observes, “it has returned in a large measure to their own bosoms. It has been a case of sowing and reaping” (192). Like a lap dog, spoiled and yet not properly cared for, the village in the Pendrainly family’s charge is left to ruin, its inhabitants failing to learn from the example of their social betters and turning on them viciously instead. This is most clearly indicated in the family’s relations with servants, particularly the aforementioned Mrs. Gribber, who has in fact poisoned Miss Keziah’s dogs. The failure of this aristocratic family to enforce proper class relations, and the ceding of their authority through their reliance on drink, leads not just to the destruction of Miss Keziah’s animal charges but also to the destruction of the squire, his nephew, and the familial estate when both fall prey to servants who exploit them. Miss Keziah’s pet-keeping operates as a potent symbol of the family’s decay; nevertheless, it is also, simultaneously, evidence that Miss Keziah herself may be salvageable and, strangely enough, the means by which the family is restored. To describe the process by which a long-lost member of the family, Rosie, comes to be connected with Miss Keziah involves detailing events both bizarre and, in terms of the narrative, providential. After the death of her dog, Miss Keziah is brought a letter by a servant, addressed to her by the dead Fido, one that had been “stuck with an iron skewer … upon Fido’s grave” (88). This missive, phallically placed in proximity to the dead dog, urges Miss Keziah to adopt an orphan left at the village pub in order to replace Fido in his mistress’s affections. Miss Keziah does so, taking in the girl known only as “Birdie,” renaming her “Roselle,” and referring to her as “Fido’s legacy” (109). Explaining the relation to her idiot brother, Miss Keziah constructs a kind of familial lineage for the adopted child that relies upon the dog as an important progenitor in her distorted version of a family tree: “Roselle is, in a sense, your gift, you know.” “Mine!” said the puzzled young man, never able plainly to understand his aunt, and now wholly at fault. “Mine!” “Yes,” said Miss Keziah, laughing. “Yes; you gave me Fido; and poor Fido from his grave showed himself worthy of his name, and directed me to a substitute for his affection.” (153) Roselle becomes the daughter of Miss Keziah via the combined symbolic paternity of a bachelor brother and a dead dog.

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  71 A filiation that is wrought by a combination of symbolic incest and ­ estiality is not one that promises to be particularly healthy, and Roselle’s b adoption as “pet” into the Pendrainly household is as successful as its torturous origins promise it will be. Miss Keziah’s innocent if misguided ­question  – “What do people ever do with children when they’re beautiful as angels, but make pets of them?” (153) – encapsulates the problem of the failed spinster mother, whose relations with her pets speak more of narcissism than of care.8 Her own relations with the animals in her charge, entangled as they are with her ownership of the local pub, her jealous and manipulative relations with her servants, and her failure to raise an orphan human child speak to the instability of a domestic arrangement headed, in part, by a female spinster. Like the over-grown child that her status as “old maid” implies, Miss Keziah sees her child more as a companion than a charge: “There had been a grand game of romps between the lady and child before the latter, wearied out, retired to rest” (146). Unlike a “true” mother, Miss Keziah does not view motherhood of child and animal pets as an opportunity to self-sacrificially express the boundless affection of her womanly heart; instead, her love is entirely inward-turning. This is evidenced by the absence of Fido from the narrative; not even a character, Fido instead provides an opportunity to showcase the narcissism of Miss Keziah’s pet-keeping, as shown in her “mourning” for Fido, about which she observes, “some griefs are delicious” (91). Taking pleasure in her own feelings, rather than in the proper care and development of her charges, Miss Keziah declares of Roselle, “I want her always amused, and then she’ll be amusing” (154). Of course, the end result of this is Roselle’s near total ruin: In a week Miss Keziah contrived to make her protégé absolutely hated. The child, to do her justice, was not half as exacting as she might have been. Her affectionate nature was amenable to a word; but her quick temper, and the involuntary caprices of an active mind, made her imperious. The pretty air of authority that she assumed was so amusing to both the squire and his sister, that they encouraged it, and “Miss Roselle’s commands were not to be disputed.” (159) Miss Keziah and the Squire’s rearing of this child reveals in miniature their failure to care for their larger charge of the county. In their hands, normal human foibles become magnified into character flaws; rather than nurturing what is best in the child and preparing her for the future, they instead indulge in what amuses them in the present, producing a spoiled product which, like their investments and their land, will return no dividends. Miss Keziah’s combined indulgence and neglect of her charge result from her failure to distinguish between the vastly different social status of children and animal pets. As I will discuss in Chapter Four, while both are represented as charming playthings occupying similar roles, they are meant to diverge as they age, with the child becoming the adult on whom the

72  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady future is built. Failing to recognize the imperatives of reproductive futurism, Miss Keziah links child with animal pet as creatures entirely situated in the present. Her species confusion is immediately apparent in her renaming of the child: “I must give her another name; I can’t call her only Birdie. Let’s see; there was that little paroquet Mrs. Dickson gave me, that died through eating plum-cake – let’s see; that was a Roselle; that’s the only bird’s name I know fit to call a child by; it’s very pretty” (110). Unconcerned by what should be an imperative point for her, the foundling’s lack of a proper name and the concomitant indication that “Birdie’s” lineage might be suspect, Miss Keziah sees only an opportunity to indulge herself by choosing a new name, notably based on the species names9 of pets long gone (and killed while under Miss Keziah’s care). Displacing concerns about human lineage with an attention to animal lineage, Miss Keziah demonstrates a species confusion that is quickly evident in her “rearing” of Roselle: “… then, as one would exhibit the tricks of an animal … [she] began to put the child through her list of accomplishments” (111). Miss Keziah’s inability to distinguish between family pet and future heir destabilizes her family’s proper kinship structures and threatens its stability. Significantly, Roselle has not so much replaced Fido as the dog has instead been elevated to a higher position in the family hierarchy. Roselle is now the pet, and because Miss Keziah “seemed to have adopted the notion of a communication between her dog and herself” (102) from beyond the grave, Fido has taken on the role of testator and patriarch, bequeathing familial status to the child. Miss Keziah’s adoption of Roselle might have the approbation of her dead dog but it threatens the legal and social status of the human members of the family, sowing discontent, hatred, and familial disharmony: “The idea that the little girl might become a legatee, superseding Mr. Vesey’s own claims, was slowly evolving in his mind; and Miss Pendrainly had, with wondrous dexterity, contrived to make a host of enemies, with her nephew at their head, for her darling Roselle” (154). The very figure of Lee Edelman’s sinthomosexual, Miss Pendrainly is dedicated to the jouissance of the now, moving not toward productivity, good investment, and proper preparation for the future but instead toward decay, dissolution, and “against futurity, against its propagation” (Edelman 33, italics in original) in her replacement of human patriarchs with dead dogs and rightful, biological heirs with adopted “pets.” Or so one would think. If ever there were a filiation and relation that entirely opposed the whole concept of reproductive futurism, this filiation via dead dog should surely be it. Born of a spinster, a bachelor, and a dog, all tied together in a decaying familial estate, and resulting in an adoption doomed to fail by the narcissism of all involved, this familial relation should truly produce “no future.”10 Nevertheless, Roselle is their lost kin, fulfilling the familial imperative of the Victorian domestic novel, with “its plots [that] invariably involve wills, bequests, long-lost relatives, and, of course, marriage” (McCrea 5). Furthermore, she does, in the end, bring peace and

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  73 comfort into the life of Miss Keziah; while she had spoiled Roselle with “romps” as a child, the older Rose repays her with appropriate relations, bringing comfort to the invalid Miss Keziah by reading at her bed side (248). The very model of forgiving, sustaining girlhood, unlike her former benefactress, Rose produces positive transformation in Miss Keziah, revealing what was hidden all along: “… under the wrappings and frippery of her outer life, there did beat a heart not wholly incapable of love, as she proved by trotting about after her poor old brother – the feeling that she was of some use being so far salutary as a new sensation, that better days dawned upon her as the winter of her life was closing in” (331). Rescued from her (far more interesting) life of artificiality and self-love, Miss Keziah can now enjoy a modicum of those self-sacrificing qualities that make up proper womanhood, trading pets for a “poor old brother” and “trotting about” after him, rather than enjoying children and pets who trot at her command. This salvation, as it is depicted, frees her from a life of the present and ushers her into proper productive time; Miss Keziah has been rendered “useful” and geared toward the future with its promised “better days.” Insofar as an old maid may be rendered a subject of reproductive futurism, Miss Keziah has achieved that. And she achieves it, I argue, because she was not so very far wrong in the first place. Her failure to distinguish between child and pet, while configured as part and parcel of her spinster narcissism and childishness, is also based on clear lines of connection, both cultural and ideological, between the two. The foundling child is called “Birdie,” after all, long before Miss Pendrainly thinks to rename her after a dead parakeet, and early depictions of the child revel in the child’s closeness to non-human pets.11 Miss Keziah’s immediate response to Birdie – “You sweet pet!” (105) – is therefore not the wrong reaction; the novel assures us that as a spinster, she carries this concept too far, of course, but the linkage between children and animals as pets, and between women whose hearts are opened by children and spinsters whose womanly love is partially kept alive by pets, are all strong enough to allow for a course correction from Miss Keziah’s initially disastrous relations with Birdie to her eventual proper relations with Rosie. Like Miss Jemima Hazeldean, Miss Keziah is salvageable precisely because her love for pets, however misguided, reveals an appropriately feminine impulse toward nurture and love, one that requires only the displacement of pet with human kin to bring the spinster partially back into the fold of family and domesticity. THE TRANSFORMATIVE SPINSTER/PET FAMILY While relations with pets are, as I have demonstrated, very often represented in Victorian fiction as emblematic of the spinster’s isolation, insufficient replacements for the husband and child the single woman has failed to attain, spinster/pet relations could also instead celebrate female agency and female-centered relations. Betsey Rayner Parkes’s A History of Our Cat,

74  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady Aspasia (1856), for example, uses the tale of two single women and their pet to remind us that just because a woman is not married does not mean she is alone or without ways of spending time. The short novel for children tells the story of Lilian and her companion, Helen, who represent early participants in the “re-categorization” of the spinster into “a working woman, a suffragette, a single woman living outside the sphere of the family, a woman living with other women, a celibate woman, a mannish woman, a sexually autonomous woman, an ‘odd’ woman not to be paired with a man” (Prins 47). As Yopie Prins points out, “This generation of single women resisted traditional spinsterhood even before the ‘New Woman’ of the nineties” (47). Martha Vicinus supports this in her assertion that single women from 1850 on “were forced to define themselves in terms beyond those of the nuclear family” (5), and they did so through creating women’s communities of their own, encompassing everything from religious communities dedicated to celibacy to women’s colleges dedicated to learning. For Lilian and her partner, the “we” who set up a domestic “establishment” (11) at the beginning of Aspasia’s history, the ultimate goal is to “set up the Associate Home, of which we have been talking for the last ten years, and which is to include several other Artists and Authors, who are always too poor to buy meat. …” (45). Clearly, these are not women who fear their own independence, and their relations with their cat Aspasia underline the idea of free association with like-minded individuals as the basis for relationships. The cat’s seeming independence, while perhaps problematic in terms of proper domesticity, certainly made it an attractive figure for those who wanted to challenge social mores. Kete calls the cat “the anti-pet par ­excellence” (56). Because it was “associated with sexuality and marginality” (115), the cat became the favored pet of the bohemian, acting as a symbol of a deliberate rejection of the domestic and the bourgeois. Rather than embracing an animal who helped to instantiate man’s dominion over nature, bohemians and intellectuals instead embraced “The companionship of a like-minded animal” (124), whose much-vaunted disregard for the concerns of others could stand in for the artist’s rejection of social values: “Unlike the dog, whose qualities lent themselves to embourgeoisement, the cat seemed resolutely set against incorporation into the mainstream of bourgeois life” (127). For Emile Zola, the cat’s association with women could be used not as a means of castigating female sexuality but instead as a symbol of a women’s repressed sexuality within the confines of middle-class hypocrisy. Discussing his depiction of the title character in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Rogers suggests “the image of a cat’s outward stillness and violent potential graphically conveys the mental state of this intensely vital woman trapped in a circle of imperceptive, undersexed humans; the parallel suggests that she, like a cat, needs and should have freedom from such social restriction” (121).12 The Ladies Companion and Monthly Magazine of 1856 observes that Parkes’s Aspasia “is a vicious puss, whose reformation and history wants

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  75 that finish which we yet hope to biographically place before the public. ­Nevertheless, we can tell our little friends in the nursery, that they may not only extract a laugh, but also a lesson, from the ‘History of Aspasia’” (C. C. 218). This description makes clear that while Aspasia gets the ladies’ stamp of approval, there is also something wanting in Aspasia – both the cat and the text – which would relieve the necessity of that “nevertheless” in the final recommendation. Aspasia’s viciousness, clearly represented in the text in her “incessant series of scrapes” (Parkes 39) and “other unruly behaviour” (41), makes her somewhat of a problematic subject for children’s literature, in which “many of the stories that use animal characters” try “to impart morals or instruct the young reader/listener in correct or socially sanctioned behavior” (Yarbrough 4). The problem is that Parkes’s text is not lacking in moral instruction; a long section detailing letters between Lilian and a “master” in whose care Aspasia has been left includes many worthy sentiments regarding the sadness of Aspasia’s conduct and their shared hope she will “become a respectable member of society” (41). The moral instruction, however, is highly parodic. Aspasia behaves throughout not like a moral exemplar, nor like the young female charge she is constructed as, but instead like a cat. As a result, far from being a text in which animals are anthropomorphized in order to facilitate their use for moral instruction, The History of our Cat, Aspasia is instead a text that pits nature against culture in ways that call into question social mores and regulations. Aspasia’s entrance into the lives of Lilian and Helen reflects the temporary domesticity in which her owners are currently and, as the narrative details, repeatedly, engaged. Visiting Wales, where the two women are “alone in the house, and were in the habit of walking about from one room to another in the morning, and holding little parliaments out on the landing place, concerning our plans for the day” (15), they come upon a kitten dwelling in a “row of tiny cottages” (10). Helen immediately decides they must have this kitten, saying, “we want some household pet in our establishment” (11). There is a pull, here, between the transient nature of their dwelling, clearly a vacation house that serves as the base for their exploration of Wales, and the idea of home, an “establishment” on which one builds one’s foundation and which is marked by the presence of a “household pet.” This same pull between the domestic and the transitory marks their relationship with Aspasia. At times, they treat her as a de facto child, such as when they call her “the child of our affections and adoption” (24) or bemoan their difficulties in properly disciplining her: “As to Aspasia, we were obliged to take her into favor again, for scolding made so little impression on her youthful mind, that it cost more trouble than it was worth” (16). At other times, however, Aspasia is something to be shipped and shifted about, left behind on the train by accident (35) or sent off to stay with various gentlemen (24,  38–39) when Helen and Lilian find it inconvenient to take her with them on their travels or to live with them in their different homes. Regardless, she is still “our cat, Aspasia” throughout, reflecting a kind of ownership

76  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady and attachment, a different form of kinship and family that is, despite its episodic and transitory nature, still deeply felt and acknowledged. These are women who make a home for themselves but a home that is not fixed and determined; instead, home, wherever it is, is a space very much caught up with active engagement in activities and the outside world, with “plans” and “painting and writing, and going down to the grocer’s” (25). Similarly, they make family for themselves out of adoptions and friendships, alike transitory but nonetheless essential. The lack of fixedness in Aspasia’s relationship with Lilian and Helen is matched by her own cat-like refusal to settle down within any household abode. If anything characterizes Aspasia, it is that she is forever lost, wandering, or out and about, getting into trouble. After being sent to live in a country home because Lilian “was very much unwilling” to take Aspasia to live with her in London, Aspasia forms “an alliance offensive and defensive” (38) with another cat named Toby, and causes her current master to complain that “on more than one occasion she has stopped out all night and once was absent a whole week without leave or license” (41). She is, in other words, a thoroughly shameless creature, one who consorts with the opposite sex, moves about at will, and causes those in charge of her to lament she is “going on like a heathen, and one unblessed by domestic influences and the advantages of feminine care” (43). In the end, she is shipped off to live with a “minister’s family,” referred to as a “Reformatory School for juvenile criminals,” in which finally “she daily becomes steadier” (44). The construction of Aspasia as a criminal in need of reformation, when her behavior highly resembles that of a cat, works as an ironic commentary on Lilian herself, likewise a wandering woman living outside “domestic influences” and without chaperone. Even Lilian’s letter castigating Aspasia and begging her to behave makes reference to “all those branches of domestic education, in which I confess myself somewhat deficient” (44) as the solution to Aspasia’s behavior. In presenting herself as not having the answers for a feline who wants to wander and refuses to be properly domestic, Lilian aligns herself thoroughly with the cat, as they both alike revel in free action and rebel against restraints. But if The History of Our Cat, Aspasia tells us anything, it tells us about Lilian and Helen. Aspasia is not so much the heroine of the book as she is the means by which the women’s relationship can be delineated, their own care for each other and their own inter-personal conflicts explored. As described earlier, Lilian and Helen share the job of “raising” Aspasia, from their joint efforts to name her (12) to their joint failures to discipline her. As with other parents, Lilian and Helen triangulate their relationship through their “child,” using the cat as a means of commenting on one another’s behavior. In one instance, Lilian complains that Helen “had a bad habit of spoiling Aspasia and giving her bits of mutton chop instead of letting her earn the more substantial part of her food in the natural feline way” (26), and in another, she refuses to delve into the question of who is responsible for

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  77 leaving Aspasia on the train: “who made the mistake and where the blame lay, I do not know to this day, and it is just one of those cases in which it is most discreet for the sake of friendship not to enquire. …” (35). Through Aspasia, we see glimpses of a relationship that is continually negotiated, one that has its own intimate boundaries established, crossed, and re-crossed. Aspasia and the opportunity she provides for amusing anecdotes seem, at this and many other times, merely an alibi for a loving detailing of Helen’s and Lilian’s relationship, as seen in the depiction of a scene immediately after they forget the cat on a train, in which Lilian observes, “I worked myself up into such distress that Helen added a special telegraphic message, ‘Take great care of Cat’” (36). Sometimes, in fact, Aspasia seems an alibi for the entire text, as she is often not present or described in much of it, which instead focuses on the two women’s experiences in Wales, as in the description of Lilian walking “on a long terrace, over-hanging the quays, amidst the deepening ­shadows. … Helen used to call out to me to come in, saying it was quite too late to go out to be poetical, and I should catch my death of cold” (25). There is an intimacy in this moment, and in many like it, that has nothing to do with Aspasia or her “history.” Aspasia’s strange lack of presence in a text that purports to be about her operates very differently, however, than the usual absent pet. She is not absent because she has no personality, or because she has been displaced by the “proper” human attachments; she is absent, at least in part, because she is independent, much of her life, and her story, happening alongside, but separate from, the lives of her human companions. The nature of Helen and Lilian’s relationship is unclear; there is simply a great deal of “our cat” (8) and “we” throughout. Nevertheless, that they are women-centered women, who relate to each other and to their cat in ways that speak to a household that is, however transitory, nevertheless utterly complete, is very clear. These are not sad, lonely spinsters who, closed off from humanity and the outside world and even time itself, find solace for their failure to attain marriage and the protection of men in a failed approximation of heteronormative domesticity. These are instead women who forcefully represent that the alternative to marriage is not necessarily to be alone. In each other, and in their cat, they find a space for women – and cats – who both wander and settle, who find pleasure in the companionship of others, and who revel in their own solitude. The text therefore demonstrates a fluid, indeterminate playing with familial roles that highlights the extent to which all families operate as a series of performances – sibling, roommate, significant other, mother – through which co-habitants negotiate power, desire, affection, and control. At times, Aspasia is a partner in crime, a scapegrace whose antics provide a model and reflection of the women’s own adventures; at other times, she is a child, a dependent who is expected to complete their home but who also operates as the means through which they negotiate the intricacies of their own inter-personal relationships. The cross-species alliance at the heart of this family speaks to the

78  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady categorical flexibility required within these relationships, a flexibility that is about ­celebrating the open-endedness of these women’s lives, rather than the ­goal-oriented ends of marriage and maternity. THE ANTI-SOCIAL SPINSTER AND HER PET While Helen and Lilian offer a more positive model of female/pet relations than is found in most discourse on spinsters, they do so, in part, through relying on narratives of family and community. Far more troublesome than the spinster who made a family with her pet, however, was the spinster who was constructed as anti-social and anti-familial, a figure seen much more frequently in late nineteenth-century texts. Spinsters were not always constructed as sad women struggling to keep their womanly hearts alive with the closest thing resembling maternal love. While it is true they were “usually objects of pity” (Gordon and Nair 167), they were also at times represented as spiteful, bitter, and inherently anti-social creatures who hated newly-weds, children, and other humans alike. Old maids who could be constructed as either useful to – or sadly emulating – the normative home were relied upon, tolerated, or pitied, but those who rejected or were perceived as rejects from marriage, motherhood, and domesticity were both hoped to be in the minority and resoundingly deplored. Less sympathetic portrayals of the spinster construct her as an overt, rather than covert, anti-social figure, a social outcast onto whom the worst qualities of human behavior could be othered.13 An article “On Old Maids” in an 1870 issue of the Ladies’ Monthly Magazine, for example, identifies the genus of the “cross old maid,” who over time “developes [sic] into a hard minded woman, unsympathetic to children and young people, especially so to newly married couples. …” (J. 8). In her hatred of youth and marriage, the “cross old maid” shows herself to be antithetical to life; mired down in her own misanthropy, she was a figure that, on behalf of sociality and geniality, Victorian social discourse was free to deplore. Of course, the problem with such an old maid was not that she was necessarily anti-social but that she betrayed the wrong kind of sociality. Often, representations of the bitter, agitating spinster link her antisociality with a preference for animals over humans; rather than a proxy for maternal love, pet ownership instead becomes a meaningful choice, a sign of one’s willful desire to reject human contact in favor of cross-species alliances. Such representations of spinsters with their pets can be read as instances of what Deleuze and Guattari call “becoming-animal.” Deleuze and Guattari reject the “little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors and cherishes it” (244) from their category of the “anomalous” – that is, the “phenomenon of bordering” (245) that “haunt[s] the fringes” and is associated with alliance rather than filiation (246). For them, single women and their beloved pets are closely linked with everything Oedipal and domestic,

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  79 “… individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog” (240). What they fail to acknowledge in dismissing the “little cat or dog” and the “elderly woman” is the extent to which both are not always safely encompassed within or representative of the normative home; instead, like the sorcerer of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal,” these figures can also revel in “alliance and contagion” rather than kinship and filiation (246). The linkage of the spinster in particular with animals, as opposed to husband and children, could be seen not as an attempt to recreate an Oedipal home but instead as a willful failure to acknowledge her supposed in-born duty to her kin and species. Rather than providing a means for keeping alive womanly feelings of nurture and affection, the relation between the anti-social spinster and her pet can instead speak to a shared spirit of enmity, a relationship that thrives on mean-spiritedness as opposed to fellow feeling: “To this class of spinsters belong by right, those well-known articles, the ill-tempered parrot, the vixenish cat, and the snarling dog” (J. 7). Like their mistresses, these pets do not happily serve the needs of others; instead, with their spinster companion, these animals revel in aggressivity. It is unclear whether the bitter spinster creates such unappealing animal companions or if the two find each other in some unholy alliance of misanthropy. What is clear, as seen in a column by “The Woman about Town” for The Sporting Times in 1871 on the occasion of the first cat show in London, is that such mean-spirited spinsters are also capable of turning on each other: I tried very hard to find out who were the judges, but nobody could tell me. I firmly believe that they must have been old maids – regular frumps, you know, with their hair done up in tight knots at the back of their heads, and bony faces, and little bags in their hands, containing, as a rule, a pocket-handerkerchief, a smelling-bottle, and a packet of peppermints. There were lots of them in the building, and now and then I caught them glaring savagely at each other, and you could be sure they were rival cat-owners, and that their names were Tabitha and Euphemia, and the like. (Stella 232) These spinsters are depicted as being as poor company for each other as they are for anyone else inflicted by them; related only to their cats, they are incapable of coming together in ways that eschew competitiveness and ill-feeling. With their savage glares and their rivalry, these women, like Miss Jemima and Miss Smilecox in Bulwer-Lytton’s My Novel, are caught up in vicious competition on behalf of their animal companions. Presenting spinsters as inherently anti-social works, of course, to pit women against women in ways that are similar to the construction of women on the marriage market, participating in larger patriarchal discourses that discourage women from homosocial alliances. What is significant about

80  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady these old maids at the cat show, however, is that while they are supposedly marked by their isolation and their competition with each other, they are nonetheless also capable of combination. Both anomalous and a “pack,” they participate in Deleuze and Guattari’s “entire politics of becominganimal … which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions …” (247). “Spinster clustering” was in fact a recognized phenomenon, the term used to describe “the grouping together of women (in twos, threes, and fours) to render some kind of accommodation where they could share costs of heating and lighting and the time spent at market, in food preparation, fetching wood and water, or picking up and delivering work” (Hufton 361). But the form of “spinster clustering” described here and earlier, in de Cyon’s anti-vivisection protestors, is one that eschews familial organization for social organization, pitting the spinster, particularly in the latter half of the century, as a political dissident against the whole infrastructure of English politics, both national and familial.14 Another nineteenth-century article observes, “Some few we find strong-minded and stern; affecting Exeter Hall or the Platforms of Woman’s Rights; or full of malice and acerbities; crabbed and sour scandal-mongers and mischief makers – the thorns and briars of society” (Vernon 78). Like the witches of old, these spinsters are represented as living to cause trouble, their politics – whether anti-slavery, anti-vivisection, or pro-women’s rights – mere “affectations” taken on for the pleasure of stirring up trouble, with their interpersonal relations likewise marred by the deliberate causing of strife and conflict. Against such creatures the home space might well arm itself, the argument being these women use their excess time to cause “mischief,” the depiction of them as the “thorns and briars of society” indicating that, without them, society would truly be an ordered space untouched by “malice and acerbities.” It is clear what is at stake here is not just a protection of the domestic sphere against the agitating spinster but an entire politics of separation, one that works to keep women separate from one another so as to diminish their very real capacity for gaining political and social power. As I indicated earlier, the spinster who is devoted to knowledge and learning also falls within this category. Felicity Nussbaum observes the “learned lady becomes a pervasive metaphor for the unnatural woman who refuses to perform the natural functions of her sex and who actively usurps the functions of the male sex” (qtd. in Hill 83). Linked with the spinster as both anti-social and yet capable of combination with other women in ways not sanctioned by heteronormativity or reproductive futurism, the educated and scholarly woman was figured as an outcast from normal society, either eccentrically rejecting normative human companionship or relying upon scholarship as compensation for the lack of better womanly pursuits. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen (1879), the titular character decides upon

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  81 a solitary life after her father’s death, her mother’s subsequent remarriage to the cold and controlling Captain Winstanley, and the seeming loss of her childhood love, Rorie. Claiming she will escape from her currently unhappy life in her childhood home, Vixen proposes instead, “I will have a cottage in the heart of the Forest. … I will spend my days botanising and fern-hunting, riding and walking, and perhaps learn to paint my favourite trees, and live as happily and as remote from mankind as the herons in their nests at the top of the tall breeches on Vinny Ridge” (152). Proposing to embrace a life of study and solitary pursuits, aligned only with animals and nature, Vixen is on the verge of making a choice directly counter to normative constructions of femininity. Proof that her proposed choice is a radical one is provided by her mother’s warning that “anybody hearing you might suppose you were not quite right in your mind” (152). That the narrative supports her mother in this conclusion becomes clear when Vixen is shipped off to live with Captain Winstanley’s maiden aunt. Vixen’s impression of spinsterhood as a pleasant refuge from the pressures and disappointments of society and her own failure to fully adjust to her role as a woman within it is one that is proved to be decidedly wrongheaded and idealistic. Her sojourn with a true spinster, one dedicated to social isolation in response to earlier disappointments and devoted to education in place of wife- and motherhood, proves the strongest form of inoculation against Vixen’s rebellious plans of escape. Miss Skipwith, “a maiden lady, a woman of superior cultivation, who devotes herself wholly to intellectual pursuits” (III. 8), lives with her cat Baba at Les Tourelles, an isolated, decaying estate on the island of Jersey. Built on the site of a monastery, Les Tourelles is appropriately antithetical to life, described as having “as dreary and abandoned a look about its blank windows as if the mansion and estate had been in Chancery for the last half-century” (III. 42).15 Cut off from England in what is represented as a strange and antique land, Miss Skipwith is described by her nephew as indeed being “the last of her race. The Skipwiths have crystallised into one maiden lady, my mother’s only sister” (49). A scion of a dying family, Miss Skipwith represents the failure of the wrong kind of aristocracy; obsessed with their own lineage, the Skipwiths, as “crystallized” in their last, unreproductive member, represent a family dedicated to notions of class and status that Braddon places in England’s dead past rather than in its vibrant present. Miss Skipwith’s spinsterhood is therefore both her own individual punishment for snobbery and a rightful opportunity for this form of aristocracy to die out: “I, too, might have married, but the man towards whom my heart most inclined was a man of no family. I could not marry a man without family. I am weak enough to be prouder of my pedigree than other woman are of beauty and fortune. … The family name and the family pride will die with me” (III., 70). Miss Skipwith’s rejection of a man of “no family” has met with the appropriate punishment: she is shut out from having family of her own with her own kin primarily dead. Rejecting the society of those

82  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady around her as “beneath” her (III. 51), Miss Skipwith has only the company of an appropriately pedigreed Persian, who she describes as her “attached companion for the last ten years” (53). That Baba shares Miss Skipwith’s notions of superiority becomes clear when Vixen attempts to befriend the cat, for whom her own beloved and loyal dog Argus is exiled to the outside world, but “He was a serious-minded animal, and seemed inclined to resent her advances” (78). Like his mistress, the Persian represents a selfsatisfied, humorless, confirmed anti-sociality, one linked to haughtiness and the resentment of attachment to perceived inferiors. Vixen even observes, “The Persian cat seemed … an attribute of the female theologian” (79). Rather than companionship, the Persian merely provides the spinster with a silent reflection of herself. This is not a proxy for a child, nor a being that represents the spinster’s sole opportunity for keeping alive the wellsprings of love in her womanly heart; rather, Miss Skipwith seems to have no maternal feelings requiring an outlet. Locked away in a dying house on a desolate island, the spinster and her cat are sentenced to an isolation that is both a choice – echoing Vixen’s dream of escape from society and all its ­expectations – and a seemingly apt punishment for their misanthropy. Miss Skipwith’s seclusion with only her cat for company is intimately tied to her pursuit of arcane religious knowledge, likewise constructed as a fruitless dead end and empty usage of time. As opposed to the more womanly pursuits of care and nurture, Miss Skipwith instead endlessly expresses herself through her research and her production of a great work aimed at creating a universal religion. She describes her “literary labours” as “The chief object of my existence. When I have done with them I shall have done with life” (63). That these labors are wasted is made clear in her failure to disseminate her knowledge, to have it “bear fruit,” as it were, either in the production of new knowledge or as a means of connecting her to a larger scholarly community. The permanent status of her book as “not yet published” (III. 63) connects Miss Skipwith’s research to the timeless status of the old maid; indeed, she rejects her nephew’s attempts to find it useful as taking too much of a “temporal point of view” (III., 66). Her research is a form of progeny that will never see its birth, and yet by never being finished, it keeps her alive, caught in a stasis in which, never having done with her work, she will never “have done with life” (63); as she herself observes, “time is never too long for me” (78). Miss Skipwith’s learning is therefore its own form of futurism but it is not (re)productive. As an endless task that merely fills her time and seemingly extends her life beyond any usefulness, it is more representative of the death drive, working as it does to keep her alone and in exile: “My own studies are of so grave a nature that they in a measure isolate me from my fellow-creatures. …” (69). That Miss Skipwith fails to recognize she is being punished for her own choices and lives in a prison of her own making is explained not by the possibility that she may find (and have a right to find) pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake but instead as a form of madness. The narrative only observes,

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  83 “The line of demarcation between such fanaticism as Miss Skipwith’s and the hallucination of an old lady in Bedlam, who fancies herself Queen Victoria, seemed to Vixen but a hair’s breadth” (71). It continues, “But, after all, if the old lady and Miss Skipwith were both happy in their harmless self-deceptions, why should one pity them?” (71). As generous as this patronizing question may be, it demonstrates that Vixen does not recognize the true threat embodied by Miss Skipwith. Though she is a figure of ridicule in the novel, Miss Skipwith is, nevertheless, the only representative of an alternative to Vixen’s dilemma, that of having to find a husband in a world in which such a partner may not, as her mother’s second marriage attests, be congenial and supportive, and in which finding such a partner might rightly mean the end of a woman’s independence. That Miss Skipwith does represent an actual choice for women in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one which must be disavowed to support the novel’s over-arching project of lauding companionate marriage as in the best interests of English society, is indicated both by Vixen’s first fanciful attractions to spinsterhood and by Miss Skipwith’s attempts to recruit Vixen for the spinster cause. Vixen’s dreams of escape from a household regulated by a domineering and cruel man center around her own hope of independence. Vixen reminds herself, “I shall be rich seven years hence” (II., 285) and vows she will not end up like her mother: “Look at her, poor soul; she sits in bodily fear of him. …” (II., 285). While the novel’s solution to this problem is simply that one should take care to marry the right man, Vixen’s focus upon her own income and the possibilities it entails for her to live on her own speak to a very real option that might empower her to find other choices than the familial and social duties of marriage and motherhood. The ridicule the narrative levels against Miss Skipwith’s efforts to bring Vixen within the fold of spinsterhood is therefore necessary to protect the overarching representation of marriage as the only valid option for Vixen. Early on in their sojourn together, Miss Skipwith observes, “If girls your age could only … seek their vocation early, how much grander and nobler would be woman’s place in the universe! But alas! the common aim of girlhood seems to be to look pretty and to get married” (III., 69–70). What Miss Skipwith fails to recognize, of course, is that women’s best place is to get married, so long as they go about it the right way; the alternative, which she represents, is merely wasted potential, narcissistic and fruitless relationships with lower creatures, self-imposed isolation, and a dedication to decay and past glory. Her attempts to teach Vixen are met with failure, and Miss Skipwith is forced to recognize Vixen will not be someone who will share her love of knowledge: “What advantages might she have derived from intercourse with me, if she had possessed a receptive nature! But my highest gifts are thrown away on her. She will go through life in lamentable ignorance of all that is of the deepest import in man’s past and future. She has no more

84  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady intellect than Baba.” Baba was the Persian cat, the silent companion of Miss Skipwith’s studious hours. (206–07) Here the text clearly demonstrates that animal companionship is no substitute for real “intercourse,” with Baba dismissed as merely a “silent companion.” Baba, unlike Gyp and Snap in the first chapter, is given no characterization. Instead, her lack of personality and her silence speak loudly to the spinster’s total isolation from others, with even her pet no comfort for Miss Skipwith in her solitude. The possibility of “intercourse” between Miss Skipwith and Vixen, that the two might form an attachment resulting in a shared joy in intellectual pursuit, is something that has to be represented as a fantasy entirely within the wrong-headed spinster’s mind. As readers, we are clearly aware that Miss Skipwith’s “highest gifts” are not at all valuable within the worldspace of this novel, nor is Vixen’s failure to engage in study a sign of her failings; instead, in a novel which is none too supportive of women’s education, Vixen’s choice not to engage in empty intellectual pursuit is instead a sign she is eminently suitable to proper English domesticity. When Vixen is rescued from a life of solitude, learning, and spinster-clustering with Miss Skipwith by the returned Rorie, Miss Skipwith’s pity for her signals the spinster’s deep denial and ignorance of love: “‘Poor misguided child!’ she murmured to herself pityingly; ‘just as she was developing a vocation for serious things!’” (III., 251). Vixen feels quite differently, of course: “What would Miss Skipwith say? Vixen laughed merrily at the image of that cheated lady” (247). The image of Miss Skipwith as a cheated lady makes clear what has been at stake here. Miss Skipwith’s total isolation is not necessarily, or not solely, a result of her own misanthropy and snobbery but instead a structural requirement of a narrative that cannot allow the possibility for female satisfaction outside of marriage and reproduction. Miss Skipwith, with her cat who can only be a silent companion, lacking the intellectual rigor Miss Skipwith would choose in a companion, is shut out from any future. Her rejection of reproductive futurism in favor of a kind of intellectual futurism in which she creates intellectual progeny through teaching and inspiring others, is shown to be futile and misguided. Having missed the possibility of the rightful form of futurism by her snobbish rejection of the man she once loved, Miss Skipwith cannot find another form of kinship or progeny either through education or through cross-species alliance. Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies (1876) presents us with a spinster who, on the surface, shares much with Miss Skipwith. Isolated on one of the Shetland Islands with her aged father, Miss Dunross is similarly the last of her race, an ancient family sunk in its own past. Though she too does not socialize with those around her and instead finds solace in cats, Miss ­Dunross is quite different from Miss Skipwith in one very important way: she is, despite her oddness and deformity, a seductive and beguiling creature, one who actually holds the power to sway the hero from his proper “destiny” (as

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  85 promised by the title) and enfold him within the enchanted, timeless space of her retreat from the world. An essentially queer figure, regardless of her attachment to the male narrator of the novel, Miss Dunross promises a kind of sexual dissidence in her attachment to “singular” pleasures, encapsulating both joy that is found in her own single state and joy that is unusual, outside the norm. Embracing a spinsterhood shaped according to stereotypes – the self-sacrificing old maid, the single woman with cat, the spinster as nun – Collins reconfigures these stereotypes in a character geared toward erotic, self-pleasuring, and seductive ends. While Martha Stoddard Holmes convincingly argues that Wilkie ­Collins subverted the “consistent message that disability, almost by definition, removes or diverts a young woman from the normative sexual economy” by “radically replott[ing] disabled woman’s sexual and reproductive ‘place’ transgressing not only the barrier of marriage but also that of childbearing” (61), I argue that his representation of Miss Dunross, despite still placing her ­outside marriage and child-bearing, is nevertheless subversive. Miss Dunross, far from being an uncomplicated figure of pity, ridicule, or disgust, instead represents the attractions of the sinthomosexual, luring the protagonist and the reader into a world dedicated to the death drive and the pleasures of dissolution, jouissance, and non-futurity. As such, she is a threat to and antithesis of destiny. Aligned against the “biological fact of heterosexual procreation” that “bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations” (Edelman 13), she instead represents “the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance … to every social structure and form” (4) that Edelman defines as central to “queer oppositionality” to reproductive futurism. To explain Miss Dunross’s significance in the novel it is necessary first to outline the destinies described in the title. George Germaine, as a young boy, falls in love with Mary, the daughter of the bailiff of his father’s estate. Though they are both very young, George relates that “Beginning by being inseparable companions, we ripened and developed into true lovers” (16). George makes clear that “true lovers” do not allow the possibility of sexuality; he asks: “What was the attraction that drew us so closely one to the other, at an age when the sexual sympathies lay dormant in her and in me? We neither knew nor sought to know. We obeyed the impulse to love one another as a bird obeys the impulse to fly” (17). Caught in the supposedly pre-sexual stasis of childhood, George and his young love are merely enacting what nature demands of them, an attachment tied inherently to a future in which that love will mature and “ripen” into a full, sexual, and ­hetero-genital relationship. The young lovers are separated, however, despite the warnings of Mary’s wise grandmother, a committed Swedenbourgian who declares them “kindred spirits” (24) destined for each other. Each one falls into a kind of degeneracy as a result, George wasting his self-worth and more “in the company of women who had reached the lowest depths of degradation” (49) and Mary, naturally not looking forward to a life of “cheerless celibacy” (59), wedding the wrong man, one who already has a

86  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady wife. Meeting later in life, they are inexplicably drawn to each other, and George plans to rescue and marry Mrs. Brandt, as she is now known, who has changed from her childhood self into a decidedly different figure, one of “womanly fullness, symmetry, and grace” (56) – in short, she has ripened into what Miss Dunross will later scathingly refer to as a “buxom” woman (189). This fecundity is clearly what attracts George to Mary, as he comments on first meeting her again on “that grand figure whose exquisite grace and symmetry even her long cloak could not wholly hide” (67) and again later revels in the moment when “her charming figure came by soft gradations nearer and nearer to me” (103). However, this (unbeknownst to them) reunion seemingly brought about by Mary’s ripe, womanly figure does not end happily; though George conceives of her as “the love of my riper age” (150), the revelation that she has had a child with her false husband erects a barrier between them: “There was the child, an obstacle between us – there was his hold on her, now that he had got her back! What was my hold worth?” (149). What Collins represents here is the juxtaposition between a childish love, one configured as natural and innocent and connected to an inevitable destiny, and the realities of adult love, hampered by social structures and the all-too-real consequences of sexuality. Fleeing his disappointment in a trip to the Shetland Islands, George finds himself offered a strange alternative to these two poles of heterosexual romantic love. With the strangely beguiling Miss Dunross, George encounters a kind of relating that defies the structures of heterosexuality and reproductivity that have come to define his relationship with Mrs. Brandt. Injured when thrown off his pony, George is conveyed by boat and by stretcher to the home of Miss Dunross and her father: “Slowly we float over the dark water … until we reach the shores of a little island; a flat lonely barren patch of ground. I am carried along a rough pathway made of great flat stones, until we reach the firmer earth, and discover a human dwelling-place at last” (162). An island on an island, this home is clearly set off from the rest of the world, and George, far from finding this cold or uncomfortable, instead revels in its separation: “… I am quite content, for the first few minutes, to stretch myself on a bed, in lazy enjoyment of my new position; without caring to inquire into whose house we have intruded; without even wondering at the strange absence of master, mistress, or member of the family to welcome our arrival under their roof” (163). George has been restored here not to a state of childhood but closer to that of actual infancy or even the womb. He enjoys a kind of stasis, carried into a dark and sheltered space of comfort that, in its disconnection from social structures and niceties, holds the comforts of home without the regulations of society and family. Seemingly divorced from the possibility of a future with Mary, George gives himself over to the pleasures of the death drive, and in so doing, reflects the actions of those who dwell within, for Mr. Dunross is a man for whom “All sympathy with the doings of the outer world, all curiosity about persons of social position and notoriety, is … at an end. … Life has lost its priceless value to

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  87 this man – and when Death comes to him, he will receive the king of t­ errors as he might receive the last of his guests” (169). Similarly, his daughter, afflicted as a result of her nursing the villagers during an epidemic, is a creature cut off from life; dwelling in shadows as a result of suffering from “a morbidly sensitive condition of the nerves near the surface to the action of light,” Miss Dunross has got used to “living in the dark” (176). While hers is a life of near total isolation and she is most definitely represented as a tragic figure, Miss Dunross nevertheless holds real attraction for George and truly does embody an elsewhere from the demands of heteronormativity, dominant gender relations, and reproductive futurism. Miss Dunross, like other women with disabilities in Collins’s texts, is represented as “a desiring subject” (Holmes 72) who falls in love with George, and she is figured by the novel as a possible alternative to his “fated” relationship with Mrs. Brandt; nevertheless, she does not hold out the promise of wifehood, maternity, and family. Instead, configured as she is as a kind of eroticized nun, Miss Dunross promises to lure George into the no-space of her island home, into a world of “amusements” and “interests” that have no social meaning and no productive use. Shrouded from his eyes both by the heavy curtains that have him (again, womb-like) “literally enveloped in shadows” (172) and by the heavy veil under which “no distinguishing feature … is ­visible” (172), the dream-like Miss Dunross immediately disavows any possibility of a future between them. She says of herself, “I have no prospect” (176) and informs him the “darkness” is “a perpetual obstacle, so far as your eyes are concerned, between you and me” (178). Nevertheless, she demonstrates there are still joys open to them, as she herself knows. Reminding him she is not a figure to be pitied, she assures him, “I have my pleasures” (176). Though she may be nun-like in her desire to be a service to him and others and in her similarity to “Saint Cecilia” (180), Miss Dunross assures George she is “no Saint!” (180). Miss Dunross’s refusal to imbue her solitude and her service with the self-sacrificing holiness of sainthood speaks to the eroticism of her solitude that defines her as a sexual dissident. Embracing and staking a claim in her own singular “pleasures,” she invites George into her world in ways that resemble seduction but are not reducible to normative opposite-sex attraction; instead, she promises “a new sensation to amuse you while you are ill” (178). Her use of “sensation” promises both a sensory and a sensational experience, one she prepares him for with her warning, “I have some odd tastes” (179). Before George can become too excited at the prospect of a “new sensation” for him based on her “odd tastes,” she asks a question perhaps least expected by George: “Are you like other men, Mr. Germaine? Do you hate cats?” (179). Here, cats and one’s relation to them form a test. Mr.  Germaine can either confirm his normative masculinity through a hearty denunciation of the cat in favor of the manly dog or he can show himself to be a like-minded spirit to the spinster. His reply – that “in this respect at least” he “is not like other men” – aligns him with her as one who

88  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady (partially) defies gender norms, thus winning her approval: “The expression of these unpopular sentiments appeared to raise me greatly in the estimation of Miss Dunross … ‘We have one sympathy in common, at any rate,’ she said. ‘Now I can amuse you! Prepare for a surprise’” (179). United, if only partially as the qualifications of “at least” and “at any rate” signify, there is now a possibility Miss Dunross’s singular pleasures will become, for the moment, shared amusements, a folie à deux in which the two will pass their decidedly unproductive time. George is in fact quite surprised by what follows, a performance composed of Miss Dunross playing the harp while her cats dance about her, a scene that deserves to be quoted at length: She touched the strings of her instrument – the ancient harp, as she had said, of the pictured Saint Cecilia; or rather, as I thought, the ancient harp of the Welsh bards. The sound was at first unpleasantly high in pitch, to my untutored ear. At the opening notes of the melody – a slow, wailing, dirge-like air – the cats began the performance by walking round their mistress. Now they followed each other singly; now, at a change in the melody, they walked two by two; and, now again, they separated into divisions of three each, and circled round the chair in opposite directions. The music quickened, and the cats quickened their pace with it. Faster and faster the notes rang out, and faster and faster in the ruddy firelight, the cats, like living shadows, whirled round the still black figure in the chair, with the ancient harp on its knee. ­Anything so weird, wild, and ghostlike I never imagined before, even in a dream! (180–81) Miss Dunross’s performance speaks to a particularly queer aesthetic, one that mixes both gender and genre in ways that are wholly unexpected, amusing, and surprising. As both Saint Cecilia and a Welsh bard, she draws inspiration from and alludes to divergent religious and regional identities while also authorizing her particular performance through recourse to very different forms of female and male power. Her music, invoking tragedy and melancholy with its “slow, wailing, dirge-like air,” is supported by the darkness in which she is shrouded but offset by the startling image of cats marching in formation. Whatever many fine attributes cats may have, they are not particularly known for their tragic potential nor for their ability to be trained as part of a corps de ballet, and the ill-fittedness of the cats for both the music and the performance adds a strange hilarity to this solemn, antique performance. This blending of high art and low burlesque culminates in the finale, in which “the whirling cats began to leap. … Four sprang up together, and assumed their places, two on each of her shoulders. The last and smallest of the cats took the last leap, and lighted on her head!” (181). No matter how stately and accomplished a harp player Miss Dunross may be, no one can look noble or aristocratic with a cat on her head. There

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  89 is a willingness here to defy the boundaries of taste, to mix drawing-room performance with acrobatic panache, and to bring high and low together in ways truly odd and unexpected, that places Miss Dunross’s performance firmly outside the realm of the normative and the ordinary. And far from being unaware of the strange, compelling, and almost comical figure she presents, Miss Dunross instead embraces it, proclaiming, “How you will amuse your friend, when he comes back from fishing, with the story of the young lady who lives in the dark, and keeps a company of performing cats!” (182). In other words, Miss Dunross embraces the spinster as a figure of fun, particularly as the object of ridicule of traditional masculinity, and in so doing reclaims her agency within that stereotype by participating within the narrative rather than living in fear of its power over her. In his depiction of Miss Dunross’s relationship with her cats and the uniquely aesthetic (rather than strictly familial) relations they enjoy, ­Collins challenges existing narratives of pets, spinsters, and their shared role in making family. Miss Dunross refers to the animals as both her “familiar spirits” and her “cat-children” (182), thus collapsing two different narratives of spinsters – as witches and as de facto mothers – to create her own particular version of family and relating. There is certainly what one might want to call a motherly pride in her “cat-children,” as she praises them as “pretty creatures” who “learn wonderfully well” (182). But there is also a reveling in control, a pleasure in the dynamics of power that is at play in her boast, “I devote myself to teaching these pretty creatures their tricks, and attaching them to me like dogs! They were slow at first, and they taught me excellent lessons of patience. Now, they understand what I want of them. …” (182). Miss Dunross describes a relationship that is about the coming together of the affective – devotion and attachment – with the coercive. It is a reciprocal relationship in which animals have lessons of “patience” to teach her, but it is not an equal relationship, as she has worked to make the cats submissive to her, willing to give her what she wants. Instead, it is what Sharon Marcus describes as an “erotic relationship,” which involves “intensified affect and sensual pleasure, dynamics of looking and displaying, domination and submission, restraint and eruption, idolization and humiliation” (114). Combining narcissism with devotion, Miss Dunross is the uncanny double of the proper Victorian mother, bringing into light the self-centered absorption in the child as the product of one’s nurture that is in fact central to motherhood in relation to reproductive futurism. But what future can Miss Dunross have? Even within the context of a novel that is far more complex in its representation of the single woman than most, she still has none. In a chapter entitled “She Comes Between Us,” George acknowledges the addictive pull of Miss Dunross who, as he reflects, “had taken a hold on my sympathies of which other women would have failed to possess themselves in as many years” (192). Circe-like, Miss Dunross threatens to keep George captive on her island home, inviting him in to her pack and the possibility of “becoming-animal” with her via

90  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady contagion (aptly, she is a figure scarred by contagion). What saves him from this unholy alliance is his remembrance of the importance of hetero-genital relations and desires: “How could I (in the ordinary sense of the word) be in love with a woman whose face I had never seen; whose beauty had faded, never to bloom again; whose wasted life hung by a thread which the accident of a moment might snap?” (193). Unlike the ripe, buxom, and clearly reproductive Mary, Miss Dunross is a creature both caught in the past and in a timeless present, a woman on whom no future can be built. George’s sad reflection that her “beauty had faded, never to bloom again” (193) dispels the dream-like state Miss Dunross has constructed, fixing her firmly within the realm of withered potential and past glory utterly common to stereotypical spinsterhood. Rejecting the fantasy of Miss Dunross for love “in the ordinary sense of the word,” George flees her home after, as one would expect, his lost love contacts him via automatic writing and visions of ghostly hands inscribing “FOLLOW THE CHILD” (293) lead him to his true destiny. And while it is true there are some hiccups on the way to true love, with George planning to murder Mary in a fit of jealous rage, their shared recognition of their past identities and her child’s stamp of approval on him as her “new papa” (313) signifies “the kindred spirits were united again; the Two Destinies were fulfilled” (335). Miss Dunross, by contrast, dies with her face veiled, a fitting end for a creature who, it is revealed, is not so much sensitive to light as she is ugly and deformed by disease. Having seen her in a vision, Mary kindly observes, “Don’t let us speak of it! You must have shuddered at that frightful sight in the reality, as I shuddered at it in the dream. You must have asked yourself, as I did: Is there nobody to poison the terrible creature, and hide her mercifully in the grave?” (245–46). Given George and Mary’s love is itself constructed as deviant, with the novel presenting a “defense of ‘irrational,’ or socially unacceptable desire” (Wagner 189), one might expect a kinder treatment toward another social outcast, the lowly deformed spinster. As Tamara Wagner points out, The Two Destinies participates in a common theme of Collins’s novels: “a love story that pivots on the separation of lovers by social prohibitions” (192). Certainly, with its focus on bigamy, illegitimate children, and violence within romantic relations, Collins’s novel does seem to move beyond the strictly “heteronormative” toward a vision of romantic love that is beset by “prejudices nurtured by social conventions” (192). Yet despite the novel’s defence of a love that defies social mores and of two lovers who suffer from a society that “has done everything to keep them apart” (202), there is nevertheless a violent expulsion of the woman who is arguably far more deviant than either George, Mary, or the love they share. In its defence of sexual deviance, the novel employs Miss Dunross as a representation of the limits of a sexual elsewhere. The couples at the beginning of the novel who refuse to attend George and Mary’s dinner party, for example, represent a prudish, conventional morality that fails to recognize the love George and Mary share. But that the reader is meant to recognize the truth of George and

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  91 Mary’s love – that is, despite its unconventionality, it is nevertheless modeled exactly on what a romantic relationship is meant to be – is captured through its distance from Miss Dunross and the truly unconventional, species- and boundary-crossing relatings she represents. Mary might be somewhat married and with a child by another man but she is still someone with whom George can build a future, as promised by the “The Child” who brings them together and sanctions their love. Mary’s violent response to Miss Dunross, by contrast, reveals that the spinster is the true sexual deviant of the novel, the one who must be expelled and repressed from the novel’s project of reclaiming transgressive heterosexual love, revealing as she does an attractive, compelling, thoroughly non-normative alternative to the sexual relations at the heart of the novel. CONCLUSION That the spinster and her pet are still usually figures of pity or ridicule says much about the continued societal need to represent a woman-centered life – whether alone, with a pet, or with other women – as an impossibility, a failure that must either be bemoaned or castigated. But it speaks also to a social rejection of any relationship that cannot be determined and/or rendered productive, any coming together as a family unit that does not serve the reproductive capacity of the nation. Helen and Lilian might be forgiven much because they are young, but as the Ladies’ Journal points out, their story lacks the “finish” that is required. The rarity of depictions of families like those of Helen and Lilian, and the persistence instead of the stereotypes of the single woman who resorts to animal companions as replacement for husband and child, and of the misanthropic spinster who prefers animal companionship to that of humans, demonstrate the force with which reproductive futurism continually shapes women’s lives and places expectations on them regarding how they should spend their time. My next chapter includes a discussion of that other supplement to the nation, the bachelor who similarly haunts Victorian literature and culture as perhaps less ridiculous, but still at times as “selfish” and “useless” (“Literature” 409) as the spinster. While old maids were perceived to be particularly superfluous to the family in the nineteenth century, bachelors were often treated quite differently; in an 1848 article entitled “What Shall We Do with our Spinsters?” the author, “A Compulsory Bachelor,” observes, “I know not the animal, biped or quadruped, that is so much courted and caressed, feasted and fondled, petted and patronized, as the young bachelor. …” (631). Configured as society’s pet, the bachelor nevertheless also was a threat to the nation, the “spoiled child of society” (631). In an examination of bachelors, villains, and their pets, I argue that while differently constrained by reproductive futurism than their female counterparts, male pet-lovers could likewise be marked as threats to and outcasts from the natural family, their

92  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady border-crossing affiliations indicative of sexual and gender deviance akin to that of their spinster counterparts. NOTES   1. Another article, entitled “Concerning Cats” and published in The Girls’ Own Paper in 1894, describes cats as “the friend of the friendless old maid” (Fox 162), suggesting that cats and other pets perform an important social function for single women that society as a whole is failing to do. As with their pest control in the home, cats here perform a perhaps unenviable, but nevertheless important, public and domestic service through spending time with the old maid.   2. Certainly, the attitude of one commentator from the Canadian Ladies Journal of 1890 suggest such social hatred was in fact quite real; the author’s observation “We have asylums for every class of afflicted people but the old maid” displays a non-too-sympathetic attitude toward the never-married woman, though there is at least financial opportunity for this individual in the old maid’s isolation: “If anybody will start an asylum I will take the contract to furnish pet cats of all color, creed and denomination” (“Our Old Maids” 5).   3. Another author refers to the old maid as a “species,” a “singularity in humanity” (“Old Maids,” The Tourist 85). While the rest of humanity operates within the flow of time, the spinster is “outside the ordinary mutations of mortality,” being “not of the earth earthly” (85). A peculiar mutation of her own, the spinster falls outside of human reproduction and evolution. Having “escaped a great change,” she dwells in the “voluntary extinction of hope” (85).   4. Lest we miss the point, the narrator directly ties such empty pursuits to Miss Hazeldean’s withered natural instincts: “Ladies of this disposition, permanently thwarted in their affectionate bias, gradually languish away into intellectual inanition, or sprout out into those abnormal eccentricities which are classed under the general name of ‘oddity’ or ‘character’” (179). Miss Hazeldean shares space with the deformed calf and the monstrous turnip as an oddity of science, a ­creature not quite of nature.   5. The author of the 1877 article “The Dogs of Fiction” laments that readers of this novel “may not have noticed when, after all, she was at last happily married, that though we are not expressly told that she deserted her canine companion, yet the animal is never once mentioned after her marriage, and it is thus very significantly implied that Flimsey was no longer the important part of her life that she had hitherto been” (Von Hacht 103).  6. Both “Jemima” and “Keziah” are names derived from the Book of Job; they are the names of two of his daughters, who are both described as beautiful and who both were granted inheritances. The granting of inheritances may construct them as independent women, which might account for the use of such names for spinster characters in fiction.   7. Given the novel is dedicated to the temperance cause and published by the Scottish Temperance League, one should not be surprised that Balfour pays careful attention to the alcohol consumption of the Pendrainly family, using Squire Pendrainly’s character as a “bon vivant” (85) dedicated to “the old English abundant style” (86) to stand in for a class and lifestyle in need of displacement by a new, middle-class, Christian, and decidedly sober order.

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  93  8. Miss Keziah’s relations, both private and public, often center on her own ­hysterical narcissism; her robust strength, unusual in her family, is belied by her hypochondria and her own proclaimed excess of feeling: “‘O doctor!’ she at length gasped; ‘I’m such a fragile creature, a breath destroys me; my feelings are too much for me; never was such a miserably susceptible nature’” (89).   9. “Roselle” is derived from rosella, the name of a species of Australian parrot. 10. And to be fair, it almost does, but Roselle is rescued from the home, brought up by Dr. Franks, and blossoms into a beautiful young maiden, saved from the debauchery and downward slide of the Pendrainly family. 11.  When asked her name, she replies, “Ess, pet – pet and birdie – dat’s me” (26). After a member of the crowd observes, “What a pranksome little puss it is!” and invites her to sing, she goes on to perform a song that is equally as cloying as her childish naming of herself but that is clearly meant to be charming: “Ittle Birdie dot no wings/Ittle Birdie tweetly tings,/Dear Ittle Birdie!” (27). Both the watching crowd and the reading audience are meant to enjoy the conjunction of child with pet, to revel in sentimental pleasure at her childish innocence and her status as the titular “waif and stray.” 12. Katherine Rogers argues further that “women writers may use [cats] to expose the selfish demands that men make on women. Cats, less sexually charged for women, can represent an independent life style that frees them from conventional gender roles and expectations” (127). 13. The toxic, bitter spinster of Victorian discourse is emblematic of the anti-social life Christopher Lane is referring to when he examines “whether the Victorians actually were ardently sociable, much less persistently moral and philanthropic.” He asks, “What happened to individuals who defied or even mocked their ideals?” (2–3). Judging by the antipathy revealed in Victorian discourse toward never-married women, they provide ample evidence of what Lane perceives as the “irreconcilable tensions between individuals and society” (13) existing within the supposedly “charitable and genial” Victorian society (xv). 14. Sheila Jeffreys’s The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (1985) argues that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist agitation on behalf of women, particularly in regards to sexuality, was in large part undermined through attacks upon “prudish” spinsters and their supposed repressed sexual energy, which they spent, so the accusations went, on political agitation rather than on “healthy” heterosexual sex. 15. The appearance of the house leads Vixen to observe Miss Skipwith’s former brothers and sisters must have “died of the stillness and solitude and all-­ pervading desolation of Les Tourelles” (III., 43), supporting the idea of this space as the antithesis of home and family; lacking comforts and, as Vixen constructs it, actively engaged in destroying the nuclear family, this house is an appropriate abode for a misanthropic single woman.

REFERENCES “A Compulsory Bachelor.” “What Shall We Do with Spinsters?” London Pioneer 2.92 (Jan. 20, 1848): 631–32. Balfour, Clara. Drift: A Story of Waifs and Strays. Glasgow: Scottish Temperance League, 1861.

94  Becoming Crazy Cat Lady Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Vixen. Vols. 1–3. London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1879. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. My Novel; or Varieties in English Life. Volumes 1 and 2. 1853. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1874. C. C., “The History of our Cat, ‘Aspasia’.” The Ladies’ Companion and Monthly Magazine. Volume 9. 1856. London: Rogerson and Tuxford, n.d. Cook, Eliza. Eliza Cook’s Journal: Volume 1. London: John Owen Clarke, 1849. Collins, Wilkie. The Two Destinies: A Romance. 1876. London: Chatto & Windus, 1898. Cyon, Elie de. “The Anti-Vivisectionist Agitation.” 1883. Animal Welfare and AntiVivisection, 1870–1910: Nineteenth-Century Woman’s Mission, Volume III: ­Pro-Vivisection Writings. Ed. Susan Hamilton. London: Routledge, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Doughty, Terri. “Introduction.” Selections from The Girls’ Own Paper, 1880–1907. Ed. Terri Doughty. Broadview: 2004. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2004. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Fox, E. F. Bridell. “Concerning Cats.” The Girl’s Own Paper 16.781 (December 15, 1894). 162–164. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Gordon, Eleanor and Gwyneth Nair. Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Greg, W. R. Why are Women Redundant? London: N. Trübner & Co., 1869. Hill, Bridget. Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “‘Bolder with Her Lover in the Dark’: Collins and Disabled Women’s Sexuality.” Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 59–93. Hufton, Olwen. “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Family History 9 (Winter 1984): 355–376. J. “On Old Maids.” The Ladies’ Monthly Magazine 47.561 (September 1, 1870): 7–8. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Kranidis, Rita S. The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Lane, Christopher. Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. “Literature. The Bachelor of Albany.” The Lady’s Newspaper No. 392 (July 1, 1854): 409. M. “Old Maids.” The Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music, and Romance (August 1, 1842): 97–100.

Becoming Crazy Cat Lady  95 Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. McCrea, Barry. In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Nelson, Claudia. Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007. “Old Maidism: Its Peculiarities and Trials.” The Englishwoman’s Domestic ­Magazine. n.d. 19th Century UK Periodicals. Accessed July 10, 2012. 69–70. “Old Maids.” The Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times. No. 764 (August 17, 1861): 100. “Old Maids.” The Tourist: Or, Sketch Book of the Times. 10 (November 19, 1832): 80–88. 85. “On the Illiberality of Attaching Censure to a State of Celibacy; and the Benevolence which May be Displayed in that Station with a Modern Fortune.” The Ladies’ Monthly Museum. (Saturday, January 1, 1820): 13. “Our Old Maids.” Ladies’ Journal: Devoted to Literature, Fashion, Domestic ­Matters, &c. Issue 7 (April 1, 1890): 5. Parkes, Bessie Rayner. The History of Our Cat, Aspasia. 1856. London: Bosworth & Harrison, n.d. “Patience.” The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine Issue 21 (January 1, 1862); 121–123. Prins, Yopie. “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.” Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Ed. Richard Dellamora. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 43–81. Rogers, Katharine M. Cat. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Stella, “The Woman about Town.” The Sporting Times 7.336 (July 15, 1871): 229–236. 232–33. “The Stray Dogs of London.” The Animal World 8.97 (October 1877): 145–60, 146. Thiel, Elizabeth. The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Vernon, E. S. “A Heart History.” Le Follet: Journal du Grand Monde, Polite Literature, Beaux Arts, &c. No. 217 (October 1, 1864): 78–80. Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: World and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Von Hacht, Bertha. “The Dogs of Fiction.” Animal World 18.214 (July 1, 1887): 96–112. 102–104. Wagner, Tamara. “Victorian Fictions of the Nerves: Telepathy and Depression in Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies.” Victorians Institute Journal 32 (2004): 189–214. Yarbrough, Wynn William. Masculinity in Children’s Animal Stories, 1888–1928: A Critical Study of Anthropomorphic Tales by Wilde, Kipling, Potter, Grahame and Milne. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011.

3 Pets and Patriarchy Bachelors, Villains, and Their Animal Companions

My third chapter focuses on men and companion animals, specifically on relations that seem to defy or reject the domestic. I do so not out of the belief that men in the Victorian period or now were necessarily defined in opposition to the domestic; far from it. Rather, in examining male domestic outcasts, refuseniks, and their animal pets and companions, I analyze the ways men were and are specifically defined by reproductive futurism and domesticity. Unlike women, who in the Victorian period were arguably more closely aligned with the reproductive powers of their bodies, the tales of sad and wasted spinsters evidence of what will happen to a woman who fails to achieve the role of wife and mother, men perhaps obviously had a larger social realm in which to enact their masculinity. Bachelorhood, for example, by contrast with spinsterhood, has often been seen as a somewhat enviable state, one that preserves for men both freedom from petticoat rule and the promise of unlimited homosociality. And rather than representing a sad substitution for children who might be, the man’s constant companion, the dog, has often been constructed instead as a true(r) companion to the man, often in ways that distinguish the companion animal from the “pet,” particularly in terms of working animals. As the 1877 article on “The Stray Dogs of London” effuses, “In one respect at least the Dog, more than any other animal, is the friend of man. … neither sheep, oxen, horses, nor cats follow man in his perambulations, in his duties, avocations, and pleasures” (146). While “The Stray Dogs of London” focuses explicitly on all those animals with whom men have relationships, I argue that the dog surpasses even other humans – specifically women and children but also perhaps other males – as male companion, because the dog stands with and beside the man in both public and private spaces, both business and domestic relations. As such, animal/human relations offer a unique opportunity to examine the man’s role in affective and social realms in the Victorian culture, particularly in terms of the role played by animal/human homosociality both within and outside the home. By specifically focusing in this chapter on those men and their companion animals who unsuccessfully occupy both worlds, I want to illuminate the extent to which the domestic animal shares with the Victorian male a fraught, divided identity, one defined both by an essential isolation, a

Pets and Patriarchy  97 necessity to be self-dependent and self-sustaining, and, paradoxically, by a need for love and familial relations. The men I study here – Mr. Vanslyperken from Captain Marryat’s The Dog Fiend; or, Snarleyyow (1837); Hugh from Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841); Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist (1838); Bartle Massey from Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859); and Count Fosco from The Woman in White (1860) – all represent outcasts from or threats to domesticity, and their relations with animals inform and complicate their outsider status. In their failure or refusal to normatively embrace the demands of masculinity in its role within the familial and domestic space, failures linked to class, gender, and sexual performance, these men and their animal companions – in some cases identifiable as “pets” and in some cases not – demonstrate that reproductive futurism enforces equal, if not greater, pressure upon the male as it does upon the female in Victorian culture. Making family with companion animals, rather than women and children, and displacing human love and affection with human/animal companionship and solidarity, these failed and reviled men illuminate the absolute centrality of father, husband, and head of household to normative masculinity in the Victorian period in all its varied forms. But in their perverse relations with animals, these men also speak loudly to the repressive nature of that normativity, their preference for the animal other illuminating both a sexual and familial elsewhere for outcast men, one that both relies upon and rejects the role of paterfamilias as an organizing force in male lives. MEN, COMPANION ANIMALS, AND DOMESTICITY While it was long a truism that men in the Victorian period were defined primarily by the public space in opposition to the private, domestic space of the home, masculinity studies has revealed that the nineteenth-century home was very much structured toward male needs. John Tosh in particular has argued extensively that “The Victorian ideal of domesticity was in all respects the creation of men as much as women. ‘Woman’s sphere’ was a convenient shorthand, not a call to exclusivity. Given that cultural power was concentrated in the hands of men, the domestic ideal reflected masculine as well as feminine sensibilities” (A Man’s Place 50). Home was the place in which the man proved both his reproductive capacities and his ability to reign: “The married state called for the exercise of what Boswell called ‘manly firmness’. … Adult gender identity for men involved forming a household, maintaining it, protecting it, and controlling it. As a socially validated status, masculinity [in the Victorian period] depended on these attributes as strongly as ever” (Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities 66). A central argument of this book, of course, is that animals played an increasingly important role in the household over which the man was expected to reign, as “dog, cats, and birds became confused with the ideal of the ‘family’ on a par with women and children” (Danahay 98). This presence of pets within

98  Pets and Patriarchy the home fully supported the conception of the paterfamilias as individual representative of male power writ large; including animals within the family meant the ruler of the home embodied masculine authority over both lesser humans and beasts, thus mirroring patriarchal dominion beyond the home. As much as pets could bolster masculine power by helping to construct a male-headed world within the home, with the “dog in its own miniature ‘house,’ an attentive lap dog, or a sleeping cat … invoke[ing] associations of fidelity, peace and companionship strongly linked to the ideal of the family and the domestic sphere as the ‘place of Peace’ evoked by Ruskin” (Danahay 99), domestic animals in the home could also disrupt male authority, acting as interlopers into the “man’s castle” who threatened the affective balance of the home. Given the cultural association of women with pets in particular, the companion animal was as likely to be perceived and constructed as the man’s rival for his wife’s affection than as a loving companion to or dependent of the man. In his analysis of dog-stealing in Victorian Britain, for example, Phillip Howell argues that the gendered nature of dog ownership played a crucial role both in how the subject was debated publicly and how it was addressed on an individual level. In parliament, “While supporters of the dog-stealing bill did their best to pose the problem as an outrage against men’s property … the bill’s opponents were quick to express their reservations about legislating in the realm of womanly sentimentality” (47). ­Howell argues, “Dog-stealing was difficult to combat … precisely because the question of property, founded on the principle of utility, was preeminently a gendered issue. … This was not simply because lapdogs, the most ‘useless’ and vulnerable of pets, typically belonged to women. More than this, the association of non-useful animals with women confined to the house as domestic essence and ornament was particularly telling” (47). Like dogs, women were more closely confined to the domestic space than men, their limited sphere of action making them dependent upon men who might not value their animal companions as they did. Linking dogs to women, dogstealers benefited from “women made vulnerable precisely by their capacity for emotion and tenderness, and on their dogs, themselves noted for their loyalty and nobility” (41). This combined vulnerability and shared affection between women and their pets also led to their shared role as victims of domestic violence. In the Victorian period, as now, violence against beloved pets worked to terrorize the woman of the home, relying on both the woman’s affection for her companion and on an understanding of the shared space of women and pet (Tuan 122–131) that made such violence a tangible threat and weapon against the woman.1 The lines of connection between woman and domestic animal as “pets” within the family home also allowed writers to employ pets as surrogates for women within domestic fiction. As Lisa Surridge illuminates, ­ Victorian writers developed a “narrative technique whereby [they] approached the fraught subject of wife battery: the deflection of marital v­ iolence from the body of the woman onto the body of a

Pets and Patriarchy  99 domestic animal – often a dog” (“Dogs’ Bodies/Women’s Bodies” 4). As a symbol of the woman herself, the pet dog represented “traditional (and misogynistic) connections between the subservient and fawning behavior of certain dog breeds and similar behavior in women” (4). In her analysis of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for example, Surridge examines a scene in which Arthur Huntingdon hurls a heavy book at Helen’s dog: “The scene positions Helen and Dash as joint recipients of Huntingdon’s violence. Violence is transferred from one to the other: while the man throws objects at the dog, the woman is injured. Ostensibly, the wounding is ­accidental – Huntingdon denies that he meant to hit Helen. The scene, however, is fraught with ­suppressed meaning” (Bleak Houses 77). The significance of this scene, according to Surridge, is one that relies on a Victorian audience that could identify the shared oppression of women and animals within what Maggie Berg identifies elsewhere, following Jacques Derrida, as the “carno-phallogocentric” social system in which “violence against animals” is linked “to violence against certain human beings regarded as less than fully human” (20). Surridge argues, “In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall … the blow to the spaniel does not merely intimate Huntingdon’s potential for violence, but, in that Helen is identified with the spaniel, suggests that such violence is already occurring” (Bleak House 77). Berg’s and Surridge’s readings of male violence against domestic pets recognize the linkage of patriarchy with dominance over “lesser” species, one which is well described in eco-feminist criticism; as philosopher Lori Gruen asserts, “The categories of ‘woman’ and ‘animal’ serve the same symbolic function in patriarchal ­society. … The role of women and animals in postindustrial society is to serve/be served up; women and animals are to be used” (60). Of course, dogs and women are not necessarily to be used in the same way, particularly if we take the hunting metaphor employed by Berg in her reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as indicative of male dominance. Focusing on the extent to which “the dual male protagonists of Anne Brontë’s novel are obsessive hunters” (25), Berg compelling argues, “the ritualized enactment of men’s right to sacrifice in the activity of the hunt serves to maintain male dominance. Hunting, like the pursuit of women [with which it is linked in Berg’s essay], is a manifestation of homosocial desire” (24). While I agree with both Surridge’s and Berg’s readings, which link violence against animals to violence against women, I also want to point out that a recognition of the homosocial relations inherent in man/ dog relations can serve to differently inflect the man’s direction of violence onto the pet dog. The companion to the male in his hunt, after all, is usually the prized hunting dog, who is something more than a servant, operating as the dog does as an external sign of the man’s prized masculinity and hunting prowess. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen, for example, the Squire’s “chosen companion” is “Nip, a powerful, liver-coloured pointer” ­(Braddon, I., 18). Along with Argus, his daughter’s dog, these are described as “gentlemanly animals, too well bred to be importunate in their demands

100  Pets and Patriarchy for an occasional tit-bit” (29). Unlike the lady’s lapdog, these animals are not “spoiled” by feminine sentimentality but instead serve to underline their master’s authority, their “well bred” manners reflecting back to him his gentlemanly status. Furthermore, far from operating as an obstacle between man and mistress, these dogs provide the model for the wife’s behavior, for it is described that his wife “loved him with a canine fidelity, and felt towards him as a dog feels toward his master – that in him this round world begins and ends” (24). The lapdog notwithstanding, the supposed loyalty and fidelity of dogs usually link them with the male in patriarchal culture more often than women; as Katharine Rogers points out, “we still tend to think of cats as females and dogs as male” (114). Unlike cats and women, with their sneaky, crafty, and underhanded ways (as misogyny and speciesism jointly constructs them), dogs serve as models of everything that patriarchy identifies as belonging rightly to the male: courage, intelligence, devotion, and stalwart true-heartedness. As such, dogs were not always easily configured as dependents but instead often represented as somewhat unequal equals, devoted companions to men, who proved male, human mastery through their devotion, but who also earned respect and love in return as a result of their supposed enduring fidelity. Tales of dog faithfulness were incredibly popular in the nineteenth century; Diana Donald notes that the “astonishing cult in nineteenth-century art and literature” focused upon dog loyalty “manifested in the countless ‘real-life’ episodes, recorded and constantly recycled in popular collections, that exemplified the dog’s intelligence and devotion to man” (138). This devotion was exemplified in the memorialization of dogs mourning their masters, such as “Sir Edwin Landseer’s sentimental portrait of a forlorn working-dog, ‘The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner’ (1837), in which the collie rests his chin on the shepherd’s humble coffin.” Also noteworthy are “Sir Walter Scott’s poem ‘Helvellyn’ (1805) and William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Fidelity’ (1805) [and] … Landseer’s painting of 1829, ‘Attachment,’ all of which commemorate the female terrier that guarded her dead master’s body on the Scottish mountain Helvellyn for three months in 1805” (Mangum, “Animal Angst” 19). Along with figures such as Greyfriar’s Bobby, these dogs were believed to be models of a devotion that placed them as simultaneously lesser than and greater than their male masters. Their love is constructed as one beyond human ability; for example, in mourning his beloved dog Boatswain, Byron describes him as possessing “all the virtues of Men without his vices” (“Epitaph to a Dog,” l. 6). Nevertheless, this love is an essentially servile one, representing an abnegation of the self in devotion to the master; after all, Boatswain’s heart, even after death, is praised for being “still his Master’s own” (l. 19, 21). Providing a devotion beyond that of humans but still recognizing the male’s right to mastery, these dogs reflect back to the man his own worthiness to be loved and respected while seemingly mirroring the master’s own construction of himself as inherently loyal; they serve to make the man see himself as he

Pets and Patriarchy  101 wants to be seen, for, in John Berger’s words, “He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else” (14–15). While such dogs might seem to be very separate from the pet dog within the home, marked as they are by their loyalty to the master in his “duties, avocations, and pleasures” (“The Stray Dogs of London” 146) outside the home, yet the devoted dog was also figured as a form of home, at least insofar as the dog’s unquestioning loyalty operated as a vehicle of retreat from the public space. Diana Donald suggests, “the merits of dogs stand in symbolic antithesis to the hard-headed competitiveness and materialism of the early Victorian era” (139), echoing Kathleen Kete’s assertion that “the notion of canine fidelity developed in response to perceived shortcomings in contemporary life” (33). If we recognize the man’s relationship to the pet dog not simply as one of dominance but also as a form of homosociality, then the linkage between the dog outside the home and inside the home becomes more apparent. John Tosh identifies “all-male association” (38) in the Victorian period as “integral to any notion of patriarchy beyond the household. They embody men’s privileged access to the public sphere, while simultaneously reinforcing women’s confinement to the household and neighbourhood” (38). Recognizing the pet dog as a de facto male allows for an understanding of how the pet dog could bring together the two parts of a man’s world, the male-associative public sphere and the male-headed domestic space. The dog as man’s chosen companion within the home could provide much-needed masculine companionship within the domestic space, helping to reinforce “the powerful myth that masculinity is about the exclusive company of men” (38) and thus providing a masculine retreat within domesticity. Such dogs could, as related by Bob the terrier in his 1848 “autobiography,” relieve the man from his isolation within the home, providing a companion who accompanies him in both spheres: “On every occasion I was Mr. Allworthy’s constant attendant. In shooting or hunting, he found, or fancied, that my services were indispensable; nor was I less a favourite in the domestic circle, when active pursuits were suspended, and the toils of the day were recounted with fresh enjoyment round the social hearth” (Weir 81). Different as the man’s dog and the lady’s pet might appear to be in relation to the man – the one, sharing an unequal brotherhood with the man, the other, providing a romantic and affective rival for the woman’s affection within the home – I argue there are direct lines of connection between the two. If we understand homosociality within Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of it as a structure of desire that relies on an “erotic triangle,” then we are able to also recognize the nature of the rivalry between man and dog in ways that are not solely about the man aligning the dog with the woman. Sedgwick, reading René Girard, argues that his analysis of desire in the novel points out that “the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved” (21). Going back to Jip in David Copperfield, the male dog with whom David wishes

102  Pets and Patriarchy to share space and woos almost as much as he does Dora (it is Jip, after all, that David wants to carry over the threshold on the eve of his wedding night), we can read the relationship between David, Dora, and Jip as parallel to the other homosocial relations so central to the novel. David’s intense romantic friendship with Steerforth, for example, one that is triangulated through Little Em’ly, is handily shut down in the novel by Steerforth’s misconduct to Em’ly, thus providing David with the incentive to redirect his passion toward socially sanctioned, heteronormative ends: “David’s infatuation with his friend Steerforth, who calls him ‘Daisy’ and treats him like a girl, is simply part of David’s education – though another, later part is the painful learning of how to triangulate from Steerforth onto women, and finally, although incompletely, to hate Steerforth and grow at the expense of his death” (176–77). After David’s marriage, Jip demonstrates that homosocial rivalry within the home has the potential to be as threatening to proper masculine authority as are improperly controlled homosocial relations outside it (i.e. those falling on the homoerotic end of the homosocial spectrum). In an ideal world, as seen with the Squire’s home in Vixen, man and dog would provide companionship to each other, modeling a devotion to be emulated by the woman of the home. But as seen in the relationship between David and Jip, the male dog within the home can also point out the tenuousness of the man’s authority. Male dogs as homosocial rivals within the home highlight the sheer necessity of excluding any form of male homosociality within the domestic space so as to preserve the illusion that occupying the head of a household is somehow equated with or translates into larger social power. In other words, men can only be heads of the household if the other denizens are particularly disempowered personages, such as women, children, and other pets. Returning to the use of dogs by Victorian writers as a means of depicting violence against women, we can see such representations as perhaps drawing upon the poetic tradition that placed the dog as sexual rival of the jealous, watching male, as one who comes between the husband and the wife. Perceived in this light, violence against dogs within the home, while certainly relying on a linkage between women and pets, can also be understood as a vivid sign of the man’s all-too-tenuous power. No male rival, however insignificant, can be tolerated within the domestic space. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that pet dogs are often associated with bachelors. “The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” depicts the dog alone at his master’s coffin, and the much-lauded Greyfriar’s Bobby was a dog attached to a single man, John Gray. In literature, Adam Bede, Gilbert Markham, and Alan Helbeck – as described in Chapter One – all enjoy the solitary pleasure of their dog’s company before moving on (or attempting to move on, in the case of Helbeck) to female companionship. Understanding man/dog relationships as a form of romantic friendship, in which “the ultimate end of friendship is foreseen in its displacement by the more intimate relation of marriage” (Oulton 8), allows me to read depictions of bachelors and their

Pets and Patriarchy  103 dogs, particularly those bachelors who do not successfully move from dog to wife, from homosociality to heteronormativity, for the policing narratives that they are. Such tales of bachelors and their dogs might represent a boyishness that has not been left behind, one that results in an improper balance of heterosexuality and homosociality. Even further, such relations can represent a sexual inversion that privileges the homoerotic over state- and religion-sanctioned reproductive relations. Katherine V. Snyder has argued that bachelors were a necessary resource for the domestic institution of marriage, yet they were often seen by their contemporaries as disruptive to domestic life or sometimes merely extraneous to it. They were thought to be both admirable and contemptible, enviable and execrable, dangerous and defanged. The contradictions evident in and among these pairings evoke the conceptual and practical challenges that bachelorhood presented to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of bourgeois marriage, family, and domestic life. (2) While Snyder rightly identifies the complex social purposes to which the multiple, contradictory meanings of bachelorhood were put, I want to focus here on the more negative, castigated forms of bachelors, those who are more “contemptible” than “admired,” while simultaneously figured as both “dangerous” and “defanged.” Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen, for example, mockingly relates the girlhood crush of one of the minor characters of the novel, in which she obsesses over a mad bachelor. He is characterized both by his “chiselled face and weird eyes” and by his relationship with his dog, “a Scotch deerhound with eyes very like his master’s, and a long nose which (uncomfortable as the position must have been) he kept always resting in his master’s hand as the two paced up and down, hour after hour, by the sea” (Ewing 70). While this man is a bachelor, he is clearly not eligible, the very word suggesting a man’s suitability and right to offer himself as a candidate for marriage and fatherhood. Instead, he is represented as a foolish crush of a not-too-thoughtful girl, a point underlined by his tooclose relationship with his dog, evident both in their physical proximity and in their physical likeness. Such close proximity with his dog, I assert, signals that this man will be unlikely to move from dog to wife, from homosociality to successful couplehood. Certainly the dog’s devotion to the master plays into existent narratives of dog fidelity, and their shared mournfulness draws upon sad tales of man/ dog love as described earlier, particularly when it is explained that “the poor gentleman died in a lunatic asylum” (70). What is fascinating, however, is how little the narrative of dog devotion actually saves this bachelor and his dog from the text’s disdain. Tales of dog devotedness aside, this particular text’s handling of the bachelor and his dog does not so much laud their mutual devotion as mark them off as figures of romantic excess in a

104  Pets and Patriarchy text that praises rationality. Rather than mourned, the man and his dog are consigned together to their fates, with Margery proclaiming, “I hope, when they shut him up, they found the deerhound guilty also of some unhydrophobiac madness, and imprisoned the two friends together!” (70). While her words could be taken as a kind-hearted desire for the two companions to have the comfort of each other’s company in the midst of misfortune, her use of “shut him up,” “found guilty,” and “imprisoned” suggests a far less charitable feeling on her part, a desire for their exclusion from society that seems unmotivated by any transgression against her or her friends by man or beast. Instead, his failure to be the eligible bachelor Matilda imagines, to live up to her “hero worship” (70), combined with the failed masculinity captured in his too-close association with his dog, seem to be the primary motivators for Margery’s response to his suffering and captivity. The images of guilt and imprisonment attached to the mad bachelor and his sad-eyed dog speak to the danger these figures represent, a cross-species alliance that is seen to represent an inherent misanthropy and rejection of reproductive futurism and all it entails. The relationship between men and their pets in the Victorian period, therefore, draws upon a number of interconnected narratives central to interpersonal relationships: pets as dependents of masculine authority, pets as stand-ins or rivals for women, and pets as homosocial “brothers” with whom a man might share camaraderie or even homoeroticism. Not all the men I will discuss in the following texts are bachelors; nevertheless, “masculinity” and its role in normative heterosexual and familial relations is a crucial concept for understanding each of the following outcast, villainous men and their pets. As with spinsters and their spoiled dogs and vicious cats, these men and their animal companions serve as exemplars of familial, sexual, and gender aberration, one that is expressed through inter-species relations but which is particularly significant for human inter-relations. “HANGING’S JUST AS NATURAL A DEATH FOR A CUR”: VILLAINS AND THEIR DOGS Frederick Marryat’s The Dog Fiend; or, Snarleyyow (1837) is a text that falls far outside the realm of domestic fiction. Set on a naval ship in 1699, it details the misadventures of Mr. Cornelius Vanslyperken, a Dutch captain of a vessel “in the service of his Majesty King William the Third” (2). This king, we are told, “like all those continental princes who have been called to the English throne, showed much favour to his own countrymen, and England was overrun with Dutch favourites, Dutch courtiers, and peers of Dutch extraction” (10). Vanslyperken represents not proper English masculinity but instead a baser, European interloper, one whose failure to manage his crew of Dutch and English stalwarts speaks to his lesser manliness and the inferiority of his nation. Opposed – and losing – to both smuggling

Pets and Patriarchy  105 J­ acobites and Smallbones, the plucky representative of working-class English ­masculinity aboard Vanslyperken’s vessel, the captain represents the worst of failed manhood. He is cowardly, traitorous, spiteful, avaricious, unable to lead, and incapable of securing the love and respect of women. Nevertheless, Vanslyperken is important in terms of delineating English masculinity, particularly in the early part of the nineteenth century. Naval fiction, such as most of Marryat’s oeuvre, “provided moral exemplars for the domestic and imperial spheres” in which officers were shown “to be better gentlemen and fitter to govern than the landed classes” (Fulford 162), and The Dog Fiend carefully outlines the other side of that. Comic and satirical, the novel skewers non-English masculinity via the small world of the ship in which, unfit to command at sea, Vanslyperken is also shown to be unfit for domesticity on land. Written in the light of royal scandal and a concomitant valorization of the English officer, Marryat’s works sought to portray, as he claimed, “naval officers as ‘ardent and enterprising,’ as dutiful, patriotic, paternalist, and professional, in contrast to the ‘dishonesty and servility’ of the Hanoverian ‘court with which, I trust, our noble Service will never be contaminated’” (Fulford 190). Reading The Dog Fiend through the lens of romantic naval fiction as a model for proper domestic manhood makes clear Vanslyperken’s purpose as a character. His combined inability to control his ship and to secure a wife pose him as the exact opposite of the ideal English male, one who is meant to bring together naval courage and command with proper authority and rule on land and within the home. What both amplifies and complicates Vanslyperken’s status as everything that a proper English man should avoid emulating is his passionate relationship with the titular dog fiend, Snarleyyow. Snarleyyow is very far from being figured as “man’s best friend,” in the popular sense of the phrase, but he is an apt companion for Vanslyperken, sharing with his “master” (to whom he is less than servile) many negative traits. W. L. Courtney describes Snarleyyow in the introduction to the 1898 edition of the novel as “a worthy companion in crime” to Vanslyperken, “popularly supposed to be a limb of the devil, a miscreant with nine lives, which [sic] is always going to be killed, and perpetually escapes, until at last, in company with his master, he obtains the due reward for his career. Both the human and the animal villains are equally mean and despicable, unheroic in their actions, cowards at heart, marvellous combinations of littleness and success” (vi). Significantly figured more as a cat than a dog with his nine lives and his seemingly Satanic connections, Snarleyyow’s companionship, as I will demonstrate, feminizes Vanslyperken. However, as the sole recipient of Vanslyperken’s affections and the single cause of his infrequent and unusual outbursts of bravery and manliness, Snarleyyow also redeems Vanslyperken, both as a human and particularly as a male. Through his connection with Snarleyyow, Vanslyperken demonstrates a flexibility in his manliness, a potentiality either for womanly, sentimental weakness and underhanded sneakiness or for manly virtues of courage and protectiveness, all of which are elicited by his close

106  Pets and Patriarchy relation with his aggressive and surly “pet.” Set as it is upon a ship, in the homosocial and arguably homoerotic context of male fraternity, Vanslyperken’s relationship with Snarleyyow demonstrates the tenuous and slippery separation between homosociality as that which brings out the best in manhood and as that which threatens proper manliness and its role in the nation and in domestic relations. Central to a critique of Vanslyperken as a leader and model of men is his misanthropy, a character trait amplified and explained by his relationship with his dog. Snarleyyow’s place on the Yungfrau is a significant cause of tension between Vanslyperken and his crew, not least because the skipper privileges the dog’s welfare above that of the men in his charge. In what will become an oft-repeated theme in this chapter, Vanslyperken fails to uphold human superiority over the animal creation and, in pitting men against dog, disrupts the hierarchy of the ship and undermines his own authority. In an opening scene of the novel, Smallbones vents his frustration over his own starvation and his continued abuse at the jaws of Snarleyyow: “Smallbones … pulled up his trousers to examine the bite, [and] poured down anathema upon the dog, which was, ‘May you be starved, as I am, you beast!’” (5). Far from sharing in Smallbones’s discomfort, Snarleyyow is instead defended by his master: “‘How dare you beat my dog, you villain?’ said the lieutenant … choking with passion” (5). For Smallbones, the skipper’s failure to both feed and protect him while allowing Smallbones to be preyed upon by Vanslyperken’s favorite cur is justifiable cause for desertion: “I’ll not stand this … I’d sooner die at once than be made dog’s meat of in this here way!” (8). Though such rebellious behavior in a working-class male would generally be cause for alarm in a nineteenth-century novel, Smallbones’s feelings are fully justified by the text; Vanslyperken’s placing of a canine favorite above humans represents a flouting of the natural order which reflects his supposedly unnatural position as a Dutch skipper of an English vessel, through which his men are rendered the dog’s prey, upsetting the human/animal hierarchy. As the paterfamilias of the vessel, he is not providing for his dependents and in so doing, he arouses their hatred and rebellion. Snarleyyow disrupts Vanslyperken’s authority with the men precisely because Vanslyperken himself has not asserted his authority with his animal, resulting in a situation in which the dog vies for space with his master rather than operating as a signifier of his master’s power and control. While the men base their mistrust of Snarleyyow’s place in the natural world through a suspicious linking of the dog with the devil (a superstition seemingly supported by their continued failure, throughout the novel, to successfully kill the dog), their failure to recognize him as a dog lies in Vanslyperken’s inability to enforce a proper master/servant relationship with Snarleyyow. While he treats his men like meat for his pet, he treats his animal like an equal, speaking to him more as a fellow officer than as a master: “Come here, sir. Come here, sir, directly” (5). Addressing his dog as “sir,” Vanslyperken reveals he has made the fatal mistake of elevating his animal companion

Pets and Patriarchy  107 above proper servitude, and the result is a dog equally as mutinous as his men: “… Snarleyyow, who was very sulky at the loss of his anticipated breakfast, was contumacious, and would not come. He stood at the other side of the forecastle, while his master apostrophised him, looking him in the face. Then, after a pause of indecision, he gave a howling sort of bark, trotted away to the main hatchway, and disappeared below” (5–6). Snarleyyow, in refusing to answer to the time-honored call of “Come here,” in looking Vanslyperken directly “in the face,” and in answering his “master’s” call with a bark of his own, thus asserting his right to speak rather than to obey, amply represents Vanslyperken’s futile authority. What is revealed in Vanslyperken’s relation with his dog is the male version of the spinster and her spoiled pet (and, by association, her failure to raise and nurture/control children). In failing to assert proper patriarchal authority over his animal, Vanslyperken creates species rebellion as surely as he creates class rebellion among his crew. While Vanslyperken assiduously cares for the dog, the only gratitude Snarleyyow shows is disobedience of his master’s orders: “… as soon as his master was half-way up the ladder, Snarleyyow turned back, leaped on the chair, from the chair to the table, and then finished the whole of the breakfast appropriated for Smallbones” (9). In a later scene in which Vanslyperken is accidentally injured by his Dutch lackey, Van Spitter, Snarleyyow again proves where his loyalties lie: The marines brought it [his body] aft to the cabin, and would have laid it on the bed, had not Snarleyyow, who had no feeling in his composition, positively denied its being put there. “Mein Got, the dog will not let him go to bed,” exclaimed the corporal. “Let’s put him in,” said one of the marines; “the dog won’t bite his master.” So the marines lifted up the still insensible Mr. Vanslyperken, and almost tossed him … right on the body of the snarling dog, who, as soon as he could disengage himself from the weight, revenged himself by making his teeth meet more than once through the lantern cheek of his master, and then leaping off the bed, retreated, growling, under the table. (27) Taking his master’s bed for himself and further injuring his injured master for no other reason, it would seem, than spiteful resentment of his disrupted nap, Snarleyyow is hardly recommendable as a stalwart companion, seeming as he does to have “no feeling in his composition.” That his actions cause consternation even to a crew who themselves despise Vanslyperken speaks to the strength of their assumptions about dogs, believing as they do that if Snarleyyow harries and harasses Vanslyperken, he will at least have enough of “doggy nature” to treat his master with greater care and respect. Betraying the vaunted reputation of his species, Snarleyyow throughout the novel

108  Pets and Patriarchy causes Vanslyperken nothing but trouble, barking in a night-time raid on smugglers, thus denying Vanslyperken a significant bounty, and even coming between Vanslyperken and his planned mistress and future cash cow, the widow Vandersloosh. Snarleyyow’s disruption of Vanslyperken’s “romantic” entanglements (in truth, they are nothing but, for either party) is particularly telling. If Vanslyperken were a proper man, his attachment to his dog would be succeeded and superseded by connection to the proper objects, a woman and a future family. Though Vanslyperken’s designs upon the widow are far from properly reproductive, mired as they are in his miserly desire for her ill-­gotten wealth, even a self-serving marriage of convenience is more respectable than Vanslyperken’s choice to cleave to his ingrate of a dog. Yet that is what he does. The widow makes clear her dislike of his animal, “such a filthy, ugly, disagreeable, snarling brute” (33), and uses the dog as a means of questioning Vanslyperken’s feelings toward her; in this case, the animal is her rival, rather than his: “It don’t prove much regard, Mr. Vanslyperken, when such a dog as that is kept on purpose to annoy me” (33). Making clear the connection between male pet-keeping and homosociality, a relation between man and dog that here represents a clear obstacle to future matrimony, the Widow Vandersloosh asserts her authority over Vanslyperken by insisting upon her partner’s separation from his dog. This close union of dog with master, particularly in matters of romance and sexuality, becomes even more evident when Snarleyyow finds his way into the Widow Vandersloosh’s home. Attacking her and her maid, and echoing the earlier scene in which he attacks his master in his master’s own bed, Snarleyyow goes beneath the widow’s bed and violently repels any attempt to remove him thither. Fighting for his right to take up a space reserved for human comforts, Snarleyyow transforms the most private of spaces into a battleground between the species. However, if his occupation of the human bed seemingly represents a violation, an incursion of savagery into a place of peace and repose, his close connection with his master in fact reveals the similarity of man and beast as interlopers into this female space. In a scene in which the bed collapses on top of Snarleyyow while the widow is upon it, the image of the two wrestling for control of her former marriage bed is made comic through its reliance upon sexual imagery that links Snarleyyow to his master: When the mattress came down, it came down upon Snarleyyow. … Snarleyyow pulled, and pulled, but he pulled in vain – he was fixed – he could not bite, for the mattress was between them – he pulled, and he howled, and turned himself every way, and yelped; and had not his tail been of coarse and thick dimensions he might have left it behind him, so great were his exertions. … (61)

Pets and Patriarchy  109 Like Vanslyperken, Snarleyyow is emasculated in his tussles with the widow, their struggles a clear reminder of the extent to which sexuality and sexual relations inherently participate in struggles for dominance. Snarleyyow’s violent occupation of the widow’s bed, after all, simply foreshadows Vanslyperken’s future plans for her once he has succeeded in winning her hand: “I’ll tame her, and pay her off for old scores” (68). Yet as much as Snarleyyow’s place in the bed with the widow is textually linked to his master’s, who, we are told, “wished to be in the very situation the dog was now so anxious to escape from – to wit, tailed on to the widow” (61), it is clear the widow has the final say in who gets to be “tailed” to her: “She vowed mentally, that so sure as the dog was under the bed, so sure should his master never get into it” (60). Snarleyyow’s position as a dog standing in for his master therefore inflects this battle between the genders with greater significance. His savagery reveals his master’s repressed and hidden violence, and his position as an “inferior” animal speaks to the woman’s, rather than the man’s, dominance in this particular relationship. The connection of Snarleyyow’s tail with Vanslyperken’s manhood, made explicit in this scene, lends itself to other examinations of Vanslyperken’s failures of masculinity, particularly in his dealings with his crew and the wider community. Snarleyyow and Vanslyperken’s shared emasculation at the hands of the Widow Vandersloosh demonstrates fully that a man who cannot rule a woman is a man who cannot rule other men, a point supported by a scene in which Snarleyyow is maimed by the wife of a crew member who objects to Vanslyperken’s attempts to impose discipline on his crew: “Moggy raised the cleaver, took good aim – down it came upon the dog’s tail, which was separated within an inch of its insertion, and was left bleeding on the block. … ‘I think Mr. Vanslyperken has had enough now for trying to flog my Jemmy – my own duck of a husband’” (250). The symbolic, practically textual castration of Vanslyperken by the wife of his crew member, one who asserts her matrimonial rights over his naval rights as captain, thoroughly underscores the carnivalesque nature of the Yungfrau under Vanslyperken’s rule. Always on the edge of mutiny, with castrating women ruling the day, the Yungfrau as a microcosm for society and nation speaks loudly to the danger of weak, perverse manhood at the helm. That Vanslyperken is perverse as well as ineffectual is made clear in his reaction to his dog’s detailment; discovering what has happened, Vanslyperken proceeds to carry the tail – which the text refers to continually as “his treasure” (255, 259) – with him everywhere. Upon losing the tail to a hungry dog, a misadventure in which Vanslyperken tellingly also loses the tail of his greatcoat, Vanslyperken is forced to defend his desire for the dog’s tail – which he refers to as “his ­property” – to the surrounding villagers. Vanslyperken’s rendering of the tail as his “property” and his ­“treasure” speaks to a financial perversion, an unholy investment in what others perceive as “carrion” over proper material goods. Vanslyperken’s obsession with his dog therefore reads as a failure and perversion of manhood across a wide, interconnected field of social performance.

110  Pets and Patriarchy Refusing proper masculine authority for the sake of what all others perceive as an unholy alliance with his dog, Vanslyperken is a man utterly committed to the death drive. After all, Snarleyyow’s story, as told by the sailors, is one of demonic origin; he appears to Vanslyperken at a moment when his ship is about to be lost at sea and Vanslyperken has blasphemed by calling on the devil for help. He is rewarded instead with the first appearance of his dog: “And the dog looked up and gave one deep bark, and as soon as he had barked the wind appeared to lull – he barked again twice, and there was a dead calm – he barked again thrice, and the seas went down – and he patted the dog on the head. …” (23). Here Snarleyyow saves the captain from death, but the unholy alliance he makes with the dog in this moment is one that links him to the dog in death throughout. From the treasuring of “carrion” to his choice of the death of his relationship with the widow over his choice of futurity with her sanctioned by the death of his dog (which she demands), Vanslyperken clings to a relationship that dooms him, one that, according to the sailors, shuts him out forever from the fraternity of sailors in the afterlife, condemned instead to damnation: “‘I don’t think we shall meet him and his dog at Fiddler’s Green – heh!’ … ‘No, no, Jemmy, a seaman true means one true in heart as well as in knowledge; but, like a blind fiddler, he’ll be led by his dog somewhere else.’ ‘From vere de dog did come from,’ observed Jansen” (43). If naval masculinity in Marryat’s work is meant to stand in for a true, stalwart manhood and source of the nation’s potential leadership of the state and in the home, then the men’s rejection of Vanslyperken, for good and forever, casts the homoeroticism he chooses with his dog far outside the homosociality that forms the basis of proper masculine power. Hanged as a double traitor to both his king and to the smugglers who have forced him into their service, Vanslyperken earns the ignominious end for which his passion for carrion and his unholy alliance with his dog companion has predestined him. When the sailors observe earlier in the text that “‘Hanging’s just as natural a death for a cur’” (211), they rely upon a linkage of dog and master that both justifies and imposes this “natural” end to their “unnatural” union. The hangings of Snarleyyow and Vanslyperken are an apt reminder that if queerness can be linked to the death drive, as Lee Edelman argues, it is also persistently consigned to death by a heteronormative order that fears its destabilizing and disruptive difference. What troubles Vanslyperken’s relationship with Snarleyyow as sign of his outcast status, however, particularly in the final scene of their shared hanging, is that if Vanslyperken’s over-investment in his companion animal represents his unfitness as a man, it also, simultaneously, is the only thing that redeems his manhood. Unlike spinsters and their cats, the relationship between man and dog as stalwart best friends, equally characterized by loyalty, has sufficient ideological support that Vanslyperken’s and Snarleyyow’s companionship has redeemable qualities, speaking as it does to the significance of masculine homosociality in general. The line between proper and

Pets and Patriarchy  111 improper love between man and dog, and between brother and brother, is so fine that passionate homosocial and, here, interspecies affection can be almost as redeeming as it is damnable. Vanslyperken, in a reversal from the bachelors discussed in Chapter One, does fail to shift his devotion from his dog to the Widow Vandersloosh, but given her castrating potential, his decision to choose his dog over a strong-willed wife is not necessarily a violation of patriarchal power. Furthermore, his love for his dog, however misplaced (given it is not particularly returned), is also portrayed and viewed as his sole redeeming quality. Susan McHugh observes, “Passion for this disfigured, mean and disease-ridden cur creates depth in an otherwise shallow villain, ‘a gleam of sunshine’ that is ‘almost ridiculous’ in his otherwise unredeemable life” (136–37). The 1897 introduction to the novel makes a similar statement, recognizing the “touch of human affection, in a wholly worthless character” that “shows that Captain Marryat meant to describe a man and not a monster” (Courtney viii). Vanslyperken’s love for his dog, which links him satanically to a bestial, homoerotic union, is also the same thing that qualifies him as a man, even as a human, placing him at least partially within the realm of the natural: “… as Vanslyperken recalled his misfortunes, so did his love increase for the animal who was the cause of them. Why so, we cannot tell, except that it has been so from the beginning, is so now, and always will be the case, for the best of all possible reasons – that it is human nature” (Marryat 262).2 If it is natural for “curs” like Vanslyperken and Snarleyyow to hang, it is also natural for the man to love his dog, a fact that makes the crew’s continual persecution of both the dog and the man via his love for the dog seem less defensible and arguably even “monstrous” in and of itself. As McHugh suggests, the Captain’s love for his animal results in a “surprise twist” in which the captain “thereby becomes more sympathetic” (137). Importantly, his love for his dog not only qualifies him as a human but more particularly as a man, for the only signs of courage and authority Vanslyperken betrays are motivated by concern for his dog. He stands up to his castrating mother (255), threatens violence and retribution upon those who harm Snarleyyow (323), and even forgets his own fear of death out of concern for his pet (356). What little there is to be had of such manly qualities as protectiveness, bravery, and authority in Vanslyperken, it is Snarleyyow who elicits them. Nevertheless, he hangs and so does his dog. While the novel gestures toward the proof of Vanslyperken’s manhood and humanity as lying within his love for his dog, that love is still constructed as perverse enough to damn them both. The line between homosociality and homoeroticism, between man/dog fidelity and bestiality, might be somewhat fine, but it is not so fine that violent, determining distinctions cannot be forced to keep the two firmly separate. Love for a companion animal might be laudatory, but such love must be kept within firm limits, and Vanslyperken’s love is portrayed as immoderate in the extreme. Even the farewell between man and dog before

112  Pets and Patriarchy hanging, during which Vanslyperken’s love for his animal affects “those who were present like a gleam of sunshine” (357), still speaks to the importance of the boundaries between proper and immoderate love: “… Vanslyperken walked with the rope round his neck over to where the dog was held … bent over the cur, and kissed it again and again. ‘Enough,’ cried Sir Robert, ‘bring him back’” (357). The “enough,” signaling the end of both the ­kissing and the lives of those involved, also speaks to the importance of a love kept in bounds, particularly a boundary crossing love between man and cur. Of Vanslyperken’s many crimes, this is the one that most defines him: “… Mr. Vanslyperken wept – actually wept over an animal which was not, from any qualification he possessed, worth the charges of the cord which would have hanged him. Surely, the affections have sometimes a bent towards insanity” (Marryat 70). Yet if Vanslyperken’s immoderate love for his animal companion is “insane,” it is also compelling in ways that undo the work of the novel to call “Enough!” to his boundary-crossing attachment. His passionate love for his dog is by far the most erotically charged relationship of the novel, making all the other romantic subplots seem anemic by ­comparison. Vanslyperken’s cry to Snarleyyow – “‘Alas! if I am to suffer as I have t­o-day for only your tail, what shall I go through for your whole body!’” – c­ ombined with their tragic end, of which it is observed by the sailors, “Well, he did love his dog after all’ … ‘And he’s got his love with him’” (359), work to construct their doomed love as a kind of passion worthy of poetry. Even the observation that “Snarleyyow had become a precious jewel in the eyes of his master, and what he suffered in anxiety and disappointment from the perverse disposition of the animal, only endeared him the more” (70), while meant as a sign of Vanslyperken’s misplaced investment, also works as a declaration in support of boundless love: “… Vanslyperken put a value upon him that was extraordinary” (70). In portraying this love as perverse, immoderate, boundless, and therefore satanic and dangerous, the text also, ultimately, makes normalcy and proper romantic attachment appear fundamentally dull, unimaginative, and limited. Hearkening back to the “lady and the lapdog” motif identified by Laura Brown, I argue that Vanslyperken and ­Snarleyyow represent a similar narrative of “inter-species love”: “Immoderate love – or heights of love – evokes a broader idea, relevant to all these occasions of inter-species affection, whatever their local role; an idea of a realm outside the bounds of the normal, which emerges from the relationships of inversion and reversal that characterize the imaginative encounter with animal-kind” (85). The love between man and male dog, between captain and cur, speaks to, I argue, a broader idea even beyond “inter-species affection.” Instead, in representing love that defies rationality, reason, class, species difference, hierarchy, proper investment (both affective and financial), and proper sexuality and sexual performance, the novel revels in an ­emotional excess that calls into question the ideals of normalcy in ways it only partially succeeds in shutting down.

Pets and Patriarchy  113 The compelling perversity of Marryat’s representation of inter-species romance is thrown into high relief by comparison with a far more sentimental, far less subversive depiction of the love of a hanged man for his dog in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. Hugh lives up to the potential signified by his lack of a last name, represented in his status as a kind of unbroken house pet at the Maypole, the village pub and inn at which much of the novel’s action takes place. The only child of a hanged gypsy (revealed later on in the novel to be the illegitimate son of the villainous Mr. Chester), Hugh serves as the hostler at the inn, a position that is suited, according to landlord John Willett, to Hugh’s particular status: “… that chap that can’t read nor write, and has never had much to do with anything but animals, and has never lived in any way but like the animals he has lived among, is a animal. And,’ said Mr. Willet, arriving at his logical conclusion, ‘is to be treated accordingly’” (114–15). Hugh’s social position illustrates the close proximity between working-class male and working animal. With the ability to self-represent cherished as one of the hallmarks of humanity, Hugh’s lack of literacy renders him “mute” and therefore animal. That he has also been ostracized from childhood and forced to live “like an animal” and only “among” animals further reinforces his status as an outcast from human society, a creature undeserving of human comforts, rights, and privileges. For John Willett, Hugh’s social position, though one thrust upon him and maintained by men like Willett himself, places Hugh, like animalkind, into a space of theological alterity: “‘He’s quite a animal, sir,’ John whispered in his ear with dignity. ‘You’ll excuse him, I’m sure. If he has any soul at all, sir, it must be such a very small one that it don’t signify what he does or doesn’t in that way’” (126). Dickens, of course, represents Willett’s prejudice against Hugh as that which has created Hugh as an animal; it is not nature but nurture and the lack thereof that is responsible for Hugh’s bestiality. Hugh himself owns his status as an animal, though he does so in ways that betray an inherent misanthropy, one which is somewhat supported by a novel in which human society and human nature are often shown at their worst. Asking for shelter, for example, Hugh begs, “I am faint, exhausted, worn out, almost dead. Let me lie down, like a dog, before your fire. I ask no more than that” (177). Here, the right to be as a pet, a lower but still somewhat protected member of a household, is used to indicate that as an outcast human, Hugh is lower still than a treasured animal; the most he can ask of his fellow neighbors and citizens is to be as a dog to them.3 Furthermore, Hugh himself does not see a request that relies on him sharing proximity with a dog as unflattering or beneath his dignity; instead, his need to beg for kindness reveals his awareness of the inherent cruelty of humans, from whom, his experience has taught him, the most that can be expected is tolerance. The worst that can be expected is also that with which Hugh is fully aware: a callous indifference to or even pleasure in the suffering of others that dogs themselves do not share and that, in his mind, makes dogs worthier of respect. Recounting his mother’s death, Hugh observes, “‘You

114  Pets and Patriarchy see that dog of mine? … Such a dog as that, and one of the same breed, was the only living thing except me that howled that day,’ said Hugh. ‘Out of the two thousand odd – there was a larger crowd for its being a woman – the dog and I alone had any pity’” (224). Dickens relies here on gender norms as a measure of the inhumanity Hugh describes. That the crowd shows no pity for a woman and a mother demonstrates the failure of Hugh’s society to cherish that which Dickens most holds dear, the ordered and gendered structure of English domestic life. For Hugh, his and the dog’s shared “howls” place them outside the rationality of human society, but this is a sign they may be superior to human society, for it is that rationality that is the source of the crowd’s heartlessness: “‘If he’d had been a man, he’d have been glad to be quit of her, for she had been forced to keep him lean and half starved; but being a dog, and not having a man’s sense, he was sorry.’ ‘It was dull of the brute, certainly,’ said Mr. Chester, ‘and very like a brute’” (224). To be “very like a brute,” according to both Hugh and Mr. Chester, is to show unreasoned compassion, to demonstrate emotion untouched by cold calculation. That Mr. Chester finds such behavior contemptible – he observes, “Virtuous and gifted animals, whether man or beast, always are so very hideous” (224) – is a clear indication of Dickens’s approbation of such “unreasoning” devotion, for it is Mr. Chester’s calculated self-interest that allows him to permit both the hanging of his gypsy paramour and, later, his son. Hugh may come by his misanthropy honestly, and his embracing of the animal creation over a cold and reasoning human society betrays an almost Romantic sensibility that constructs him as at least partially sympathetic. Nevertheless, his close proximity to animals and his preference for them over humans mark him as a distinctly dangerous figure. Hugh’s privileging of animals represents a threat to domestic peace, a violent aberration that, while caused by society’s treatment of him, is nevertheless a source of menace that must be contained. Hugh proclaims, “Bring trouble on me, and I’ll bring trouble and something more on them in return. I care no more for them than for so many dogs; not so much – why should I? I’d sooner kill a man than a dog any day. I’ve never been sorry for a man’s death in all my life, and I have for a dog’s” (199). Hugh’s incipient violence toward his fellow humans makes him a ready candidate for the mayhem at the center of Barnaby Rudge, a historical novel that takes as its subject the Gordon Riots of 1780. If Hugh’s preference for animals over humans is readily comprehensible as a response to the violence enacted upon him, it also betrays a capacity for bestiality within humans, an atavistic savagery that simmers beneath the surface of Georgian life. Hugh’s joyful participation in the upheaval caused by the riots, events Dickens portrays as motivated by upper-class, anti-Catholic fervor but which are supported by lower-class male ferocity and desire for social disorder, speaks to the danger of permitting lower-class masculinity to sink to the level of, and perhaps even to revel in, what Dickens nevertheless portrays as an almost natural proximity to animals. Dickens may depict Hugh’s bestial nature as caused by social

Pets and Patriarchy  115 indifference to the plight of the lowest of its members but he also, in his linkage of working-class male fraternities with unbridled violence, suggests that the line between lower-class man and animal is perishingly small to begin with. Hugh is, after all, welcomed into the working-class fraternity of the “United Bulldogs,” the (as Dickens portrays them) ingrate apprentices who threaten class order. Fidelity is laudable so long as it is the loyalty of proper servant to proper master, but when Hugh “vow[s] to be faithful … to the last drop of blood in his veins” (361) to the cause of working-class unity and, implicitly, social upheaval, he betrays the dangerous side of his dogged nature and of the wrong kind of homosociality. Hugh’s animalistic nature is constructed as a threat not only to the social order but also to domestic peace, with his role as “dog” within the novel further supported by his rapacious sexuality. As discussed earlier, “The association of dogs with human sexual immorality has a long history” (Garber 141), but it is important to note that this history is not solely focused on flirtatious women and their lapdogs; male sexuality is also linked to doggishness, though to be a “dog” in matters of intercourse is far more likely to be a term of praise for men. But in a lower-class, outcast man like Hugh, a sexuality that is modeled upon that of dogs is not a source of manly approbation but of fear, reminding us that “however much the dog is said to possess human virtues, it is also, as Sigmund Freud remarked, repugnant to man because of its lack of shame about its excrement and sexual f­unctions. …” (Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog 6). Hugh’s “shameless” sexuality is made evident in the novel in his capacity for rape, his unbridled lust for and advances upon women far above his station standing in sharp contrast to the sentimental and restrained courtship performed by the heroes of the novel. Like the stray dog he is, Hugh does not recognize boundaries, and the passage detailing Dolly’s encounter with Hugh in the woods plays upon Hugh’s liminal status: If his manner had been merely dogged and passively fierce, as usual, she would have had no greater dislike to his company than she always felt – perhaps, indeed, would have been rather glad to have had him at hand. But there was something of coarse bold admiration in his look which terrified her very much. She glanced timidly toward him, uncertain whether to go forward or retreat, and he stood gazing at her like a handsome satyr. (198) Hugh is “usually” to Dolly what a somewhat savage guard dog would be, merely “dogged and passively fierce.” But here he is transformed from “passive” to “bold,” from a somewhat off-putting domesticated animal to “handsome satyr.”4 Hugh’s status as not quite human, not quite animal allows him to use both roles to his advantage, forcing his unbridled, animalistic sexuality on Dolly one moment and playing the domesticated watchdog, charged with finding her assailant, the next. Hugh’s ability to move between working

116  Pets and Patriarchy animal and bestial interloper demonstrates the danger of letting an animal such as him occupy a similar place as the dog upon the hearth. Once he is let into the home, he might feel he has a right to be there. In the conclusion to the novel, Hugh earns the end that, like Snarleyyow, might be the most “natural” for a cur such as he; he hangs like his mother before him. In a moment that links him to Vanslyperken, Hugh begs for his dog at the hour of his death, stating, “There’s one, belongs to me, at the house I came from, and it wouldn’t be easy to find a better. He’ll whine at first, but he’ll soon get over that” (212). Unlike Vanslyperken, however, Hugh’s care for his dog is not so much an act of passionate devotion but instead, as always, an expression of a deeply rooted misanthropy: “‘ – You wonder that I think of a dog just now,’ he added with a kind of laugh. ‘If any man deserved it of me half as well, I’d think of him’” (212). While Vanslyperken’s and Snarleyyow’s shared kisses lend a mixture of pathos and perversity to their final moments, thus both troubling and sanctioning their execution in a way that illustrates the vexed homosociality of man and dog, Dickens here uses Hugh’s plea for his dog in a much more straightforward, if somewhat dishonest, way. Hugh’s words, echoing back to the child and dog who witnessed a mother’s hanging, certainly implicate a heartless society in the tragedy of Hugh’s death. However, Hugh himself evidently cannot be redeemed within the world of the novel, so his death is made meaningful in a way most serving to middle-class interests. Hugh makes clear that for him to have been a better man, his actual betters needed to be more deserving; his death, rather than a mourning for Hugh specifically, is instead a warning that a failure of leadership on the part of upper-class masculinity will lead to the creation of men such as him.5 Hugh’s unbridled homosociality within violent lower-class manhood, presaged by his acceptance of his proximity to animals and his privileging of animal life over human life, demonstrates his opposition to Dickens’s much vaunted “interest in self-sacrifice and citizenship” (Lane 60). Therefore, even though it gestures toward a critique of human hierarchies in its portrayal of a man seemingly (somewhat) redeemed by care for the lower creation, Dickens’s depiction of Hugh’s hanging instead is a fairly straightforward cautionary tale that lower-class men must at least partially, and in controlled ways, be brought within the social fold if they are to rise from animality to proper sociability. Those who fail to do so, like Hugh, must be violently expunged from the narrative, for as Christopher Lane argues, when it comes to misanthropy, “Dickens insists that such social behaviour is irremediable and must be eliminated” (61). Another example of a man in the Dickensian panoply who must be hanged for his anti-communitarian ways is, of course, the villainous Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist. Like Vanslyperken and Hugh, Sikes keeps company with a low-bred cur, meeting with him the hanging that by now should be familiar. It is significant all these dogs, by the way, are “curs,” for as Harriet Ritvo and others have pointed out, the breed of the dog was (and still is) a metonym for discussing the breeding of the humans who owned them: “… dogs

Pets and Patriarchy  117 without breed standing were unquestionably beyond the pale … lumped together by Victorian fanciers in the catch-all class of mongrels or curs. It was a class about which they had little good to say.”6 Bull’s-eye in Oliver Twist is clearly such a cur, whose features speak to the use he is most likely put by his violent master: “A white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty different places, skulked into the room” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 107). While much has been made linking Bull’s-Eye to Nancy, Sikes’s partner, as shared victims of Bill Sikes,7 the appearance of man and beast also speaks to their shared pastimes, with Sikes’s face presenting “a broad heavy countenance with a beard of three days’ growth, and two scowling eyes, one of which displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently damaged by a blow” (107). Both wearing the badges of their violent sports upon their faces, the two companions, urban man and urban cur, are represented as equally indiscriminate in their violence, capable of attacking both friend and foe; Sikes tells his co-criminal Fagin he would murder him if he were one of Fagin’s apprentices, and Bull’s-Eye is described as “seem[ing] to be meditating an attack upon the legs of the first gentleman or lady he might encounter in the streets when he went out” (109). Bill Sikes and Bull’s-Eye represent a chaotic savagery at the heart of England, speaking eloquently to the danger of unrestrained and unlicensed lawlessness. That Bull’s-Eye is a cur who must be distinguished from man’s best friend is made evident in his repayment of violence enacted upon him by his master with violence of his own: Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr. Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and labouring perhaps, at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth in one of the half-boots, and, having given it a good hearty shake, retired, growling, under a form; thereby just escaping the pewter measure which Mr. Sikes levelled at his head. (127–28) Like Snarleyyow, Bull’s-Eye is a canine who challenges the supposedly fixed character traits expected of his species. Rather than presenting a model of loyalty worthy of poetry, Bull’s-Eye “is as short-tempered as his owner, acting upon resentment when he feels it and suffering the consequences of his impulses” (Moore 202). By fighting back, as he may well be expected to do, Bull’s-eye is nevertheless represented as exacerbating his master’s ill temper instead of inspiring him to better heights of manliness: “This resistance only infuriated Mr. Sikes the more; who, dropping on his knees, began to assail the animal most furiously. The dog jumped from right to left, and from left to right, snapping, growling, and barking; the man thrust and swore, and struck and blasphemed” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 128). Rather than reflecting back man’s best qualities, as a dog is expected to do, bringing out qualities of loyalty, heroism, and bravery in Sikes, Bull’s-eye is instead depicted here

118  Pets and Patriarchy as giving back as good as he gets. While his defensive behavior is not necessarily blameworthy, the response it elicits from Sikes seems to draw a line between innocent victims and those who, in their violent response to violence, seem to earn, in Dickens’s representation, even more abuse in return. If such violence is, in fact, both their livelihood and their pastime (with Bull’s-Eye’s many wounds suggesting dog-fighting in either an organized or unorganized way), then the battles within the home between the two combatants speaks to an inability to leave either the dog ring or the criminal world behind them. Domestic bliss, for Bull’s-Eye and Sikes, looks an awful lot like a hard day’s work. Of course, Sikes does not remain a bachelor, and his co-habitation with and eventual murder of Nancy served, in early Victorian culture, as a model for domestic violence, with him and Nancy providing “a kind of shorthand for wife beater and victim in the Victorian period” (Surridge, Bleak House 15–16). Surridge goes on to argue, “It has frequently been noted that Nancy is paralleled with Sikes’s dog, Bull’s-Eye” (Bleak House 37), but while she observes, “Marlene Tromp argues that this parallel points up Nancy’s animalistic qualities” (Tromp, 35–6), Surridge argues instead that “the text distinguishes between Nancy and the dog in their response to this shared violence. Crucially, Nancy remains passive toward her abuser, whereas Bull’s-Eye aggressively resists Sikes’s beatings” (37). Using Bull’s Eye’s violence toward Sikes as a point of comparison, Surridge asserts “Nancy represents a textual exemplar of supreme devotion under the companionate model,” a “passive demeanor [that] represents what the middle classes increasingly tried to impose on the working classes” (39). By contrast, the relationship between Bull’s-Eye and Sikes, prior to Nancy’s advent into their lives, instead “parod[ies] the combative marriage commonly associated with the ‘brutal’ classes to which Nancy belongs” (37). However, after Nancy’s murder, Surridge sees a transformation in Bull’s-Eye: “the dog unexpectedly becomes like Nancy, displaying her illogical and pathetic devotion to an abusive owner/master” (41). In the end, despite Sikes attempting to drown him, Bull’s-Eye still throws himself to his death after his master’s own accidental hanging, proving to Surridge that “The victim’s passivity – even suicidal self-immolation – was thus necessary to Dickens’s conclusion after all” (43). Surridge’s reading of Bull’s-Eye as a representative of Nancy in the conclusion to the novel has significant textual support and works very much within the linkage of woman and domestic animal in the Victorian period, but I also want to read Bull’s-Eye not solely as a representative of Nancy but also as Sikes’s dog, one with whom he shares a tumultuous, and yet arguably devoted, relationship prior to his connection with Nancy. Bull’s-Eye’s death does not solely speak to Nancy’s death and Nancy’s characterization (though I agree with Surridge and Tromp that it certainly can) but also says something significant about Bull’s-Eye, his death, and the relationship he had with his master. As Grace Moore points out, Bull’s-eye has a “peculiar positioning within the novel, embodying elements of both the victim and

Pets and Patriarchy  119 the ruthless accomplice”; he “displays his affinities with Sikes but also his submission to his owner’s iron rule, pointing to the complexity of their dayto-day interactions” (203). While Moore is correct that Bull’s-eye is at least in part a victim (204), one who shares with Nancy a disempowered position in a triangulated relationship with Sikes and Nancy, I read Bull’s-Eye’s parallel with Nancy somewhat differently. Following Surridge’s argument that Bull’s-Eye and Sikes “parody” a lower-class marriage in the ways they relate to each other, I argue that what this reveals is that Sikes and his dog kept house with each other in ways that cannot necessarily be subsumed in what we usually understand by pet relations, nor in precisely the same way as Sikes shared space with Nancy. Sikes and Bull’s-Eye, while not equals, can be read as combatants and co-habitants, as comparable characters who shared more in common with each other than did Sikes and Nancy, with their opposed aggressivity and passivity, brutal lower-class vices and sympathetic middle-class virtues. Certainly, if we read Bulls’-Eye as a dog who is not given voice and cannot speak for himself, the brutality he experiences under Sikes’s rule do mark him as a “victim,” one who is “unable to leave in spite of a lifetime of ill treatment” (Moore 206). But Bull’s-Eye is also a character, one Dickens endows with personality and whom he describes as, again, “having faults of temper in common with his owner” (Dickens, ­Oliver Twist 127). As a result, while he can be constructed as a victim, I believe he is also as much meant to be read, as Snarleyyow is, as a villain in his own right, one who betrays the best qualities of doghood just as Sikes betrays the best qualities of manliness. Sikes’s short-lived relationship with Nancy represents a domesticity of which Sikes is undeserving, a home that a brute like him can neither earn nor sustain. Like his dog, and with his dog, “Sikes is a throwback who confounds contemporary morality” (Moore 203) and is meant for the street and the ring, a brutal outsider who can only find companionship with someone as violent and unlikeable as himself. Dickens kills Bull’s-Eye in the end not simply to preserve the “victim’s passivity” (Surridge 43) in his narrative of domestic violence but because Bull’s-Eye, like Sikes, like Snarleyyow, like Vanslyperken, and like Hugh, deserves it. He is a cur that is fit for hanging, going to his “natural” death even if it requires an unusual recourse to doggy devotion to bring that end about. None of these men and their dogs is domestic. None can earn a place on or beside the hearth, and none can be tolerated as presences within a society that, by the mid-Victorian period, firmly structured masculinity around and toward domesticity. Devoted as they are instead to a cross-species homosociality, these men and their dogs represent a savagery that cannot be subsumed within the middle-class version of domesticity and the concomitant version of manhood being constructed within early and mid-Victorian fiction and culture. It is not insignificant, of course, that both The Dog Fiend and Barnaby Rudge are historical novels, set in a past from which Victorian England increasingly sought to distinguish itself. Even Oliver Twist, written

120  Pets and Patriarchy in the early part of the nineteenth century, hearkens back to the gothic novel and the Newgate novel, and concerns itself with the kind of men that social reforms of the nineteenth-century, from anti-cruelty to animals campaigns to sanitation movements, increasingly sought to police. According to J. Carter Wood, emergent discourses of violence in the nineteenth century, specifically those constructing violence as the antithesis of civilization, were very much linked to nascent middle-class identity and masculinity: While earlier dominant masculinities relied on bodily prowess and the ability to deploy violence, respectable male identity came to concentrate more on “occupation, on ‘rational’ public activity, and on one’s role as husband and father.” Middle-class culture emphasised selfrestraint, aspiring at least to the appearance of control over “passion,” which was often linked directly to violence. (32) With the marks of violence upon them and the violence they mete out on others, Bull’s-Eye and Sikes speak to a shared (if, again, not necessarily equal) performance of virility, one that is more at home with England’s past of working-class homosociality structured around bull-baiting and dog fights. Ritvo details the extent to which activities like dog-fighting “could be considered powerful, premeditated challenges” to social order (150), with “The defiance implicit in the combination of low company and brutal entertainment … even more obvious in the north of England, where animal combats often occurred in conjunction with traditionally saturnalian rural festivals” (151). With “animal baiting” sometimes “overlapping with the world of unquestioned criminality” (150), it is clear Sikes and Bull’s-Eye, taken together, represent a “savage” form of animal-human relations that represent a direct threat to the civil, communitarian world of middle-class England. In its detailed representation of Sikes’s social exclusion following his murder of Nancy, the novel makes clear that men such as he have no place in the new social order; significantly, neither does his dog: “This mad excitement over, there returned, with tenfold force, the dreadful consciousness of his crime. He looked suspiciously about him, for the men were conversing in groups, and he feared to be the subject of their talk. The dog obeyed the significant beck of his finger, and they drew off, stealthily, together” (451). By too closely linking Bull’s-Eye with Nancy, we run the risk of failing to recognize that certain breeds of animals were as much linked to masculinity as they were to femininity, as much likely to represent an atavistic and, therefore, repellent savagery as to speak of home and hearth. These hanged men and their hanged dogs represent the other side of Victorian domesticity, the threats to the home that had to be expunged from the national consciousness in order to recreate England from the “hell of dumb animals” (qtd. in Ritvo, 126) it was perceived to be in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to a nation famed for its humanity and praised for its home life.

Pets and Patriarchy  121 STRANGE DOMESTICITY: MALE-HEADED ANIMAL FAMILIES Not all men who kept house with dogs were so virulently anti-domestic, of course, and in this final section, I examine bachelors and non-fathers in Victorian literature who instead create family with their pet animals. In George Eliot’s Adam Bede, one such bachelor is Bartle Massey, the schoolmaster and Adam’s mentor. Bartle is very much a man-centered man, which is a kinder way of saying he is a raging misogynist. But more than that, Bartle is someone who enjoys the companionship of men, the pride of paternity, and the pleasures of domesticity; he simply wishes to firmly exclude women from any of these experiences. In his education of the men of the village and particularly in his close relationship with Adam, we see that Bartle is not misanthropic. Though possessing a “keen, impatient temperament” (Eliot, Adam Bede 233), he also demonstrates a “compassionate kindness” (233) out of keeping with misanthropy, a charitable nature evident in the pains he takes with his pupils. And though he is a bachelor, he achieves a kind of paternity with his students, Adam in particular: “But where’s the use of all the time I’ve spent in teaching you writing and mapping and mensuration, if you’re not to get for’ard in the world, and show folks there’s some advantage in having a head on your shoulders, instead of a turnip?” (244). With his male students, Bartle achieves productive if not fully reproductive futurism, for through them, his own knowledge lives beyond him, allowing him to achieve the parental goal of progeny who “get for’ard in the world.” Nevertheless, his version of the world and his place in it cannot easily be subsumed within the concept of heteronormativity because he so clearly advocates a one-sex model of life; for Bartle, men living with other men in the world is the closest approximation of utopia. In keeping with his male-centered version of paternity and sociality, ­Bartle enjoys a male-centered domesticity, eschewing popular opinion that a proper home requires a woman to maintain it. For Bartle, bachelorhood is not a state antithetical to domesticity; instead, he argues for a purer domestic comfort, a tidier and homelier space, untainted by female companionship: “Look at me! I make my own bread, and there’s no difference between one batch and another from year’s end to year’s end. … And as for cleanliness, my house is cleaner than any other house on the Common, though half of ’em swarm with women” (Eliot 240). By embracing a “female” role in the home, Bartle does not so much challenge the concept of separate spheres as rely on the connection of women with domesticity to prove their ultimate worthlessness. Women, he implies, are falsely pushed on men as domestic helpmeets and essential adornments to the Englishman’s castle: “It’s the s­ illiest lie a sensible man like you ever believed, to say a woman makes a house comfortable. It’s a story got up, because the women are there, and something must be found for ’em” (239).8 For Bartle, proving his skill in housework and home management is both a means of striking a blow against the opposite sex and of demonstrating the efficiency of male-centered ­relations.

122  Pets and Patriarchy He asserts, “Will Baker’s lad comes to help me in a morning, and we get as much cleaning done in one hour without any fuss, as a woman ’ud get done in three, and all the while be sending buckets o’ water after your ankles; and let the fender and the fire-irons stand in the middle o’ the floor half the day, for you to break your shins against ’em” (240). Invoking the power of men to work together in the home in ways marked by the ­traditionally masculine attributes of skill, efficiency, and rationality, B ­ artle creates a vision of domestic life that brings together homosociality and domesticity as ideals that complement, rather than oppose, each other. For all of his talk about the uselessness of women, however, Bartle does have a female in his home, or rather, a bitch named Vixen. I use the highly laden term for a female dog deliberately here, for, as with the misogynist associations with the term “bitch,” Vixen’s very name implies a temperament in keeping with Bartle’s general assumptions about womanhood: women are “stinging gnats” (239) with “no conscience” (246). Importantly, however, Vixen is clearly neither “vixenish” nor a “bitch” in the colloquial sense of the terms. Instead, her behavior throws Bartle’s own quarrelsome and nagging ways into high relief. In the course of his rant on the troubles caused by women to a man’s peace within the home, for example, Bartle works himself up into a frenzy: Bartle had become so excited and angry in the course of his invective that he had forgotten his supper, and only used the knife for the purpose of rapping the table with the shaft. But towards the close, the raps became so sharp and frequent, and his voice so quarrelsome, that Vixen felt it incumbent on her to jump out of her hamper and bark vaguely. “Quiet, Vixen,” snarled Bartle, turning round upon her. “You’re like the rest o’ the women – always putting in your word before you know why.” Vixen returned to her hamper again in humiliation, and her master continued his supper in silence which Adam did not choose to interrupt; he knew the old man would be in a better humour when he had his supper and lighted his pipe. (240–41) Bartle’s behavior in this moment clearly identifies him as the “stinging gnat” that disrupts domestic peace, transforming as he does implements for eating into instruments for striking and mealtime itself from a moment of comfort and sociability to one of “invective” followed by “silence.” By his own example, Bartle’s domesticity is neither so comfortable nor so peaceable as he portrays it. Vixen’s own interruption of his discourse, by contrast, is shown to be both occasioned by Bartle’s own actions – she felt it “incumbent on her to jump out of her hamper” – and mild by comparison. After all, she only barks “vaguely.” Placed in contrast to his “snarls” and “raps,” Vixen’s actions and vocalizations are clearly depicted as less disruptive and violent than Bartle’s own, her single proclamation no match for his own invective. Clearly, there is one person who is “a-buzz and a-squeak” here

Pets and Patriarchy  123 (239), as Bartle accuses women of so often being, and it is not the female in the house. Using the presence of a female dog within the home to put the lie to Bartle’s claims about the opposite sex, Eliot ironically reveals the source of Bartle’s misogyny, a projection onto women of all the traits that are unlovable and unlikeable in himself. But Vixen plays a far more complicated role than simply acting as the female in the home in order to put the lie to Bartle’s views on womanhood; in addition, Vixen’s role in Bartle’s life puts the lie to his own hatred. Through her, we see a man who is, in fact, drawn to domestic and familial life, one who uses his dog to construct the version of heteronormative family his extreme misogyny prevents. Observing that Vixen has produced a litter, Adam jocularly observes, “‘Why, you’ve got a family, I see, Mr. Massey? … How’s that? I thought it was against the law here” (237–38). In keeping with his performance of misogyny, Bartle replies that if he had known Vixen was a woman, he would have drowned her; failing that, “you see what she’s brought me to” (238). However, what she has “brought him to” is e­ vidently a paternalistic kindness, for his first action upon entering the home is to show care for the mother and her pups: “‘Well, Vixen, well then, how are the babbies?’ said the schoolmaster, making haste towards the chimney corner, and holding the candle over the low hamper, where two extremely blind puppies lifted up their heads towards the light, from a nest of fl ­ annel and wool” (237). Like a father returned home to check on his brood, Bartle shows extreme solicitousness in his “haste” to check on the litter, a care that is further evidenced by the nest he has obviously constructed. His relationship with Vixen is one marked by love and kindness, punctuated by a performance of hatred, whether there is an audience to see it or not. For example, after walking Adam out at the end of their evening together, Bartle speaks to Vixen, who has accompanied him, in ways that betray the complicated nature of his misogyny: “Well, well, Vixen, you foolish wench, what is it, what is it? I must go in, must I? Ay, ay, I’m never to have a will of my own any more” (246). Bartle’s words, on their surface, support his theories that women control the lives of men, restricting their freedom and causing them trouble. But delivered as they are to a loyal and loving dog, one who immediately accompanies her master on his walk (245), torn though she is “in a state of divided affection … twice run[ning] back to bestow a parenthetic lick on her puppies” (245), Bartle’s words instead speak of a gruff kindness, a perhaps not-so-grudging gratitude for a creature who cares enough about him to require his company and value his presence. Like a woman, Vixen humanizes Bartle, softening his rough edges, so that without her, as the writer of “The Dogs of Fiction” asserts, Bartle’s character “would lose no little of [its] charm” (Von Hacht 102). Vixen’s role in Bartle’s life relieves the bachelor of what Eliot suggests would otherwise be a barren hearth, a space in which Bartle stews in his own misogyny, unrelieved by the kinder feelings a woman bestows. Even Bartle’s domestic management is attributed, comically, to the dog, as the narration observes,

124  Pets and Patriarchy “The table was as clean as if Vixen had been an excellent housewife in a checked apron” (Eliot 238). Such a use of dog as housewife might serve to challenge Bartle’s misogyny, but it also, of course, relies on no small portion of misogyny itself in its suggestion that dogs and women can serve a nearly inter-changeable role within men’s lives, a substitution already indicated by the seamless replacement of Adam’s dog Gyp with his wife. This is an over-simplification of the gender relations within Adam Bede, of course, with the relationship between the Poysers, and between Adam and Dinah, instead providing ample evidence of love and affection between two equally strong and willful partners. Nevertheless, Eliot’s depiction of Bartle and Vixen’s domesticity does challenge Bartle’s vision of a man-centered domesticity in favor of a more essentialist two-sex model of nuclear familial relations, one that relies explicitly on a complementary, heteronormative view of gender. Like the spinster with her cat, whose avowed hatred of men is merely a cover for her disappointment in love, Bartle’s man-dog domesticity is a clear imitation of that which he claims to despise, one that speaks to his own failure to achieve the role of husband and father and, in so doing, instantiates the “natural family” as the ultimate best goal of man and woman. While the novel remains silent on any past disappointments that may have contributed to Bartle’s views on family life, saying only Adam “had never learned so much of Bartle’s past life as to know whether his view of married comfort was founded on experience” (251), yet the novel’s careful use of irony in its representation of Bartle’s home with his pet serves to underscore its representation of a man whose views on marriage and domesticity are not in keeping with either his desires or his best happiness. By comparison, Wilkie Collins’s representation of pet-centered paternity in The Woman in White (1859) is substantially (and perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sensational nature of the novel as a whole) more perverse, offering as it does a version of domesticity that directly challenges heteronormativity and reproductive futurism. Count Fosco, the compelling villain at the heart of the novel’s many scenes of action and intrigue, keeps house with his subservient wife and his panoply of pets, including his prized “children,” a collection of white mice. Though definitely not a bachelor, Fosco is far more homosocial than he is domesticated, with his close relationship with the odious Sir Percival Glyde providing the impetus for many of his criminal actions and his past allegiance to a fraternal organization called the Brotherhood both informing his villainy and enforcing his secretive nature. His relationship with his wife, though ostentatiously performed in a highly chivalrous, devoted manner, is one more closely resembling master and servant, or high priest and acolyte, than man and wife. A former espouser of women’s rights, Madame Fosco has been transformed by Count Fosco’s magnetic personality into his willing accomplice, supporting him in his nefarious actions and at all times engaging in the ritual of making his cigarettes. Significantly, Count Fosco’s most passionate feelings in the novel are reserved not for her

Pets and Patriarchy  125 but for his worthy opponent, Miss Marian Halcombe, the novel’s mannish heroine. While Count Fosco’s relationships and his ostentatious performance of joviality, one that combines a childish sensibility with cosmopolitan tastes and manners, allow him to be read in any number of ways,9 he is also an essentially queer figure. His performance of married bliss, a deliberate act that helps to hide his actual role as a spy and an exiled member of the Brotherhood, suggests that Fosco is arguably a “closeted” man, one who utilizes the appearance of heteronormativity in order to obscure a more scandalous reality. Fosco also defies gender boundaries in his combination of masculine and feminine qualities. He is described by Marian as a man of great power: “He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress,” she says (233). As a man who “tames” women, he clearly establishes himself as a hunter within what Derrida has called the “carno-phallogocentric order,” one that links women and children with animals as subjects of male dominance and victims of male aggression. As Maggie Berg notes, Derrida “argues that a society’s eagerness to use animals for food is the foundation of a social hierarchy maintained by violence” (22). Fosco certainly participates in this violence, yet he also betrays a womanly sensibility. Marian observes, “He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women; and, more than that, with all his look of unmistakable firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. … He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed by my own want of tenderness and sensibility, by comparison with the Count” (Collins 235). Such characteristics are in keeping with Sedgwick’s identification of Fosco as an “aristocratic homosexual ‘type,’” one marked by “feckless, ‘effeminate’ behaviour” (175). Dennis Denisoff similarly argues that Fosco is “portrayed as effeminately vain through his theatrical actions, facial expression, and extreme attention to sartorial detail” (47). Fosco’s “childish triviliality of his ordinary tastes and pursuits” (Collins 238), as seen in his love of desserts, further links him to queer sensibilities because the construction of the homosexual man as trapped in an essential childhood, thus failing to move from the sexual inversion of youth to the “maturity” of heterosexual love, is a common homophobic trope.10 Finally, even Fosco’s erotic passion for Marian Halcombe underlines the Count’s status as a queer figure for, as Lisa Surridge points out, “Famously, her body is feminine and her face is masculine, with a ‘large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw,’ ‘resolute eyes,’ and ‘almost a moustache’ on her lip. … She shakes hands like a man, says she thinks little of her own sex, and even before Laura’s marriage fills the masculine role of guardian that the effeminate Mr. Fairlie fulfils so badly” (Bleak Houses 159). Fosco’s queer enactment of masculinity is significant because it plays into his particular version of pet-centered paternity, one that directly parodies English masculinity and the English family. The Count has a taste for the exotic, as seen in part in his construction of a pagoda for his pet mice.

126  Pets and Patriarchy Unlike David, for whom Jip’s pagoda was an unwelcome sign of his failure to maintain power over his own castle, the Count revels in a decidedly nonEnglish performance of masculinity. As Marian recounts: If it be possible to suppose an Englishman with any taste for such childish interests and amusements as these, that Englishman would certainly feel rather ashamed of them, and would be anxious to apologize for them, in the company of grown-up people. But the Count, apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast between his colossal self and his frail little pets. He would blandly kiss his white mice, and twitter to his canary-birds amid an assembly of English foxhunters, and would only pity them as barbarians when they were all laughing their loudest at him. (236) Marian’s observations of the Count’s pet relations certainly suggest, on their surface, that his own particular style of masculinity is inferior to English manhood, constructed as it is as “childish,” something of which an Englishmen would be “ashamed” and “anxious,” and for which he must “apologize.” However, Marian’s comparison of Count Fosco to Englishmen actually reveals the deficits in the English manly character, or at the very least, reveals the performativity of English masculinity. Though she questions whether it is even “possible to suppose” an Englishman might share the Count’s taste in pets, thus asserting that such tastes would be unnatural to English character, yet her acknowledgement that if an Englishman had such tastes, he would have to hide them reveals an awareness of masculinity as a performance, one founded on shame and secrecy and bolstered by violence and a communal mockery of difference. By contrast, the Count’s own manliness seems to consist of an ability to own his tastes and pleasures without the sanctioning support of normative masculine, homosocial frameworks. Instead, the Count revels in his closeness to small creatures, captured both in his close relation to his “frail little pets” and in his desire to associate himself with women: “‘A taste for sweets,’ he said in his softest tone and his tenderest manner, ‘is the innocent taste of women and children. I love to share it with them – it is another bond, dear ladies, between you and me’” (314). While being connected with “frail animals” and “innocent … women and children” should undermine the Count’s masculinity, this is not the case, as supported by the Count’s later confrontation with a dog, that quintessential representative of English manhood: “‘You big dogs are all cowards,’ he said, addressing the animal contemptuously, with his face and the dog’s within an inch of each other. ‘You would kill a poor cat, you infernal coward. … You could throttle me at this moment, you mean, miserable bully; and you daren’t so much as look me in the face, because I’m not afraid of you’” (237). Like hunters who use dogs and horses to hound to death the small fox, this “big dog” is seen by the Count as an “infernal coward,” one whose strength is called into

Pets and Patriarchy  127 question, rather than supported by its dominance of weaker, frailer things. Rather than linking himself homosocially with the dog, the Count instead founds his manliness on his opposition to the “stronger” species – and by implication the “stronger” sex – and on his ability to look them in the face and call them cowards and barbarians. What complicates Fosco’s masculinity as seemingly kind and gentle is, of course, the fact that he utterly dominates both women and pets, all in the service of patriarchy. His own power, as captured in Marian’s observation that he could tame a tigress (233), is one he only masks behind a performance of childishness, domesticity, and sensibility. As the novel makes evident, his control of his pet menagerie, the denizens of which he plies with treats in order to teach them to perform tricks at his command, simply reinforces his theories on how to control inferiors in general. Marlene Tromp observes that Fosco philosophizes with Percival, pointing out that there are only “two ways to manage a woman”: by beating her, which he marks as the province of the working classes alone, and by “never accept[ing] provocation at a woman’s hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and its holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in” [352]. Women, then, must be trained that their desires, wishes, and concerns have no impact on their lives or the lives of the men around them. Fosco requires only the quiet resolution of a glacier and the constant threat of private violence to tame his pets and Madame Fosco. (85) As much as he defines himself in opposition to barbarous Englishmen who use overt violence to assert their masculine power, Fosco’s own foundation for manliness differs only in respect to the tools he uses to support his ­ authority. And while he frames his actions as suggestive of greater ­manliness – he does not, after all, have to resort to violence, as the force of his personality alone is sufficient to impose his will on others – yet his own form of domination is every bit as performative as that of the Englishman; he relies on “private violence” to reinforce his seemingly non-violent power and he does so primarily because the performance of civility renders him free from legal and social reprisal.11 Through Fosco and his pet relations, Collins therefore reveals the ugly side of domesticity in ways that the more obvious treating of Sir Percival’s brutal relationship with Laura cannot quite encompass. Sir Percival and Laura’s marriage falls more easily within the sensationalist discourse surrounding aristocratic marriages, a discourse that upheld the superiority of the middleclass companionate marriage as opposed to the model based on financial and family interests supposedly reserved for the upper classes. Fosco’s more sentimental relations with his animal “children,” however, though undoubtedly

128  Pets and Patriarchy perverse and un-English, nevertheless still reference a version of family based on love, protection, pride, and affection, and thus shares closer proximity to the m ­ iddle-class narrative of family life. In his rendering of Fosco’s gentle paternalism, one that masks a hidden violence and a manipulation of family members’ love for the purpose of serving the patriarch’s own self interests, Collins reveals the ugly side of the sentimental construction of family, one in which love relations are not so easily separated from power and dominance. As Yi Fu-Tuan asserts, “Affection is not the opposite of dominance; rather it is dominance’s anodyne – it is dominance with a human face. Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. What it produces is the victim. On the other hand, dominance may be combined with affection, and what is ­produces is the pet” (1–2). It would be easy enough to dismiss Fosco’s species-crossing family as a perversion of the proper English family, a failed copy produced by a foreigner unable to truly grasp English nature and customs, in much the same way as Professor Pesca, at the beginning of the novel, betrays his alien origins through his “shrill foreign parody on an English cheer” (Collins 1). Nevertheless, what supports Count Fosco’s family as something other than a “foreign parody” of an English home is Count Fosco’s own defence of his wife’s part in his machinations: I remember that I was married in England – and I ask if a woman’s marriage obligations, in this country, provide for her private opinion of her husband’s principles? No! They charge her unreservedly to love, honour, and obey him. … I stand, here, on a supreme moral elevation; and I loftily assert her accurate performance of her conjugal duties. Silence, Calumny! Your sympathy, Wives of England, for Madame Fosco!” (307–08) Fosco’s assertion that, regardless of his ethnicity, his marriage was founded in England and therefore shaped by and lived according to the customs of that country is a powerful reminder that this marriage cannot easily be dismissed as indicative of “foreign” barbarity. With his pet mice and pet birds as progeny, Fosco does indeed make a parody of English “natural family” life, but he does so in ways that reveal the centrality of dominance to the patriarchal home. In other words, Fosco uses domesticity to “pass” and in so doing subtly reveals all the ways in which domesticity normatively operates as a means of obscuring that which is hidden within the family home from the outside world. In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud famously links the concept of unheimlich (strange, “unhomely”) to heimlich (“homely”). Some of the many shades of meaning attached to the word heimlich include “belonging to the house” and “intimate” but also “concealed, kept from sight” (221– 222). Reading Fosco’s “family” as a dark parody of English domesticity, a performance put on by a foreigner for the express purpose of concealing

Pets and Patriarchy  129 himself, reveals the extent to which the heteronormative family is always already constructed for the purpose of passing. For Fosco, his animal children are a crucial aspect of his disarming persona; as Marian describes early in her acquaintance with him: The gentleman, dressed, as usual, in his blouse and straw hat, carried the gay little pagoda-cage, with his darling white mice in it, and smiled on them, and on us, with a bland amiability which it was impossible to resist. “With your kind permission,” said the Count, “I will take my small family, here – my poor-little-harmless-pretty-Mouseys, out for an airing along with us. There are dogs about the house, and shall I leave my forlorn white children at the mercies of the dogs? Ah, never!” He chirruped paternally at his small white children through the bars of the pagoda; and we all left the house for the lake. (Collins 247) The Count is “impossible to resist” in this moment because he falls very much within a performance of proper masculinity, one, that is, of course, eccentric but also engagingly familiar in that he so clearly occupies the role of family man in this moment, with his “amiability” and the “darling” nature of his “small family.” The Count assiduously links himself to his pets, using his “poor-little-harmless-pretty-Mouseys” to underline his own performance as a harmless, child-like eccentric. Nevertheless, he also appeals to fatherhood to further win over his audience, with his “paternal” engagement with his children and his role as protector of their helplessness, signaling to the women around him he is a safe and kindly model of manhood. This persona is useful to the Count in his machinations, as seen in numerous instances in the novel when Fosco employs his intimacy with his animal children as a direct means of participating in domestic spying and plotting. On one occasion in which she overhears Count Fosco speaking with his birds, Marian assumes “The Count is safe in the breakfast room” (289) and sneaks away to send a letter. On another occasion, Marian again assumes the Count is occupied, based on his interaction with his pets: “The singing of the canaries in the library, and the smell of tobacco-smoke that came through the door, which was not closed, told me at once where the Count was. I looked over my shoulder, as I passed the doorway; and saw, to my surprise, that he was exhibiting the docility of the birds, in his most engagingly polite manner, to the housekeeper” (335). In both cases, Marian is proven wrong; the Count clearly is aware of her desire to evade him and uses his pets as a means of tricking Marian. Upon encountering Fosco after believing him occupied, Marian questions his performance with his birds: “I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room,” I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could.

130  Pets and Patriarchy “Surely. But my little feathered children, my dear lady, are only too like other children. They have their days of perversity; and this morning was one of them. My wife came in, as I was putting them back in their cage, and said she had left you going out alone for a walk.” (293) The Count’s performance with his birds serves a complicated function here in terms of the domestic spying and intrigue that is taking place. By saying the “Count is safe” when he is occupied with his birds, Marian means, of course, she is “safe” from him, because she is able to count on his being occupied by what she overhears in the breakfast room. But the double meaning of this is that the Count wishes to appear “safe,” certainly in terms of making Marian think he is occupied, but also in the larger scheme of things. His child-like play with his pets allows him to wear the persona of sentimental animal-lover and family man, an eminently “safe” figure of domesticity. By questioning the Count “quietly and firmly” on his performance with his birds, Marian subtly challenges that persona, making him aware that she sees his domestic play for what it is: domestic intrigue. But this subtle accusation is countered by Fosco with another performance of domesticity; his play was interrupted by his children’s misbehavior because the birds “are only too like other children,” and “have their days of perversity.” In arguing from the position of a father figure, one who must properly discipline his children, Fosco inhabits an unassailable position; to question him is to question his love for and management of his children. Fosco’s use of his animal children as a shield, as a means of subterfuge by which he passes as a kindly paternalistic figure and as an alibi for his more underhanded actions gets at the heart of familial life as itself subterfuge and alibi. So long as one has attained the role of father and husband, one is, to a certain extent, shielded from inquiry. One’s sexual tastes and proclivities, even one’s morality and ethics are, to a certain extent, judged to be normal or, at the very least, treated with a respectful reticence. For bachelors like Bartle Massey, the “secret” of singleness is always a source of public questioning, of an attempt to discover what went wrong, what mysterious incidents within the past can explain or justify a man’s decision to remain unmarried, what “nature” the man has that prevents him from taking his proper place in society. But once married, a man enjoys the protection of marriage and family, with both operating as visible signs of his attainment of proper masculinity. Fosco’s willful manipulation of the paternal and the domestic throws into high relief the performativity of the natural family itself, exposing the extent to which the possession of a family hides a multitude of sins behind the closed doors of intimate, domestic life. But these are, of course, animal children, and while Fosco’s relationship with them mimics and parodies the “natural” family in ways that reveal its uglier side, his inter-species family also allows for an exploration of intimacy and companionship that subtly challenges and undermines it. If Fosco uses and manipulates his animals to his own end, he also appears to truly

Pets and Patriarchy  131 enjoy them, engaging in play with them that is not reducible to domination but instead speaks of shared pleasures. Marian’s description of the Count’s relations with his pet animals suggests that while his appellation of them as “children” serves a particular function in terms of allowing him to represent himself as an irreproachable paternal figure, such a term for them also does not fully describe the relation they have with him: He attends to all the necessities of these strange favourites himself, and he has taught the creatures to be surprisingly fond of him, and familiar with him. The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous bird towards every one else, absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in the most caressing manner imaginable. He had only to set the doors of the canaries’ cages open, and to call them; and the pretty little c­ leverly trained c­ reatures perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one, when he tells them to “go up-stairs,” and sing together as if they would burst their throats with delight, when they get to the top finger. His white mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, designed and made by himself. They are almost as tame as the canaries, and they are perpetually let out, like the canaries. They crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his capacious shoulders. He seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other pets, smiles at them, and kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of endearing names. (236) The Count might speak highly of his own management of his pets, one he distinguishes as employing “quiet resolution” with the “superior quality” of a “master” (352), yet Marian’s description of his relationship with his pets seems to indicate instead a shared intimacy with very permeable boundaries. The Count has certainly “taught” and “cleverly trained” his animals to respond to him but he has also, in the process, transformed his body into their playground, surrendering his bodily integrity to their own desires as they “mount his fat outstretched fingers” and “crawl all over him” (236). Their freedom, of course, serves to underline his ultimate power as a man who does not have to employ force to impose his will; nevertheless, this freedom also speaks to his own pleasure in surrender. Counter to his own depiction of himself as a man always in control, Fosco’s consent to his animals’ free occupation of his person betrays a submission to their pleasure, one that signals a far more complicated play of wills than that encapsulated within his philosophy of dominance. Importantly, while Marian finds Fosco’s depiction of his animals as children to be both charming and disarming, her response to his more intimate relations with his pets is quite the opposite: “They are pretty, innocent-­ looking little creatures; but the sight of them creeping about a man’s body

132  Pets and Patriarchy is, for some reason, not pleasant to me. It excites a strange, responsive creeping in my own nerves; and suggests hideous ideas of men dying in prison, with the crawling creatures of the dungeon preying on them undisturbed” (248). Marian’s “strange, responsive creeping” speaks to an important moment Alice Kuzniar identifies in animal/human relations: “It is when such ­borders … threaten to dissolve that one encounters the abject, defined as that from which one wants to distance oneself because it conjure[s] up an uneasy or repulsive association and thus threatens firm ego boundaries” (6). As the “true” companion species relationship that is obscured beneath the Count’s performance of animal/human domesticity, this “creeping” of the animal other upon his person works to disrupt the Count’s paternalism through a performance of polymorphous perversity, a physical intimacy with animal companions that falls closer to bestiality than it does to sentimentality, if we understand bestiality to refer to the whole “spectrum of affective relationships” between “human and nonhuman animals” (Boggs 31). The Count’s playful physicality with his mice bears more resemblance to what Erin Runions calls “raw sex” than it does to the ordered relations of familial life, and it is this complicated sexual/affective relationship that repels and disturbs Marian. Runions explains that “Raw sex is sexual expression understood simply through the desire and physicality of the moment, rather than through some future goal, whether relating to the solidification of a monogamous relationship, or the construction of a family. It is the opposite of heteronormative sex and of normative apocalyptically-oriented desire” (97). That “normative end” of desire Runions identifies is reproductive futurism, what “Calvin Thomas calls ‘justifiable,’ ‘teleologically narrativized sex: sex with a goal, a purpose, and a product [children]’” (97). So long as the Count’s relationship to his pets is paternalistic – that is, a relation that falls within acceptable notions of domination and affection – it is eccentric but tolerable. But in flagrantly allowing his pets free reign over his body, in submitting to their pleasures in ways that cannot easily be subsumed within the rubric of domesticity, dominion, and paternal care, the Count crosses a line, evoking instead disgust and horror. Linking him with death, predation, and criminality, Marian constructs this particular animal/human relation as antithetical to domesticity, a queer subversion of proper hierarchical and affective companionship, insofar as queer can be used “to signify the continual unhinging of certainties and the systematic disturbing of the familiar” (Giffney and Hird 4). In the end, Fosco’s relations with his animal children defy easy categorization, with his final scenes both continuing his parody of normative familial relations while also indicating again that his affections for (at least some of) his children run deep. The scene in which Fosco must part with his pets plays upon the teleological narrative underpinning the family, in which the reproduction of the family unit is linked to the reproduction of social power through the act of willing one’s wealth to the next generation. For Fosco, however, it is his children who must be willed away, for in his flight from

Pets and Patriarchy  133 the consequences of his crimes, he finds his pets are an encumbrance to him: “My innocent pets! my little cherished children! what am I to do with them? For the present, we are settled nowhere; for the present, we travel ­incessantly – the less baggage we carry, the better for ourselves. My cockatoo, my canaries, and my little mice – who will cherish them, when their good Papa is gone?” (Collins 289). Simultaneously “baggage” and “cherished children,” Fosco’s pets are at once family members who will be a “last laceration” of his heart to part with and objects that weigh him down, of which he must divest himself in order to travel lightly. Constructing his pets as “baggage” certainly seems to suggest that, in the last instance, Fosco determines his pet progeny to be closer to objects than to cherished family members; what they resemble most in this moment are beloved objets d’art that the Count has collected with care and for which he holds a curatorial passion. Indeed, he portrays his pets as products of his making, in which he finds a means of leaving his mark upon society: “An idea!” he exclaimed. “I will offer my canaries and my cockatoo to this vast Metropolis – my agent shall present them, in my name, to the Zoological Gardens of London. The Document that describes them shall be drawn out on the spot. Number One. Cockatoo of transcendent plumage: attraction, of himself, to all visitors of taste. Number Two. Canaries of unrivalled vivacity and intelligence: worthy of the garden of Eden, worthy also of the garden in the Regent’s Park. Homage to British Zoology. Offered by Fosco.” (289) In offering up his pets for public consumption, marked by his name as the donor, Fosco seemingly abandons the “pet as child” narrative in favor of a collector/connoisseur relation. Nevertheless, Fosco’s curatorial relationship with his pets still mimics the workings of the family. Fosco here shows all the hallmarks of a proud parent, with his animal “children” leaving the nest to attain high status in English society – or, at least as high a status as pet can achieve – and thus operating as the means by which their “Good Papa” establishes his name. His progeny are his works of art, his bequests, and in so being, they remind us of the extent to which human progeny are also expected to represent their parents as living examples of their family’s status. If, in parting with his birds, Fosco parodically reveals the parallels between progeny and possessions, his inability to part with his mice shows the limits of this correspondence: “‘All human resolution, Eleanor,’ he said, solemnly, ‘has its limits. MY limits are inscribed on that Document. I cannot part with my white mice. Bear with me, my angel, and remove them to their travelling-cage, up-stairs” (289). The Count’s choice of the word “limits” to describe the boundaries of his own “resolution” in this matter plays in a number of ways. On the one hand, it speaks to the Count’s continual

134  Pets and Patriarchy performance of sentimentality. While he is expected to be hard-headed and rational in this moment of divesting himself of his encumbrances, he again dramatically performs his role as a caring, loving man, one who cannot part with his children despite the impracticality of keeping them. On the other, his focus upon “limits” reminds us of the Count’s perversions; his “limits” differ from those of law-abiding society. The Count does not respect the law, nor human life, and his absolute treasuring of what others might find worthless – mice – speaks to his defiance of normative values, captured in Cartwright’s observation that the Count “had not been at all troubled about writing his confession, but he was visibly perplexed and distressed about the far more important question of the disposal of his pets” (289). The Count’s valuing of his animal companions, when placed in contrast to his lack of respect for human laws, demonstrates that his white mice occupy a position in his heart that defies limits, one which might be described according to Laura Brown’s depiction of “immoderate love” between human and animals. She argues that women and lapdogs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were sometimes represented as enjoying an “inter-species intimacy” that represented a “perversion of kinship connections” (79) and acted as a “challenge to relations of hierarchy” (79). The Count’s refusal to give up his white mice, and in so doing, his assertion of their importance as beings of consequence, speaks to a similar perversion, because he treasures animals above and beyond his “kinship” with his own species. Strangely enough, however, in this moment Fosco is also most like the ideal parent, in that he puts his children’s care before his own well-being. His relationship with his white mice, therefore, both parodies and embraces the conflicting ideologies of fatherhood and parenthood, in which the father provides for and cares for his children but also expects dividends to pay out from his investment in them. In portraying a companion species relationship that is shot through with domination and yet still affection and care, Wilkie Collins holds a mirror up to normative paternalism, revealing it in all its complex and contradictory aspects. CONCLUSION In their relations with their pets, the men discussed here share some commonalities with the spinster. Like their female counterparts, these domestic outcasts are defined in large part by the threat they pose to, or their seemingly necessary exclusion from, family life. With pets as significant others, children, and, for lack of a better word, cohabitants, these men all acknowledge the necessity of companionship as an antidote and support to the kind of isolation imposed upon men in their expected role as head of household and nation. But in their failure to move from pet to progeny, from homosociality and homoeroticism to heteronormativity, they underline the necessity of male integration into relations with women and children, albeit only i­nsofar

Pets and Patriarchy  135 as their relations successfully combine affection with dominance in ways utterly coincident with patriarchy. All of these men have pets who instead undermine their wonted authority, either curs who fight back, inciting violence rather than devotion, or “wives” and “children” who serve to subtly reveal the affective needs of men, such as their desire for submission to interrelations that cannot be subsumed solely within narratives of dominance. In my final chapter, I turn to those whose shared connection with pets informs both the couples, the spinsters, and the “fathers” discussed thus far: children. While it is assumed animals and children share a close proximity that makes them easily interchangeable as dependents within the home and family, I want to complicate that proximity so as to reveal the fraught nature of the animal/child trope. While children are essential to the natural family, the progeny and “love machines” around which the home constellates and upon whom the future of reproductive futurism is built, yet, like the pet, the child is both a “family-constituting being” (Pearson 37) and a repressed and disempowered member in its structure. Distinguishing animals from children, and lower-class waifs and strays from middle- and upper-class “pets,” I suggest that the role of domestic heart and center is one that imposes its own powers and restrictions on those forced to occupy it. NOTES   1. Danahay notes, “Women … frequently identified with domestic animals as the victims of violence. When advocating women’s rights, Victorian writers would often link the status of women as the property of their husbands to that of domestic animals” (100).   2. Not only does the novel here defend Vanslyperken’s seemingly irrational love for his dog as occurring for the “best of all possible reasons,” but it also sanctifies that love in its echoing of Biblical language: “[I]t has been so from the beginning, is so now, and always will be the case …” (262).   3. The linkage of Hugh with the dog works to make him a partially sympathetic figure, for as Marjorie Garber observes, “The association of the dog with the concept of home makes the pathos of the homeless dog, the dog abandoned or given away by its owner, take on the poignancy of all our human fears of abandonment and rejection” (40).   4. Dolly is not the only one to think Hugh resembles the mythic half-man, half beast, as Mr. Chester himself later refers to Hugh as a “centaur” (217).   5. The example of the stalwart Joe Willett, who proves his manhood through joining the army and losing an arm fighting the “red man,” is meant to hail the right brand of homosociality, one that serves the nation and is therefore deserving of proper domesticity with the same Dolly Varden whom Hugh had dared to set his eyes on.   6. According to one expert, its members did “‘ninety per cent of all the mischief that the canine community is charged with committing’. …” (Ritvo 91). One of the major crimes laid at the paws of “curs” was that of spreading rabies, an infectious disease linked simultaneously to the “burgeoning canine proletariat

136  Pets and Patriarchy of the ownerless and uncared for” (Walton 225) and the “urban working man, outside the charmed circle of the fancy, who kept unlicensed dogs which were allowed to roam, breed and fight indiscriminately” (226).   7. See Grace Moore, “Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 201–214. Lisa Surridge, Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005; Marlene Tromp, The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.   8. While many women would perhaps agree with Bartle that the linkage of woman to home is a “silly lie,” it must also, of course, be pointed out that “something must be found” for women to do because of that other silly lie that has often restricted women from the activities in which men habitually engage.   9. He fits well within Orientalist discourse, for example, particularly with his corpulence, his taste for opulence, and his subservient, conquered wife, all familiar tropes of the “exotic East.” 10. Victorian romantic friendships, often formed in childhood, were usually homosocial, with the expectation being that such homoerotic attachments would be left behind once one grew into adulthood and proper heterosexual attachments (Oulton). As Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley point out, such constructions of queerness are related to Victorian narratives of childhood: “Childhood itself is afforded a modicum of queerness when the people worry more about how the child turns out than about how the child exists as child. Alice, for instance, can be as queer as she likes in her dreams and in her childhood sorrows and joys, as long as she can be imagined telling her stories to other children around her when she is an adult” (xiv). Given that contemporary childhood is based on Victorian models, it is not surprising Victorian exemplars of childhood remain important in current constructions of normative sexuality. Kenneth B. Kidd, in his critiques of the masculinity movements of the 1990s, notes the extent to which Peter Pan is used as a model in texts such as Dan Kiley’s The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up, which “valorizes heterosexuality as adult, predictably depicting the modern ‘man-child’ Peter Pan as determined to avoid women and responsibility. Peter, in Kiley’s account, is a potential homosexual, a ‘soft, effeminate boy,’ a narcissist, ‘a very sad young man whose life is filled with contradictions, conflicts and confusions’” (172). 11. As Marlene Tromp points out, “A man whose violence remains concealed behind two linguistic structures – middle- and upper-class men are not physically violent with women, and physical violence has observable public results – remains free from discipline” (86).

REFERENCES Berg, Maggie. “‘Let me have its bowels then’: Violence, Sacrificial Structure, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 21:1 (2010): 20–40. Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Boggs, Colleen Glenney. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Pets and Patriarchy  137 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Vixen. Vols. 1–3. London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1879. Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. London: Arcturus, 2010. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley. “Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.” Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha ­Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ix–xxxviii. Byron, George Gordon. “Boatswain, His One Friend.” The Dog in British Poetry. Ed. R. Maynard Leonard. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, n. d.187–88. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1860. Courtney, W. L. “Introduction.” The Privateersman and The Dog Fiend: Or Snarleyyow. By Frederick Marryat. Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1898. v–viii. Danahay, Martin A. “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Violence and Animals in Victorian Art.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 97–119. Denisoff, Dennis. “Framed and Hung: Collins and the Economic Beauty of the Manly Artist.” Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Ed. Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 34–58. Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge: The Works of Charles Dickens: Volume TwentyFive. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier & Son, 1900. ———. David Copperfield. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850. ———. Oliver Twist. 1839. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Donald, Diana. Picturing Animals in Britain. Yale University, 2007. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Ewing, Juliana Horatia. Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls. 1875. London: George Bell & Sons, 1885. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 824–841. Fulford, Tim. “Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Collins, Austen, and Marryat.” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 60.2 (1999): 161– 196. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Giffney, Noreen and Myra J. Hird. “Introduction: Queering the Non/Human.” Queering the Non-Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 1–16. Gruen, Lori. “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals.” Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, and Nature. Ed. Greta Gaard. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. 60–90. Howell, Phillip. “Flush and the Banditti: Dog-Stealing in Victorian London.” Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Animal-Human Relations. Eds. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert. London: Routledge, 2000. 37–58. Check these page numbers. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

138  Pets and Patriarchy Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lane, Christopher. Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 15–34. Marryat, Frederick. The Privateersman and The Dog Fiend: Or Snarleyyow. Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1898. McHugh, Susan. Dog. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Moore, Grace. “Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray Dogs in Oliver Twist.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 201–214. Oulton, Carolyn W. De La L., Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Rogers, Katharine M. Cat. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Runions, Erin. “Queering the Beast: The Antichrists’ Gay Wedding.” Queering the Non-Human. Eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 79–110. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Snyder, Katherine V. Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. “The Stray Dogs of London.” The Animal World 8.97 (October 1877): 145–60, 146. Surridge, Lisa. Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005. ———. Dogs’/Bodies, Women’s Bodies: Wives as Pets in Mid-Nineteenth Century Narratives of Domestic Violence.” Victorian Review 20.1. (Summer 1994): 1–34. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005. Tromp, Marlene. The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in ­Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984. Von Hacht, Bertha. “The Dogs of Fiction.” Animal World 18.214 (July 1, 1887): 96–112. 102–104. Walton, John K. “Mad Dogs and Englishmen: The Conflict over Rabies in Late ­Victorian England.” Journal of Social History 13.2 (Winter 1979): 219–239. Weir, Harrison. Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier. Supposed to be written by himself. London: Grant and Griffith: 1848. Wood, J. Carter. “A Useful Savagery: The Invention of Violence in Nineteenth-­ Century England.” Journal of Victorian Culture 9.1 (Spring 2004): 22–42.

4 Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays Children and Animals Inside and Outside the Victorian Home

In my previous chapters, I outlined the extent to which domestic pets often serve as proxy for human progeny, whether as “practice children” who are expected to give way gracefully for their human successors or as problematic displacers of human offspring, furry children who signal their parents’ failure to accede to reproductive futurism. The very common, if often criticized, alignment of pet with child that is so common in nineteenth-century and contemporary discourse relies on a close association of the two, both in terms of the qualities they supposedly share and the space they are meant to occupy in the home and family. In The Rights of the Defenseless, Susan J. Pearson argues, “Popular and humanitarian literature identified children and animals as similar, capable of forming intense emotional bonds and reciprocal relations, and incorporated animals-as-pets into the emotional order of domesticity.” As well, “popular authors and humanitarians applied new ideas about punishment, discipline, and rearing equally to animals and children, incorporating both within a disciplinary regime of kindness” (21). Though Pearson’s study focuses on nineteenth-century America, I argue that the “disciplinary regime” she identifies is also clearly present in English models of childhood. Focusing on representations of children and animals sharing both symbolic and physical space within the home in texts such as Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen (1875) and A Flatiron for a Farthing (1872), both texts that feature child as pet and child and pet as companions and siblings together, I argue that such shared relations serve to underline the complicated status children occupied as dependents and as future adults. Called upon to be “pets” within the affective relations of the home, children in the nineteenth century nevertheless also had to learn to be masters and mistresses, with too close an association with the domestic pet spelling disaster for the child’s eventual transition into proper, authoritative adulthood. Furthermore, as discourses on cruelty within publications like the RSPCA’s Animal World revealed, children and animals alike experienced the extent to which a state of dependency, though necessary for a “petted” status, made them vulnerable to cruelty. While the shared status of petted children and animals of the middle and upper classes represents the fragile balance within the home between affective and power relations, and between home as retreat from the public world

140  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays and as training ground for it, the linkage of child and animal waifs and strays, by comparison, addresses those “pets” less easily enclosed within the domestic space. The quintessential representatives of domesticity, child and pet, became familial outsiders when figured as waifs and strays, and their characterization within sentimental and philanthropic literature worked to explore and police the limits of domestication and domesticity. As Laura Peters has argued in Orphan Texts (2000), “Victorian culture perceived the orphan as a scapegoat – a promise and a threat, a poison and a cure … the family reaffirmed itself through the expulsion of this threatening difference” (2). Drawing upon Peters’s analysis of the orphan in Victorian culture, I examine animal and child waifs and strays so as to interrogate their role as social misfits who might be saved to a life of domesticity but who, through their social mobility, also represent a direct challenge to the power relations of the Victorian home. Participating in classed narratives that linked animals with servants and the lower classes with the lower creation, Evangelical texts such as L. T. Meade’s Scamp and I (1872) and sentimental novels such as Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders (1872) bemoan the tragedy of unloved and un-petted children and animals while simultaneously recognizing them as threats to proper child and animal petted dependency. In so doing, such texts reveal the affinity between violence toward and protection of children and animals within the home. CHILDREN AND ANIMAL PETS The association of children with pets, though arguably central to our construction of dependency and domesticity, is nevertheless one that causes significant unease. For example, while Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto seeks to explore how “an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness [might] be learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously” (3), she very clearly indicates that significant otherness does not include blurring the lines between pet and progeny, because “To regard a dog as a furry child, even metaphorically, demeans dogs and children” (37). Arguing for the historical, cultural, and species specificity of children and animals is certainly crucially important, but I believe a closer examination is necessary in order to understand why it is that H ­ araway needs to so strongly make her point for distinction and difference, particularly in a text that celebrates and exploits the always blurred lines between human and non-human, and between nature and culture. I suggest that Haraway has to assert difference precisely because such distinctions are not clear, because the line demarcating children from animals is already a blurry and indistinct one. Haraway’s ethical reasoning is c­ ompelling, and she is correct that the conjunction of child with animal is often about committing them both to a state of shared dependency: mute, h ­ elpless creatures who are best when obedient, loving, and fulfilling the needs of those who care for and control

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  141 them. However, the overlapping status of children and animals within and outside the domestic space – as dependents who define the home and as independents who challenge the home – also serves as a means of exploring likeness, similarity, and vexed relations of power that cannot always be easily encompassed within the descriptor “demeaning.” Reading closely the relations of children and animals allows for an understanding of how species difference can be used to negotiate gender, class, and sexual difference within the often fraught and sometimes claustrophobic confines of familial relations. The term “pet” referred, in its earliest stages, “simultaneously to a ‘spoiled child’ and ‘a domesticated, fondled, young animal’” (Pearson 57). It is important to recognize, of course, the distinctly different status of children and domestic pets in the nineteenth century. For example, Ivan Kreilkamp argues, “It is typical for a Victorian pet to be treated in certain respects like a person but also typical for an animal to be forgotten or replaced and allowed to disappear without recognition in a manner that would seem troubling in the case of a human being” (“Dying like a Dog” 82). Nevertheless, the ideal “regime of kindness” of the Victorian middleclass home “consigned both beasts and babes to a similar position in the household’s affective economy, assigning them both a mutual role as objects of sentimental investment” (Pearson 43). According to Pearson, the preciousness of both “pets” exemplified their uselessness in the family’s domestic economy and their ultimate value in its affective economy, because “to have a perpetual baby is, in the context of nineteenth-century bourgeois family ideals, to continually enact the family’s emotional ­constellation and reason for being” (66). This investment in child and animal as shared “cherished objects of emotional investment” (57) is very much in evidence in Victorian England, particularly in the pages of the journals of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals (RSPCA), the magazine Animal World, and the journal for children, Band of Mercy (originally entitled Band of Mercy Advocate). Within their pages, the adult and child reader saw continual linkages between child and animal as loved members of the family; in the illustrations “Two Kittens” (Figure 4.1) and “Grandpapa’s Four Pets” (Figure 4.2), for example, child and animal are virtually indistinguishable in terms of their status as adored and adorable object. In the one, girl and kitten share a beseeching prettiness, posed carefully as objects for the viewer’s enjoyment, while in the other, dogs and girl gaze obediently and adoringly at the approving grandfather, who is obviously well pleased with his possessions. The shared status of children and animals as aesthetic objects is ­further underlined in the cover image of the February 1890 issue of Animal World, “They Grew in Beauty, Side by Side” (Figure 4.3). Representing a rough peasant dwelling with bare stone floors and walls, the engraving lovingly captures a plump, beautiful little girl sharing a bowl of milk with a kitten while a fluffy white dog watches close by. Her finger in her mouth, clearly having just tasted the milk the cat laps up, the girl is

142  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays

Figure 4.1 “Two Kittens.” Cover illustration for Band of Mercy 10.117 (September 1888): 65.

captured in a pose both innocent and eroticized, flush as she is with the bounty of healthy country living and wholesome, natural companionship. Images such as this capture the essence of child and animal friendship as a signifier of true English values: pure, rosy-cheeked, well fed and content, this child of the lower orders with her animal companions in their shared rustic home promises that England is a land of peace and bounty, a “peaceable ­kingdom” in which order and civility prevail. The promise of these fi ­ gures, particularly in a journal devoted to ending cruelty to animals, reminds the adult viewer of the rewards of proper stewardship and authority: child and animal d ­ ependents who repay kindness and care toward them through their beauty and, as captured in the young girl’s innocent eroticism, future

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  143

Figure 4.2 “Grandpapa’s Four Pets.” Cover illustration for Band of Mercy 6.71 (November 1884): 81.

fecundity. Though the home might be sparse, there can be valued possessions within, and an assured and rich futurity, in the form of loved and cared for progeny and animal dependents, for those who embrace the true English spirit of humane domesticity. That there is something specifically and intrinsically English in Victorian England’s linkage of children and animals as beloved objects of investment is evident in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Vixen, in which the young heroine, Violet Tempest, embodies her squire father’s love of the hunt and of English country life: He had been particularly anxious for a son to inherit the Abbey House estate, succeed to his father’s dignities as master of the fox-hounds, and in a general way sustain the pride and glory of the family name; and, behold! Providence had given him a daughter. “The deuce in it,” ejaculated the Squire; “to think that it should be a vixen!”

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Figure 4.3 “They Grew in Beauty, Side by Side.” Cover illustration for Animal World 21.245 (February 1, 1890): 17.

This is how Violet Tempest came by her curious pet name. Before she was short-coated, she had contrived to exhibit a very spirited, and even vixenish temper. … As she grew older, her tawny hair was not unlike a red fox’s brush in its light golden-brown hue, and her temper proved decidedly vixenish. (Braddon, I. 70–71) Though the Squire desires a son who will ensure the family’s lineage, the text makes clear that his daughter will at least succeed in honouring the familial heritage; in fact, the daughter’s close association with the fox works to cement the family’s status as of the land and in union with nature, rather than ­simply masters of it. For Vixen/Violet, this association with wild nature

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  145 and the cultivated English landscape is also balanced by her close union with her pet dog, Argus, together with whom she embodies the principles present in “They grew in beauty, side by side” in their shared role as representations of family, domesticity, and dominion. In a scene in which she and Argus are found asleep by her future lover, Rorie Vawdrie, landed girl-child and pure-bred pet represent the best of the old English stock: the girl and dog made rather a pretty picture, despite the inelegance of Vixen’s attitude. The tawny hair, black velvet frock, and careless amber sash, amber stockings, and broad-toed Cromwell shoes; the tawny mastiff curled in the opposite corner of the deep recesses; the old armorial bearings, sending pale shafts of parti-coloured light across Vixen’s young head; – these things made a picture full of light and colour, framed in the dark brown oak. (I., 85–86) Girl and mastiff make a “pretty picture” largely because of the frame they are within. Captured under “armorial bearings,” ensconced within “dark brown oak,” both figures work to embody the vigor of the English landed gentry while simultaneously celebrating the ancient roots that give it strength. Vixen may be “inelegant” and spirited, but the text presents this as a sign of her honest, stalwart nature, particularly as compared to her rival, Lady Mabel.1 Pointing out that “People are not rooted in their native soil nowadays, as they used to be in the old stage-coach times, when it was a long day’s journey to London” (I. 116), Lady Mabel makes her cosmopolitan allegiances clear by playing French songs and rhapsodizing on the European countryside. Ridiculed by the text for her higher learning and attempts at metaphysical poetry, Mabel, with her “transparent” skin and “fragile figure” (I. 60), represents conventional, but not robust, beauty. By contrast, Vixen, with her love of dogs, horses, and simple English country folk – “every honest familiar face of nurse, servant, and stable-man, gardener, keeper, and huntsman, that had looked upon her with friendly, admiring eyes, ever since she could remember” (I. 74) – speaks for a unique, separate English upperclass identity, superior in its natural, rustic, and ordered dominion from an effete, cultured European order. Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls, which claims to be simply “a sketch of domestic life” (iii) but which also hopes to “illustrate a belief in the joys and benefits of intellectual life” (iii) and is thus committed in part to an outline of ideal childhood education, similarly features children and animals sharing space in a home dedicated to the health of children as developed through naturalistic, intellectual pursuits. The Arkwright home, in which protagonist Margery, an orphan, comes to live with her friend Eleanor Arkwright, is a country home that allows children ample space to garden, engage in rigorous physical activity, and pursue scientific studies of the natural world. The dogs, referenced throughout as “the dear boys” to distinguish them from the human brothers, who are referred to simply as

146  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays “the boys,” are a central feature of this home, acting as furry siblings in a domestic menagerie composed of children and animals together. On Margery’s first night in the home, she is offered what is presented as a sign of her acceptance into the culture of the home, a dog to sleep with in her room: “‘Would you like a dog to sleep with you?’ Eleanor politely inquired. ‘I shall have Growler inside, and my big boy outside. Pincher is a nice little fellow; you’d better have Pincher.’ I took Pincher accordingly, and Pincher took the middle of the bed” (82). That this is a particularly English eccentricity in domestic life is made clear by a visit from the girls’ French teacher: Poor madame! I thought she would have had a fit on the first night of her arrival, when the customary civility was paid of offering her a dog to sleep on her bed. She never got accustomed to them, and they never seemed quite to understand her. … Madame was markedly civil to them, and even addressed them from time to time as bons enfants in imitation of our phrase “dear boys;” but more frequently, in watching the terms on which they lived with the family, she would throw up her little brown hands and exclaim “Ménage ­extraordinaire.” (92) Though Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir makes clear that pet animals were in fact a central part of French life, nevertheless both Ewing’s and Braddon’s texts assert that the English perception of animal/human domestic relations was one of a unique English attachment to pets, dogs in particular, which bespeaks an unaffected, natural, and healthy communion with the natural world and thus attests to the essential superiority of the English home. If it is true, as Ivan Kreilkamp asserts, that “It became defined as particularly English – or rather, particularly bourgeois-English – to witness, with condemnation and sympathy, the spectacle of cruelty to animals” (“Petted Things,” 92), it is also true that texts like Vixen and Six to Sixteen see living with animals in a kind of human-animal sibling menagerie as an essentially English aspect of domestic life. The bond between children and animals represented in these texts participates, as Pearson’s analysis attests, to a broader Western discourse on childhood, one linked to English Romanticism but drawing also upon Romanticism as a larger cultural movement in Europe and America. In Romantic discourse, “children are regularly depicted as the indigenes of nature; at once originary models of ideal nature, unselfconscious and selfsufficient models of natural beauty, and irrepressible engines of vital power” (Plotz 6). Though not necessarily interchangeable, children and animals nevertheless shared close proximity in the Romantic imagination. Perceived to be somewhat outside human culture and the industrialization and destruction of the natural world associated with it, the animal and the child were seen as uniquely emblematic of an innocent, Edenic world. But if they shared space as exemplars of natural innocence, they also represented true vulnerability in an industrial age as shared sufferers of adult, human violence.

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  147 Animal protection agencies in particular drew upon this supposed bond between children and animals as a means of creating greater sympathy for animals, with both Animal World and Band of Mercy filled with stories and illustrations that celebrate the supposedly natural bond between children and animals so as to encourage the child reader to deeply identify with the animal. A picture of a young, smiling boy embracing a lamb, for example, is merely entitled “They understand each other.” Another, with a young girl holding the head of a horse close to her own while the two gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, is called “Fast friends” (Figure 4.4), suggesting both an immediate and unshakeable attachment. Neither picture requires explication; instead, both the child and the adult reader are meant to understand children and animals share a deep connection, one of mutual love, certainly, but also one of identification. Unlike the adult reader, who was encouraged to see the suffering animal as an object of adult, human benevolence, child readers and adult readers alike were encouraged to see children and animals as somehow the same. Figuring animals as children in part worked to provide didactic lessons for children, and participated in a long history of representations of animals in children’s literature as a means of using “animal behaviour and attitudes to give moral lessons on child behaviour” (Cosslett 73).2 In “School-Time,” published in Band of Mercy in 1883, the child reader is reminded, “Little cats, like little girls and boys, must be taught good manners, honest ways, and useful conduct” (90); in “The Disobedient Rabbit,” a story printed in the Band of Mercy Advocate, the child reader is told, “Though they were not bad rabbits on the whole, they were not unlike some little folks I know, very fond of having their own way...” (A. C. W. 77).3 For the child reader, then, the stories and poems in The Band of Mercy and yearly publications like The Band of Mercy Almanac rely on a far more complicated identification with the animal than that demanded from the adult reader. In “‘Prince’ and the Kitten,” subtitled “A Story for Little Boys,” for example, a dog is presented as a model for boy behavior: “Now most little boys, like this spaniel/ Love dearly to romp and to play;/And pleasant it is for their parents/To see them so happy and gay./But when frolic and fun are quite over,/And the games are all ended, then ought/Rough manners to cease the same moment:/ Prince knew this without being taught” (3, l. 45–52). If the “little boys” who read this poem are meant to understand something from this poem, it is this: Prince is both like them and, simultaneously, perhaps even better than them. He knows “without being taught” how to behave properly, and if the child reader has himself failed to “cease” in “rough manners” without being told, then he is perhaps significantly less well-behaved than the dog with whom he has been encouraged to identify. Of course, Prince’s knowing “without being taught” is also a sign of a significant difference between children and animals; his knowledge is depicted as instinctual and natural whereas the boys are expected to rely on both nature and culture in order to become the men they will someday be.

148  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays

Figure 4.4  “Fast Friends.” Animal World 22.264 (September 1891): 129–144, 136.

Such a distinction between children and animals is ever present in these journals, but it is often obscured and complicated at the same time. One article on the cruelty of confinement to animals, entitled “Prisoners and Captives,” clearly illustrates this fuzzy distinction in its urging of child readers to understand that “Confinement and bondage are worse for an animal than for a man, because his physical life is his all” (1899). Lest children associate

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  149 themselves uncomplicatedly with “man” and not the “animal,” however, the article goes on to present the following analogy: “Look at a number of boys and girls ‘loosed’ from school on a fine day. It seems as if they must find an outlet for their pent-up energies during school hours by shouting and rushing madly about. This is child nature, and this is dog nature, too” (1899). Though the almanac collected articles and images from various places, suggesting the possibility that the article printed was not necessarily intended for child readers, yet the RSPCA’s use of this text specifically for children indicates their vexed status. Both like animals and yet with the promise of being more than animals someday when their “physical life” will presumably not be their “all,” they are yet, in their current child state, as much subject to “nature” as are their animal counterparts. The importance of animals to children’s lives, of course, went beyond the page as pet-keeping “came to assume an important place in the discourse of child development” (Mason 14), based on the “belief that companion animals – and especially the dog – exhibited the qualities parents wished to inculcate in their children” (19). Descriptions of pet-keeping for children in the RSPCA’s publications therefore rely on the same vexed binary seen in children’s literature, with children and animals being touted as appropriate companions for each other while animals are simultaneously used as objects for children’s transition into adult authority and responsibility, from being like an animal to being above an animal. As Colleen Glenny Boggs observes, “Animals take on a double role in this didactic literature: animals stand in for children – their behavior models for the child how to behave, and they are important as animals whose vulnerability and exposure to potential cruelty teaches children to be kind” (147). Just as “Prince” is held up as a model for young boys to learn proper behavior, so too is an obedient animal offered as the reward for children who properly train them: “… if you treat your dog, your donkey, or your pony in this way you will always be rewarded by their gratitude,” urges a story about “The Favourite Pony” (2). Here, rather than being chastised for bad behavior, which causes problems to those who must deal with disobedience, children themselves are the ones enforcing obedience and being taught the pleasures of a c­ orrectly controlled subject. Such lessons could still be taught through relying on identification with the animal; for example, a story entitled “Our Black Cat” instructs the child reader, “The want of instruction and clear teaching often brings animals into disgrace, and causes them to be regarded as senseless and u ­ seless, when all the while they would be quick and attractive if only shown how” (10–11), and immediately cautions, “Let boys and girls think of their own troubles at school the next time they wish one of their pets to be very accomplished; and be patient with the little creature, and teach it the same lesson over and over again” (11). Here, the child reader’s own assumed experience of subjection and discipline, combined with the association of child with animal, is used to prepare the child to exert appropriate and humane dominance over the animal. From taught to teaching, the child learns how to be an adult

150  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays and to wield power through a shift in roles facilitated by comparisons to the pet animal. Furthermore, in learning to care for animals, girls and boys also learned gendered lessons that helped lay the groundwork for their future social roles. In “Young People’s Pets” (Goodall 52), the author lauds “the schoolboy taking a real and lively interest in the welfare of his rabbits, pigeons, and whatever pets he may have chosen, spending his leisure time in tending them, and in ministering in many little ways to their comfort and happiness.” This description of a schoolboy’s role in animal care forms an implicit contrast with that of the “invalid girl, whose delicate health compels her to remain within doors, devoting her spare hours to the care of some tiny feathered pet, whose friendship she has so completely won” (52). The distinction between the “lively interest” of the boy and the “devotion” of the fragile girl speaks volumes to their different experiences; though the boy is arguably feminized in his “tending” and “ministering,” his “lively interest” in the animals’ “welfare” indicates an intellectual, and thus superior, relation to the animals, combined as it is with a paternalistic care for them. By contrast, the girl is more closely associated with the bird, confined as they both are and linked through being “delicate” and “tiny.” Similarly, an article on “Children and Pets” printed in Animal World (1879) relates that “boys – and sometimes girls – when they have passed the period of childhood, conceive a desire to have pets under their control” (125). The suggestion is that having someone or something “under their control” is an inevitable aspect of coming of age for boys, though not necessarily always for girls. But even if both should be given control over another as a form of training for adulthood, that training significantly differs; for boys, it entails being “an observer,” someone who “has learnt how to approach, to talk to, to coax, and to impart pleasure to those animals” because “every manner of his presence gives confidence” (125). The boy, that is, has learnt to be masterful, even if part of his mastery lies in his ability to give (or, presumably, to withhold) pleasure to those in his control. For girls, care for animals is less a lesson in confidence and mastery and more a form of practice for self-abnegation, because “Girls who invariably attend to their pet birds before taking their own meals or seeking their own pleasure may be regarded as under excellent training” (125). ANIMAL AND CHILD SIBLINGS Given the constant, complicated identification of children with animals in children’s literature and Victorian culture more broadly, it is not ­surprising that animals and children were configured in sibling-like relationships in literary representations of the home. Having animals as de facto siblings highlights the supposed natural affinity between children and animals but also throws into sharp relief the hierarchical nature of sibling ­relationships, in

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  151 which power and dominance along age and gender (and species) lines are as much a factor of such relations as are their presumed “purity, tenderness and mutual sympathy” (Nelson 99). The confusion of this shared petted status is captured perfectly in a letter from a young child to Band of Mercy, which relates, “I am seven and the youngest of seven, and therefore a great pet, and, besides being one, I have one, namely, a pigeon ...” (“My Snowdrop” 63). To the child’s siblings and parents, the letter-writer is the “pet,” but the child gets to be a form of older sibling by having a pet of her own. Similarly, the near conflation of the “dear boys” with “the boys” in Six to Sixteen certainly works to underline and support the sibling relationships between the girls and the boys, with the girl-children adopting a more nurturing attitude toward both boys and dogs while the boys are directly linked to the animals and their vigour and energy. When first entering the house, Margery hears the ruckus of the animals and after Eleanor’s exclamation, “It’s the dear boys!” Margery reflects, “For a moment, I thought of her brothers (who must, obviously, be maniacs!), but I soon discovered that the ‘dear boys’ were the dogs of the establishment” (81). Margary’s confusion of one group of boys for the other indicates much similarity, a point supported further by their shared space as objects of affection. In Eleanor’s room, which is “rich in those treasures … ‘of no value to anyone but the owner,’” there are displayed “daguerreotypes and second-rate photographs of ‘the boys’ – i.e. Clement and Jack – and of ‘the dear boys’ also” (82). The connection of “the boys” and “the dear boys” is further supported by Eleanor’s loving care for both. The quintessential girl child, Eleanor perfectly enacts the expected devotion for her boys, fretting, for example, about the state of their gardens while they have been away at school and toiling “without pause” (83) so the boys won’t be “vexed” by the conditions of their garden (83). In caring for animals and boys alike, Eleanor proves herself to be a model of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, a crucial behavior required of girls because “Girls capable of sacrifice, of subordinating their desires to others’ good, were demonstrating their purity, which in turn was considered to be a potent source of moral influence” (Nelson 107). By contrast, the boys are not expected to do much more than be as boisterous as the dogs, with the housekeeper acknowledging, “Now the young gentlemen was home there was an end of peace for everybody” (Ewing, Six to Sixteen 90). As in the poem “Prince,” the boys share space with the “dear boys” in providing boisterous and rollicking companionship that is both endured and treasured by their female caregivers. While the pets in the Arkwright household serve to accentuate the gender differences between siblings, they also provide, through their crossing of species boundaries, a model for the integration of non-blood kin into the familial framework. As Claudia Nelson notes, “While both the cult of domesticity and the Victorian science of eugenics made much of the blood tie, in practice many nineteenth-century children were raised by people other than – or in

152  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays addition to – their biological parents” (145). Mary Jean Corbett asserts that the flexibility of sibling-ship was in fact a central feature of Victorian life: For much of the nineteenth century, sisterhood or brotherhood was conceived not only as a static relation fixed at and by birth but also as an achieved and achievable state of relationship to others. Siblingship was not just a legal or biological designation but also a more-thanmetaphorical means of indicating proximity and connection. (60–61) The dogs, twinned as they are with the other boys in the household, support the idea that family goes far beyond consanguinity in that it can also be constructed through love, mutual companionship, and caring. This bodes well for Margery, because she is an orphan who is shuttled back and forth from blood kin to family friends, and at various points in the novel she experiences only a liminal or temporary status as a family member. In the Arkwright home, however, she is easily absorbed into and made an essential part of family, a transition from outsider to insider that is modeled on and forecast by the animals’ careful inclusion into the domestic sphere. Other animal stories further elucidate this construction of family as both born and made, particularly those stories in the pages of Animal World and Band of Mercy that focused upon animals caring for those outside their own species as their own offspring or family. In “Leo, Topsy, and Pip,” for example, child readers of Band of Mercy are introduced to “a good clergyman and his wife” who “had no children, so kept a number of pets of another kind – viz., birds and beasts” (75). The logical progression captured in the word “so” makes clear “pets” of some kind must be present in order for this clergyman’s domestic circle to be complete and either children or birds or beasts will suffice. Just as this man and his wife make family out of decidedly non-kin dependents who live “a happy, fearless life” (75), so too do the non-humans in the household follow this example. Pip, a chicken, “ignored her blood relations and their way of living altogether. She preferred a nice comfortable house to a hen-coop!” (75). Within the home, all the animals enjoy their assimilation into the domestic space; as the narrator observes, “It was a curious sight to see the great dog and the cat curled up together on a mat, and little Pip perched on Leo’s back or hopping playfully round them, giving a friendly peck with her beak from time to time, that they might not forget her presence” (75). The narrator’s framing of the scene as “curious,” while also presenting it as a charming picture, ably negotiates the tensions between blood kin family and what Elizabeth Thiel terms “transnormative families,” those familial units that stood “outside of the established order” (8) of the “natural” family composed of father, mother, and biological children. Clearly, the family composed of the childless clergyman and his wife and their “children” of diverse species is “curious” and not quite right; nevertheless, in mimicking the “natural” family and in carefully elucidating the preference for human domesticity over arguably less ideological chicken domesticity, this family privileges form over blood ties, and structures of feeling and relating over kind and kin.

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  153 Juliana Horatia Ewing’s A Flatiron for a Farthing, or, Some Passages in the Life of an Only Son (1872) further explores the idea of pets as siblings and their role in negotiating complicated relations between blood kin and outsiders who become kin, though the protagonist’s single-child status vests that relationship with even greater and arguably more complicated meaning. Young Reginald’s early loss of his mother and baby sister is tragic but it is also nevertheless shown to be at least partially compensated for by his immediate adoption of a puppy. Grieving his lost family members, Reginald is asked by his father: “What can Papa do for you, my poor dear boy?” I looked up quickly into his face. “What would Regy like?” he persisted. I quite understood him now, and spoke out boldly the desires of my heart. “Please, papa, I should like Mrs. Bundle for a nurse; and I do very much want Rubens.” “And who is Rubens?” asked my father. “Oh please it’s a dog,” I said. “… And it’s such a little dear, all red and white; and it licked my face when nurse and I were there ­yesterday, and I put my hand in its mouth, and it rolled over on its back.’” (9–10) Reginald’s request of a dog and a nurse simultaneously signifies their clear roles as substitutions for the lost sister and mother. Importantly, Rubens also represents Regy’s salvation into proper class and adult/child relations, because his motherless state has exposed Regy to a gossiping caregiver who fails to protect him from adult concerns through her obsession with all things sensational. With Rubens by his side, and a new, more conscientious caregiver, Regy is able to do what his single-child status had made difficult: to retreat into childhood, with like companionship at his side. Ewing writes, With him by my side, I now ran merrily about, instead of creeping ­moodily at the heels of nurse and her friends. Abundantly occupied in testing the tricks he knew, and teaching him new ones, I had the less leisure to listen open-mouthed to cadaverous gossip. … Finally, when I had bidden him good-night a hundred times, with absolutely fraternal embraces, I was soothed by the light weight of his head resting on my foot. He seemed to chase the hideous fancies which had hitherto passed from nurse’s daytime conversation to trouble my night visions, as he would chase a water-fowl from a reedy marsh, and I slept – as he did – peacefully. (10–11) Rubens operates as a shield between Regy and that which should not be his province, namely, adult concerns and improper class relations. Through his “fraternal” relations with his dog, Regy is able to retreat into child land, that Romantic space apart from the world of experience, which, the text suggests, requires other siblings, either animal or human, to be maintained.

154  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays If Rubens serves as protector of Regy’s childhood, he also works as a proxy for Regy, an externalized self over whom Regy watches when he feels vulnerable. Seeing his father possibly fall prey to a manipulative old maid, Regy retreats in grief to gaze upon his mother’s portrait: “I took up Rubens in my arms again sobbing and saying, ‘I shall go to Mamma!’ and so weeping and in the darkness we crept into the dressing-room. … My voice died away with a wail which was dismally echoed by Rubens” (23). As a seeming sharer in his grief, Rubens helps provide Regy with an antidote to isolation and loneliness; through him, Regy is able to find support in his grief and to provide for Rubens in the way his mother can no longer provide for him, cradling the dog close and crooning comfort to him: “I carried him, and as I went I condoled with him. … My poor Ru, my darling, dear Ru!” (23). Rubens, as non-human sibling, ably represents the boundary-exploding nature of sibling relationships in which companionship with like others provides a model for parents, friends, and even love relations. Regy here is both mother and sibling to Ru, while Ru plays the role of child/younger sibling over whom Regy watches, thus displacing, in order to cope with, Regy’s own feelings of vulnerability. Later, when Regy recovers from a dangerous illness, it is Ru’s turn to play devoted sibling, compensating again for the lack of human siblings whose charge Regy would be: “Rubens was a great comfort at this period. For his winning ways formed an interest, and served a little to vary the monotony of the hours when I was too weak to bear any definite amusement or occupation” (91). Like a sister devoting herself to the care of the sickroom, Ru comforts Regy and shares with Regy’s father the anxious waiting for Regy’s return to health: “… [Nurse Bundle] used to declare that when she came out, Rubens, as well as my father, turned an anxious and expectant countenance towards her, and that both alike seemed to await and to understand her report of my condition” (86). That the narrator later describes the “loneliness” of his childhood (273) indicates that Rubens is not entirely compensatory for human siblings, but Rubens nevertheless does allow for a clear explication of the multiplicity of relations involved in siblingship, a point underlined by Regy’s later attempts to find himself a brother and a sister. While recounting a visit to the Zoological Gardens with his father, Regy remembers, “The monkeys attracted me ­indescribably, and I seriously proposed to my father to adopt one or two of them as brothers for me” (63). His father argues that “a friend who could neither speak to you nor understand you when you spoke to him would be a very poor companion” (63), a point Regy rebuffs by pointing out an infant child. Ably arguing that he could converse and play with a monkey as well as with an infant child – a point supported by the text’s conflation of the monkey with the infant, who seem to mimic each other’s behavior (63–64) – Regy highlights the extent to which the inequality of human/animal relations is at least in part matched by the inequality of age in familial relations. His desire to have a sister serves to throw other boundary crossings into light, in this case not between humans and non-human animals,

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  155 but between siblings and lovers. Meeting two young girls in a shop one day, Regy develops a fascination for the older of the two, who “shone on my young eyes like a fairy vision” (103), holding for him a “peculiar charm” (104). While his descriptions suggest the beginnings of a fervent puppy love, he claims instead that his feelings are strictly fraternal, longing as he does to make her his sister: “… I felt how nice it would be to have such a sister to play with, as I had heard of other sisters and brothers playing together” (107–108). It quickly becomes clear that part of his desire for a sister, as he understands it, is for a beautiful possession, a living doll that will provide him with both a pleasing object to gaze upon and an opportunity to practice benevolent paternalism: “Then I fancied showing her all my possessions at home, and begging the like for her from my indulgent father. … It delighted me to imagine myself presenting her with whatever she most desired, like some eastern potentate or fairy godmother” (108). The text seeks to safely close off this fascination with erotic sibling fantasies by having Regy marry the less-enchanting girl, thus in fact winning this bewitching creature for his future sister-in-law.4 Nevertheless, the fact that he and his future bride “plighted [their] troth” on “Ruben’s [sic] grave” (284) highlights the extent to which pet, sibling, and beloved all overlap in the end. Regy has successfully moved from animal love to human love, from sibling love to romantic love with the death of his pet and its all-too-clear displacement with adult, human, conjugal relations. Rubens as his one love, from whom he learned companionate affection, has been finally realized in a partner who is both sister and wife, both friend and lover. ANIMALS, CHILDREN, AND LESSONS IN CRUELTY AND CONTROL Rubens’s role as a de facto sibling for Regy serves another significant purpose. In being Regy’s pet, Rubens works to prevent Regy from becoming a pet himself. While the child and the domestic pet share space in the cultural imagination as beloved, treasured creatures, a child who is too petted, who too closely approximates pet-hood, runs the risk of not transitioning successfully into adulthood. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë lovingly explicates the extent to which “petting” a child produces a weak, ineffectual adult. Both Edgar and Isabella Linton, who will turn out in adulthood to be no match for Cathy and Heathcliff’s manipulations, show the promise of their future in their childhood play, as Heathcliff recounts: Isabella – I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy – lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red-hot needles into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog shaking its paw and yelping, which, from their mutual accusations, we understood

156  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! to quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things, we did despise them! (89) Ivan Kreilkamp identifies the complex “category of the pet” at work in this scene, one which “at once posits and deconstructs the opposition between the natural and the cultural, inside and outside, uncivilized and civilized – distinctions on the border of which stands the figure of the ‘pet’” (“Petted Things” 101). In its depiction of cruelty, the scene “defines the ‘human’ in relationship to the suffering animal” and the “Lintons’ domestic space as a sorting-house for animals: some are thrown in the basement, some are ‘petted’ and domesticated as useless pets, others are positioned as sentinels and guards against any uninvited creatures around the premises” (101–102). Though their cruelty to the pet dog asserts their power over the animal, in being “petted” themselves, Edgar and Isabella arguably fail to deserve that power. Isabella’s shrieking and Edgar’s silent weeping both attest to their breaking of appropriate gender norms, and their unreasoning behavior at this moment suggests the flaw in their upbringing that has produced them as pets also makes them both unsuited for adulthood. Similarly, Isabella and Heathcliff’s son, young Linton, is weak and frail enough for others to want to make a “pet” of him, and perhaps unsurprisingly, proves to be too frail for the world. While Bronte’s depiction of Isabella and Edgar’s cruelty takes place within an imaginative landscape in which such cruelty is virtually the norm, her linkage of spoiled children with cruelty to animals was one very much in evidence in the broader cultural imagination. If the animal and the child were jointly celebrated for their innocence, playfulness, and beauty, they were also simultaneously feared and disciplined for their perceived ­“savagery,” a propensity for violence equally believed to be a consequence of their closeness to nature. In RSPCA discourse, stories of the child as pet often appear side by side with s­ tories of the child as the vicious instigator of violence, and for every sentimental narrative about a child and animal pair in the RSPCA’s journal, there is a competing narrative of some child’s sadism toward helpless and defenceless animals. Stories of cruel boys in particular filled the pages of the journal, with the combined aim of instructing parents on how they might curb that cruelty and of modeling proper behavior for the child reader. One story, “Only for Fun!” tells of young Harry who, when caught “pulling the legs and wings off a poor fly,” has his hair pulled out by his dutiful mother so he might learn “the pain you have inflicted on the poor fly” (19). Another common story found in both journals was that of the fantasy reversal, in which young boys find themselves, in dreams or by enchantment, made small and at the mercy of animals they have previously tortured.

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  157 While such stories construct the animal as victim of (young) human savagery, it is important to note that discipline, and not necessarily the suffering of the animal, is the primary concern. In Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, James Turner somewhat problematically observes, “Presumably little boys have for centuries satisfied their curiosity and their sadistic impulses by tormenting unlucky cats and dogs” (12), but notes that it was not until “the eighteenth century – due partly to new attitudes towards animals, partly to the influence of Evangelicalism at the end of the century, and perhaps partly to increased interest in child rearing as such – this juvenile barbarity [began] to disturb many adults” (12). Though it is true that concern for the suffering animal inspired protests against child cruelty to animals, it is also important to remember it was the fear that torturing an animal “was the first brutalizing step on the road to callousness, sadism, and – who could say? – murder” (12–13) that inspired much anxiety. As a result, both child and animal alike, in anticruelty rhetoric, represent wild subjects very much in need of taming. The nature and character of that taming, however, was not always the same. Though considered to be like animals in many ways, children were also adults-in-training and the position they occupied was therefore often quite distinct from that of the animal. While children and animals were similarly in danger of being spoiled by improper handling, children could be ruined both as a child and as a future adult, two very different roles that required different instruction. The complicated position of children in the social hierarchy is perfectly captured in “Bend or Break,” a story of child abuse published in the RSPCA’s Animal World in 1870. In the description of the young protagonist struggling with his gloves, the reader is presented with the overlapping image of child as animal with child as dominant human: “‘I never can put on lavender gloves without papa, or else I make them so dirty,’ said Bertie, looking piteously at his little brown paw, on which the glove stood at attention, half on and half off. ‘I have such a nice pair in my pocket, do let me wear them!’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Dog-skin. …’” (77). Little Bertie struggles with the dress restrictions his parents place on him, restrictions the narrator ably captures in the battle between lavender gloves and “little brown paw.” Though his analysis is focused on American boyhood, Kenneth Kidd’s Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (2004) is also relevant here. Kidd’s attention to the theory of recapitulation as it applies to childhood in particular (that children represent an earlier, evolutionary form of human, one still found in “primitive” societies) speaks to the kind of “boy work” (Kidd 2) present in this story: “The doctrine of recapitulation … as it was often reformulated, sustained the boy-savage comparison without insult to the boy, since he will outgrow and incorporate not only his savagery but also his femininity …” (15). Bertie’s dirtiness and paws speak to his boyishness and connection to nature, both of which are valorized in the story, but his dog-skin gloves also speak to his position of power over nature, to a nascent manliness that rejects lavender gloves in favor of the

158  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays more rugged option and that clearly revels in man’s dominion over animal at the same time. The struggle to define just what space Bertie occupies – playful, improperly managed child with “little brown paws” or little man who must learn proper authority – provides a glimpse of the issues at stake in the collision of children as pets versus children as future adults. “Bend or Break” fits very much within the RSPCA’s goal of humane education and the production of civilized (middle-class, adult) subjects. The subtitle is “a story for parents” and, throughout the text, advice on childrearing and proper child management are liberally mixed in with the narrative. In his rantings against the mistakes of parents and in his appreciation of child exuberance and elder sagacity, the narrator seeks to demonstrate how parents should shape their boys, and instructs them in the ways of boyhood and boy nature so as to best understand and nurture “true” boys. Beginning with little Bertie’s sad complaint, “If only I wasn’t so ugly and stupid” (44), and ending with the tragic death of Bertie and his brother Alfie after Alfie’s abused pony propels them both over a cliff and into a quarry, the story makes clear that the parents, the wealthy Fanes, are very much in need of good instruction. There are three boys in the family: Bertie, the eldest, who is abused and reviled by his parents for his exuberant boyishness and plain looks; Alfie, who is adored (particularly by his mother) for his beauty, feminine qualities, and malleability; and Hugh, whose only purpose seems to be to leave his parents with one last child to prove they have learned some lessons after the deaths of the first two. The abuse Bertie suffers at the hands of his parents is both physical and psychological. He is “beaten and kept in the oak room for three days on bread and water” (44); he is told he is a “wicked, ungrateful, unnatural child” (45); and he is continually rejected by his father after Bertie’s numerous attempts to show respect, affection, and love toward him. The complex similarities and distinctions between child as animal and child as future adult are very apparent in the parental instruction the reader receives from the story on the proper way to “bend” not “break” a child.5 Certainly, the story does suggest that, in some ways, the treatment of the two should be much the same. For example, Bertie’s careful instruction of his dog Bounce, in which he lovingly puts Bounce through his drills and rewards him accordingly while giving only the admonishment “Naughty” as needed (76), provides a sharp contrast to the thoughtless and rigid discipline his parents mete out to their children. When Bounce gets caught poaching, Mr. Fane promises to punish “dog and poacher [Bertie]” alike, with the punishment against the dog, locked away without food, identical to the punishment Bertie receives at the beginning of the story. While this kind of discipline is frowned upon by the narrator, it is important to note that it is not the similarity of the boy’s and the dog’s punishment that is criticized. Instead, it is suggested that such a punishment suits neither. When it comes to boys and other pets, Mr. Fane does not exercise the light hand and understanding heart such creatures most require, demonstrating a failure to

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  159 recognize the affective value child and dog should hold within the domestic realm. After the death of his two children, Mr. Fane can only ask himself if he “had tried to manage them, even taking the word in its accepted sense in the stables? No, he could not honestly say that he had. He had punished them when they did wrong, or displeased him; but had he ever rewarded them by a kind look, a changed tone, a word of encouragement … when they did well?” (103). Yet if the story recognizes similarities between boys and pets, the word “even” suggests that while such equal treatment would be preferable to the cruelty exercised upon Bertie, “even” the management that happens in the stables is not quite right as treatment for boys. Mr. Fane seems to consider his duty as father and as “famous stock farmer” (44) as one and the same: “He saw that his children had a comfortable nursery, and a competent ­governess … and a careful groom to take charge of them when he rode out” (44), while in terms of his animals, “he regularly visited the stable, the farm, and sometimes the kennels” (44). His dutiful if perfunctory treatment of both speaks more to his style as caretaker than it does to his knowledge of what management best suits the animals and children in his care, because he gives the animals “the food most adapted to them and the sort of breakingin or rearing most likely to make them serviceable” (44), but his treatment of the boys can lead only, the narrator assures the reader, to their ruination. The narrator’s dry observation, “It would have done no harm if he would have spent as much time and personal attention in supervising the rearing and education of his children” (44–45), raises the spectre of competition between animal and child, with the father privileging the animals who “brought Mr. Fane both money and credit, while his children only cost him the former” (45). Mr. Fane’s misplaced priorities, though clearly linked to his personal vanity and new-money status (59), are implicitly connected by the narrator to larger societal preferences: “The slaughter of a blue-rock pigeon furnishes abundant ground for a harrowing display of fine writing, but a dingy-complexioned, ill-dressed, and half-washed child, with its back all over bruises, is hardly a picturesque object!” (91). But if the story wishes to castigate readers and parents for appreciating attractive and/or financially compensatory animals over messy and physically unattractive children, it only does so by valorizing and celebrating boyhood, and by producing a competing aesthetic that glories in the roughand-tumble style of the true English boy. Harold Annesley, an artist hired to produce a portrait of Mrs. Fane, represents the ideal father, one who, the narrative suggests, allows his boys to be boys: “He was himself the father of a merry, noisy, romping family of six boys, who ran wild about his studio” (59). These boys are messy, spilling “his turpentines over their pinafores and jackets” and making themselves “ill with tasting his paints” (59). Bertie is himself a messy boy, destroying a mechanical sheep used by Mr. Annesley in his portraits, breaking a billiard cue, and burying his youngest brother in a rabbit hole. Though his parents despise him for this, the reader is meant to

160  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays recognize, through the voice of Mr. Annesley and others, the truly “manful way” (61) Bertie comports himself. Managing such a nature as his requires proper handling. As Mr. Annesley proclaims to Mrs. Fane, “The thing seems to me to be merely to be thoroughly just to them, and at the same time perfectly firm, and of course, thoroughly to understand them” (62). Breaking in a boy, the narrative continually reiterates, requires understanding a boy’s nature while also taking into account the man he will one day become. The father and mother’s inability to properly consider the difference that future adulthood means in terms of the temporary similarity of children and animals is continually demonstrated in their rearing of their boys. Alfie is usually cared for and loved in the story, but to such an extent that he becomes weak, cowardly, and selfish. Bertie notes, “He’s delicate, and gets petted, and that makes him more like a girl” (44). Bertie, on the other hand, is treated harshly; Bertie himself asks, “Must they pen him up like a sheep in a slaughter-house when they had given him punishment already?” (45). In both cases, the reader is meant to understand that children suffer as a result of their parents’ inability to distinguish their children’s needs from their animals’ needs. Made into a ridiculous pet or treated like a sheep to be slaughtered, neither boy is given the upbringing required to shape them into a proper man. Instead, what the boys learn is the violence enacted upon them. Alfie, after being castigated by the groom and by Bertie for beating his horse replies, “Papa says, animals were only made for our pleasure” and continues, “Papa beats us” (77). The fact that Alfie models his treatment of animals on his father’s treatment of the boys speaks to the role that pet-keeping played in the shaping of the young adult and in the teaching of the proper exercise of power. As Pearson notes, pet-keeping was a “didactic enterprise: to teach children to become adults who can exercise self-control in their dealings with equals, and more importantly, subordinates” (60). However, Alfie clearly recognizes that in his relationship to his father, he is in a very similar relationship as his pony is to him. In Alfie’s understanding lies a paradox. Though the story clearly seeks to demarcate the distinct differences between boys and animals so as to suggest the proper handling of both, yet its construction of childhood and ­boyishness repeatedly relies on the similarities between them. The reader is asked to consider the effects punishment has upon the child’s “mirth” and “spirits,” “spirits and mirth which come to them naturally, as bloom to flowers or songs to birds” (103). Mr. Annesley’s perfect boys are “wild” (59) and, we are told, Bertie’s singularly wonderful nature springs from “sheer happiness and abundant spirits … just as the flowers bloom because the sun shines hot, and waters ripple because the winds blow soft” (103). The story reminds us, “Youth is to be reverenced for its pure unknowingness” (91), an innocence that, when placed within the context of the descriptions linking the child to the natural world, places the child firmly outside adult human rationality, experience, and responsibility.

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  161 Such a fetishization of the child does not of course allow for a discourse of child rights, for if a child like Bertie is meant to be appreciated in all his natural glory, he must also, like the animal, be properly managed and controlled – that is, kept in line and preserved in dependence, so as to safeguard the pleasure adults find in him. In an essay on “Kindness to Animals,” printed in Animal World in 1882, George Lowe argues, “Animals, like human beings, need correction, but two things are necessary to make it of use. One is not to punish them too severely, which only hardens them in rebellion; the other is, never to beat them at all, except for real fault. … Otherwise the poor beast, not knowing when or why it may be beaten, gets confused and foolish, as any boy might do from being in a great fright” (Lowe 90). The essay continues, “An animal, or a boy either, living in constant fear of ill-usage whether he deserves it or no, will get so stupid or careless as seldom to do what is required” (90). Though the essay seeks to demonstrate the wrongness of cruelty, it does so through elucidating its ineffectiveness, ­specifically the extent to which cruelty prevents the subject from doing “what is required.” The suggestion that improper treatment “hardens” subordinate animals “in rebellion” is the threat “Bend or Break” continually applies to young boys as well. Though everyone in the household recognizes the parents’ flaws, Bertie is continually reminded to respect them and to recognize that they have his best intentions in mind (even when it is clear they do not). Bertie’s observation that his father was “very unkind” (44) toward him, though accurate, yet demonstrates the beginnings of a rebellion against parental authority. The fault for this rebellion may lie with the father, but such a lack of respect is nevertheless represented as ultimately damaging to the child. The story plainly states, “It is right [children] should obey the rules of their elders” (45); the problem is not that Mr. Fane expects obedience, but instead that by setting unclear rules or by punishing inappropriately, he fails to properly “break in” his sons. Such a failure may result in a frightened, effeminate boy like Alfie but it also holds out the possibility of creating a “hardened child,” a child who can only be produced, the narrator states, when they “have been long and systematically mismanaged; misgoverned because miscomprehended” (45). The deaths of the children, caused by the mismanagement of a cruelly treated pony, are a not-so-subtle reminder that improper training – as in the case of poorly trained Alfie, who is too cowardly to control his animal, and in regards to the poorly trained pony, who is too abused to be controlled – can have disastrous results. As the narrator observes, “Long punishments harden by rendering obstinate high-spirited children; make them desperate by cowing the timid ones, break their spirit, make them deceitful. …” (45). Children, like animals, can be spoiled by mismanagement, growing up to be “at the bottom of the social kennel, moral ‘slag’” (103). Though the narrator laments, “we ‘bit’ our children” (59), the story is clearly concerned with demonstrating how to kindly and properly do just

162  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays that. Furthermore, though it bemoans the supposed preference for pretty birds over ugly children, yet in its championing of Bertie it does not challenge the assumption that protection should be given most to pleasing, deserving objects. Alfie, though pretty, is cowardly and unlikable, and the reader is meant to appreciate Bertie’s threat of “I shall break your switch and punch your head” (77) in response to Alfie’s spoiled behavior. The story warns that children who are mismanaged will become “vicious” with “blighted lives” (45), yet little Bertie, who receives the harshest treatment of any creature in the story, remains unstained. He might be physically unappealing with his “by no means pretty face” (45), but he is to the end a “true, chivalrous, self-sacrificing,” “merry, manly, unimpressible,” and, most importantly, “blameless” (103) little boy. His response to a beating, “not that I minded” (44), is crucial because it suggests it is his “unimpressible” nature that sustains him, but also because it is central to his role as victim in the text. It is his blamelessness, rather than simply his right to freedom from abuse, that should protect him from harsh punishment. WAIFS AND STRAYS If the middle- and upper-class child shared a too-close association with the domestic pet, which speaks to their shared status as dependents who might be either loved or abused, then child and animal waifs and strays provide examples of how that relation is even greater when both are associated with the lower classes. As curs, mongrels, and vagabonds, the waif and the stray threaten proper domesticity through their “excess” status because, as supplements to the domestic space, the stray child and pet threaten its sanctity and wholeness. Laura Peters figures the orphan as essentially uncanny: “the orphan is unfamiliar; i.e.; not of family, strange, and outside the dominant narrative of domesticity” (19). I argue that the child waif shares this uncanny status with the animal stray. Similarly unhomed and sharing too close a connection with dangerous elements through its mongrel status, the stray reminds us that domestic pets, like lower-class children, have animal, ­savage origins and wild and perhaps dangerous allegiances. Child and animal waifs and strays hold out the promise, of course, of upward social mobility and s­alvageable innocence, particularly through their eminently adoptable ­status. Ivan Kreilkamp notes, for example, that the adoption of Heathcliff, who is found by Mr. Earnshaw on the street, “becomes an analog for the lost pet, needing hospitality and offering human characters the opportunity to demonstrate their sympathy and kindness, or lack of those qualities” (99). Unlike adult, human, lower-class beings, the child and the animal can be transformed into pets, brought within the fold of domesticity, and, in being saved, reaffirm the edifying moral status of home and family. Furthermore, by representing

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  163 guileless, rags-to-riches pluckiness, waifs and strays fulfil the fantasy of merit, with their deserved rewards and earned status. Nevertheless, waifs and strays also challenge the status quo, with their very social mobility, as seen in the case of Heathcliff, serving as an affront to the domain of the home as sanctity from the public world. Both salvageable and contaminated, waifs and strays serve as dangerous supplements to domesticity, emblematic of its excesses and failures. The connection of street children and wild animals was prevalent in ­nineteenth-century discourse: The term “street Arab,” though undoubtedly racial in its implications, originally referred to the breed of horse, rather than to Arab peoples. Other phrases from the nineteenth century, such as “ownerless dogs” and “predatory hordes,” also clearly signify the connection between children and wild animals, and [Hugh] Cunningham concludes that ‘Animal analogies were indeed common: John Hollingshead wrote of “human child-rats,” Blanchard-Jerrold of the “claws” of the “wretched children” of the street. (Flegel 53) Such depictions focus almost entirely upon the dangerous proximity of street children to violent, savage animality, the implication being that without early intervention and, importantly, the removal of the child from the jungles of the street, such children will fulfil the promise of their early savagery with an adulthood of like violence. Too close a focus on the savage street cur, however, might render them unattractive objects of intervention, suggesting as it does a degeneration that goes to the core and that cannot be expelled through education or separation from adult elements (such as parents). In social-problems novels such as F. W. Robinson’s Owen: A Waif (1862), the lower-class child’s proximity to the lower creation clearly signals this endangered status: … he appeared unconcerned and at home – caring nothing for the rain that soaked through his scanty clothes, and looking as sharply round for stray morsels of bread and meat from those who were dashing through a hasty breakfast, as the half-starved mongrels that waited on their master, and showed their teeth at each other and at him. (22–23) Like a stray dog, a “mongrel,” Owen is both in a state of nature, an animal outside culture and society, and a potential domestic dependent, someone who can, and as the narrative will suggest, should be rescued and restored to a place of family and domesticity. In his current state, however, Owen is simply a mongrel, sharing with the low-born and impure the curse of improper lineage, clearly indicated by his lack of a family name: “‘What’s your name?’ asked Mrs. Tarby, turning to the boy. ‘Owen.’ ‘Owen what?’

164  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays ‘Owen nothing. I’ve got no other name.’” (25). Like a dog, Owen has one name only, and while he may be free from social restrictions and “care nothing” for the elements, this state of untroubled, unconnected independence makes him a victim and a threat, both as a child and a future adult. Vulnerable to exploitation, he also holds the promise of future violence, the suggestion that one day he himself may show “his teeth.” Owen is like Hugh in Barnaby Rudge and like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, whose single name “simultaneously enshrines his own orphanhood and lack of familial genealogy” (Peters 46), a status intimately tied to Heathcliff’s place in the Earnshaw home as “feral pet, a resistant animal brought in to the family circle. …” (Kreilkamp, “Petted Things,” 98). And also like Heathcliff, Owen is described in racialized ways: A boy of nine years, or thereabouts, tall for his age, with large jetblack eyes, that gave him a gipsy look, and would have added more interest to his pinched face if they had been less inclined to sharp, suspicious glances, that had no small amount of cunning in them. What the face might have been under happier auspices, it is difficult to say – possibly frank and rosy, and expressing the candour and innocence of youth. … (42) The description of Owen as possessing a “gipsy look,” linking him both with the hated Romani and the endless parade of canine Gyps so present in the English novel, supports Laura Peters’s assertion: “The veneration of the family and its constitution of the nation state … leaves the orphan as an outsider, a body without family ties to the community, a foreigner” (6). ­Robinson clearly suggests that Owen could be transformed under “happier auspices” and that his inclusion within a family would result in nothing less than a transmutation from “cunning,” dog-like gypsy to wholesome child, one bearing all the stereotypical hallmarks of English childhood: “frank and rosy,” with “candour and innocence” (42). Robinson’s assertion that leaving Owen in such a state is a painful waste of an inherent promise within him is fulfilled later in the narrative through Owen’s eventual ascension through the ranks as a result of his doggedness (forgive the pun) and hard work. But it would be too simple to say that Owen’s association with the lower creation is a temporary and negative state, one he must entirely leave behind in order to ascend to fuller humanity. Instead, his association with animals also serves as a sign of his salvageability: Like a dog one may have unintentionally caressed by the roadside, he had become intrusive, and solicitous for a few more of those kind words and looks to which his life had been foreign; and even the sharp sidelong glance that he occasionally bestowed on Tarby had something of the animal instinct in it – that instinct to be friends with a master who has lately used the whip or the harsh word. (39)

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  165 Owen’s likeness to a dog in this moment holds out some promise for his future in two very specific ways. It signals his openness to being cared for and receiving kindness, and thus his ability to be integrated into the affective space of the home. It also shows he is not too demanding. Like a dog, Owen will put up with abuse and repay it with kindness. Such “instinct,” much lauded in animals, is eminently useful also in working-class men. The boy who will endure abuse and keep on paying it forward with kindness is far more preferable than the one who will rebel or demand an equal stake in society’s many benefits. Robinson’s depiction of Owen and his communion with animals therefore relies upon similar strategies of representation as that linking middleand upper-class children and domestic pets, but it also reflects the divergent power positions between petted children and those of the lower classes. For example, in describing a scene in which Owen shows affection to the donkey of a working-class couple to whom Owen has attached himself, Robinson opines: Surely it was animal instinct that kept this lad waiting for the humble pair, who had been, to a certain extent, charitable towards him, that led him to make friends with Tarby’s donkey, and pat its neck, and rub its lumpy hairy forehead with almost a younger brother’s affection. There seemed even more sympathy between Owen and his asinine companion, than between Owen and his fellow-creatures. They understood each other better, and were more inclined to be friends. Both had seen the world, and experienced its hardships, and been kicked and beaten, and sworn at, treated cruelly and unjustly, in fact, from the earliest age. Both were poor and disreputable and wore no livery to command respect. (40–41) The comparison of Owen with an ass certainly brings to mind Haraway’s warning that too close a linkage between animals and children “demeans them both.” Robinson is, of course, attempting here to vest them both with a quiet dignity, a shared sense of injustice for their underclass and abused status. Donkeys were the subject of a politicized and not-so-politicized discourse linking their suffering to that of the working classes, ranging from Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass” (1794) to E. Burrows’s Tuppy; or, the Autobiography of a Donkey (1868). Robinson’s juxtaposition of Owen with a donkey is therefore no more unusual than were the innumerable representations of aristocratic women and their horsey companions.6 Unlike the earlier image of “they understand each other,” however, which seems to celebrate a shared innocence, Owen and the donkey understand each other as compatriots of suffering and as outcasts of social systems and “respect.” Furthermore, while the earlier image celebrated a child/animal understanding that is implied to be beyond adult ken, Robinson instead links Owen with ass in a shared, unthinking animal instinct by adding, “I do not know

166  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays if any similar thoughts occurred to Owen, as he leaned his little shock head against the donkey’s neck; possibly he was thinking more of the bar-parlour, and what it was likely Mr. and Mrs. Tarby had for dinner” (40–41). Clearly, the moment of understanding Owen and the ass share is one in which the narrator, rather than the donkey or the boy, sees meaning. By contrast, boy and ass, the narrator suggests, are merely thinking of food. Robinson’s linkage of Owen and ass, and his depiction of one of England’s “poor strays” (42) as “like a dog” (39), therefore speaks to the complex negotiation of similarity and difference, aided by animal metaphors and associations, entailed in bringing Owen into the fold of proper humanity and of helping middle-class readers remember their “common origin and brotherhood” (42) with creatures of the lower class. Linking animal and child waif and strays was particularly important in animal protection discourse, in which the savage lower-class human was often constructed in opposition to the helpless, and often represented as more deserving, non-human animal. While it might be true that a­ nimal-protection societies like the RSPCA emerged from “a powerful combination of evangelical piety, romantic poetry, and rational humanitarianism” (Harrison 85), and that “preaching the gospel of kindness” (Turner 39) was a central goal of the anti-cruelty movement, it is also true that the policing of cruelty was about instituting and protecting a civil society modeled on middle-class notions of gentility and decorum. As J. Carter Wood observes, Nineteenth-century social commentators often wrote as if they were discovering violence, and, indeed, increasing social investigation brought into view much that had been previously ignored. However, these commentators, along with the state and legal profession, were also involved in inventing violence: developing a new set of beliefs as to the nature of physical aggression, debating and redrawing the boundaries of legitimate interpersonal behaviour and seeking explanations for violence in the structures of social life. (22) Such renegotiations of boundaries were, of course, inflected by issues of class and gender. Wood writes, “Middle-class culture emphasised self-restraint, aspiring at least to the appearance of control over ‘passion,’ which was often linked directly to violence” (32). In Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness and Criminal Justice in Victorian England, Martin J. Wiener argues that the “newer expectations of men, to manifest peaceableness and self-restraint in more and more areas of life, well-established by the end of the eighteenth century was extended … from gentlemen to all men, and from public, maleon-male violence to ‘private’ violence against subordinates, dependents, and the entire female gender” (6). Certainly, violence against animals was included as a type of violence against subordinates that should be eliminated, and the role played by the RSPCA in the dissemination of the concept of the civilized, rational, controlled male has been well established. As James Turner

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  167 points out, the belief of the organization was that “Training and kindness might yet root out the hatred, cruelty, and anarchy thought to flourish in the lower classes,” while RSPCA rhetoric “demanded that the people, wild animals in the nation’s midst, be tamed” (55). Unsurprisingly, numerous stories and articles within the RSPCA’s journal seem to underline the similarity between the lower classes and animals, particularly in the case of street children. When a woman writes in to Animal World in 1886 to tell the story of two starving dogs she has fed biscuits to, she, without any irony, explains, “Then I gave him some biscuit, which I had, as usual, in my pocket, ready for dogs, or sometimes children” (71). Another article, entitled “The Stray Dogs of London” (October 1877), notes, “Unfortunately the stray dog, like outcast children, often suffers from a thick incrustation of degradation – the kernel of love is nevertheless within” (146). Stories of waifs and strays in Animal World and Band of Mercy helped to prove the lower classes were worth taming, ironically rehumanizing the lower-class savage through association with the (implicitly) more deserving animal. For example, in a story entitled “Partners in Distress,” published in the January 1882 issue of Animal World, the narrator details an encounter with a “wretched little girl and her dog … both waifs, partners in a common distress” (9). The girl, Bess, is described in ways that underline her status as a being who possesses only basic life, with “just sufficient ­nutriment or ­shelter … to keep [her] body and soul together,” yet the narrator stresses “there was something left in her which attracted the person whose sympathy had first of all induced him to talk to or befriend this poor waif” (10). The narrative reveals this “something” is a spark of common feeling Bess shares with the “despised little dog” (10) at her side. Offering to take her to a refuge house, but informing her she must leave behind her canine companion, her saviors are told that the mean-looking and starved cur at her side was a companion much more dear to her than life, and that he should participate in her prosperity, or she must reluctantly decline the relief she so much needed … in that small creature she had found tenderness, fidelity, and gratitude – a love as true and unchanging as though she had been a queen. Her dog had been her only solace during periods of bodily suffering and mental anguish; in moments of merriment her glee had made his heart joyous; he had shared her food and her lodging; and he had patiently endured with her the privations of hunger. Could she cast him away now that a gleam of a better life came before her? (10) What the child reveals in this moment is sacrifice, devotion, and a downright doggy sense of loyalty to her companion. Through him, she has learned “tenderness, fidelity, and gratitude,” and it is these qualities, taught by a dog and proved through defence of a dog, that redeem her as a human, with the

168  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays result of her touching plea being “both saved from the streets” (10). Stories of this kind recur throughout the pages of the RSPCA’s journals, in poems such as “The Gutter Child; or, Tiney and Tim,” published in Animal World in April 1872, and in “The Violet Boy,” in the October 1892 issue of Band of Mercy. In the first, Tiney, the boy, proves his right to be saved through his kindness to Tim, his dog. The interchangeability of their names, with the boy in fact possessing a name usually more suited to a dog, is matched by their equal care for each other, with Tim sharing “What scant food the pitying gave … however ill he fared … with his sole companion …” (D. J. M., l. 33, 34–36). In the second, written by Eliza Cook, a “tiny boy, with pallid face” similarly shares his food with his fellow stray: He gave the poor dog many a bite, Without one thought of grudging it, Though he himself was hungry still, And had not eaten half his fill. The lady, who had marked the deed, Now walked towards the child of need, And asked him why he gave away His bread, that might have served the day. (78) The reader will not be shocked to learn that, as with Bess, this boy is saved by his act of kindness to an animal. The poem ends, “Perhaps that boy may some time be/A merchant of a high degree./His happiness or rank will spring/Through mercy to a poor dumb thing” (79). Here, the child proves his worth and his right to claim a higher status in society through “mercy.” In part, his action has proven he has a right to claim himself as part of the higher creation, as mercy is an act of power, thus instantiating him as a superior being to the animal. Nevertheless, in both poems the boys have to share what they have, even when at the point of starvation, in order to earn their salvation, thus implying that humans who do not choose to starve and are forced to look after their own interests are not as worthy of intervention. In literature focused more on sympathizing with and saving the child, linkages of child and animal required a careful touch, one that illuminated the problems inherent in children who are almost animals while continually stressing the difference between children and animals in order to make the child’s salvation an ideological and social imperative. Written in the tradition of what Anna Davin has identified as “waif stories,” Hesba Stretton’s Lost Gip (1873) and L.T. Meade’s Scamp and I (1872) represent that class of fiction authored “mostly by women, usually of evangelical tendency. … The children who were their central figures were objects of pathos – d ­ esperately poor and without parental support, their parents dead, missing or deficient and perhaps brutal. In the course of the story these heroic children would encounter and be converted to evangelical Christianity” (Davin 69). ­Written in response to the highly visible presence of street children in England’s

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  169 city centers, such fiction sought to transform the independent children of England’s lower classes into pitiful waifs who might be saved to a life of comparative dependence and an approximation of – if not actual integration into – proper domesticity. Such a transformation was seen as highly necessary because “Children who fended for themselves, apparently living without family and beyond parental and religious discipline, were a shocking affront to prevailing conventions of protected and innocent childhood and to the order embodied in the ‘normal’ middle-class family” (70). Children who too closely approximated the animal strays of England’s urban centers represented a challenge to the idea they were harmless and in need of protection, innocents who properly should be safely enclosed in the domestic space. The brother and sister of Stretton’s Lost Gip closely mimic animal strays, particularly in terms of their less-than-valued status with their mother, who “loses Gip when she is dead drunk” (Denenholz Morse, “Unforgiven” 108). The brother, Sandy, “searches for his little sister for the rest of the story, a knight-errant on a Christian, brotherly quest” (108). When Sandy gets taken in by “a middle-class clergyman’s family fallen upon hard times” (108), his rescue is figured entirely in terms of animal adoption: “Mrs. Shafto was also a little anxious about Sandy, who followed her so closely, as closely as a stray and homeless dog might have done, and for whom she had undertaken a kind of responsibility.” But the following lines clearly indicate separation between human and non-human stray: “She could not treat a dog so; and how much more worth was this boy than a dog!” (Stretton 58). Within the context of Evangelical literature, a human stray has infinitely more potential because there is a soul, as well as a body, to be saved. In their wandering state, Sandy and his sister, little “Lost Gip,” support “the association of the orphan figure with travelling peoples (gypsies) who, by their lifestyle, disrupt certain notions of rootedness, family, home, Christianity, and nationhood” (Peters 31).7 Common conceptions of the gypsy as “debased and dehumanized” (Lomax 196) lead to overlapping representations of stray dogs and homeless gypsies, both of whom challenge the “rootedness understood to characterise the family and the home” (Peters 49). The text makes clear that it is necessary to find Gip and return the lower-class waif to the domestic circle in order to reinstate her both as a human with a soul and as an adopted child of an appropriate Christian family.8 Human child and animal stray might be separated by their possession of an immortal soul, or lack thereof, but I argue that the careful delineation of human and animal stray works also to police boundaries between humans themselves along class lines. As I have suggested, the lower-class child was a problematic subject of intervention. Salvation had to come early enough and had to find fertile enough ground for the child to be transformed from future criminal to obedient dependent. In some texts, such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837), this distinction between salvageable and unsalvageable child is managed along blood lines. Oliver, with his

170  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays well-born if illegitimate heritage, is the very picture of helpless innocence while the Artful Dodger represents dangerous “knowingness,” a child who is not a child and who will too soon recognize the very adult consequences of his independence. In texts such as Meade’s Scamp and I and Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders (1872), however, this distinction is managed through human and non-human companions. The presence of an animal “sibling” helps to split the figure of the “stray,” on the one hand, into the helpless and therefore more innocent child who can be marked as salvageable by a separation from his or her class status and, on the other, the stray animal, who stands in for the child’s class status. Attributing to the non-human companion both the positive and negative aspects of lower-class identity serves to safeguard the stray child from these associations, as signs of lowerclassness make the child a more problematic subject for integration into the fold of respectability. In L. T. Meade’s Scamp and I, for example, the presence of Scamp in the narrative works to scapegoat some of the more attractive, if more problematic, aspects of the street waif onto the animal. Though often depicted as savage and animalistic, street children were also sometimes valued for their charm. As Hugh Cunningham explains in The Children of the Poor (1991), “Social reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … expected to find and were prepared to forgive … an element of mischievousness, now considered a desirable sign of spirit” (154). If children were valued for their sense of boisterousness and play, particularly boy children, then the children of the street seemed to exemplify this quality even more than the middle-class child. As such, the street urchin could be almost a figure of envy, particularly for the adult male observer, for whom they represented a freedom of spirit and an essential pluckiness that existed outside the restraints of polite society (161). Even the girl waif, for whom the street was “universally thought to be fatal” (162), yet possessed a beauty and attraction that more coddled children did not. Cunningham quotes philanthropist Thomas Holmes, who effuses: “Where do you find such beautiful curly hair as they possess? in very few places! It is perfect in its freedom, texture, colour and curl. … Where do you find prettier faces, more sparkling eyes and eager expressions? Nowhere!” (160). As Cunningham explains, “The implication of this was plain: the healthy children of the very poor, whether boys or girls or both is not clear, had a form of beauty which made them more appealing to Holmes than the children of the rich” (160). In Scamp and I, the young protagonist, Flo, clearly falls on the more attractive side of the spectrum of the street waif. The narrator writes, “Flo, seen by daylight, had brown eyes, very large and soft; curling, golden brown hair, and a sweet gentle little face.” The text goes on to explain that had her circumstances been different, she “in all probability would have been a lovely child, but her cellar-life had produced sharp shoulders, a complexion of grayish-white, and a certain look of premature age and wisdom, which all children so brought up possess” (5). Given “all children brought up” have

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  171 the same look of experience as Flo strongly suggests that for her and her class, her knowledge is not “premature,” but, of course, the model against which Flo is being compared is that of a more respectable childhood. While she may have some aspects of knowingness, Flo nevertheless is a true innocent, raised as she is from her infancy to avoid criminality and marked by a native shyness: “She was a timid child, not bold and brazen like many of her class …” (9). As well, Flo is somewhat sheltered from street life by her more domestic pursuits. While her older brother wanders the streets, she herself, possessing more “housewifely instincts” (14), remains enclosed within their cellar, repairing boots and shoes in order to help support her mother and brother. Flo has markers of normative feminine domesticity – devotion, selfsacrifice, rootedness, and industry – that single her out as both worthy and capable of social and spiritual salvation. Her brother Dick, on the other hand, possesses more problematic streetchild characteristics, which, combined with his boyishness, construct him as a somewhat paradoxical figure. He is restless and brazen, possessing a “full, bright, impudent stare” (3). He is a “dirty, troublesome little imp” (3); nevertheless, “Those who looked at him might have pronounced him hungry, certainly poor, but, for the time being, not at all unhappy” (2–3). In short, he is both emblematic of dangerous, independent knowingness, and therefore a challenge to childhood dependency and innocence, and also a consummate boy, one whose “curious, bright expression” (3) bespeaks the best of young, English manhood. For his mother and sister, Dick represents an irrepressible joy and freedom that is not available to them as lower-class women: “His elastic spirits never flagged, his gay heart never despaired, he whistled over his driest crusts, he turned somersaults over his supperless hours – he had for many a day been the light of two pairs of eyes” (107). But this very freedom is linked to the greatest danger he faces, that of nascent criminality. Being boundless in his energy and imagination, Dick also refuses to recognize social boundaries, “intrud[ing] his disreputable little person in the midst of scenes and people with which he never had, and never could have, anything in common” (2). Even his playfulness and sense of fun are shown to be a fertile ground for contamination, for, under the influence of another “funny boy” who “had no end of pleasant droll things to say” (25), Dick uses a street performance of play as an opportunity for thievery: She was quite overjoyed at seeing them so near her, but how funny they looked! or rather, how funny Dick looked! His face was blackened, and he had on a false nose; he carried a little fiddle which he capered about with. … Flo observed Dick give a red-faced, stout old gentleman a tremendous push, and quick as lightning Jenks had his hand in the old man’s pocket. … (68–69) The connection between roving street fun and criminality is clear. Dick’s play has resulted in serious consequences. Racially marked by his ­black-faced

172  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays minstrelsy, Dick’s antics have tipped over from boyishness to disruptive and dangerous criminality. From this point on, he is severed from Flo. Seeing him arrested and tried, she determines, “It was plain she and Dick must separate. … The honest could not live with the dishonest” (107). Luckily, the narrative does not have to entirely expel the attractive, plucky, working-class boy because Scamp, the dog Flo ends up taking in and befriending, ably fills that role. From the beginning it is clear that Scamp, in his own doggy way, shares the same social class as the waifs and strays who take him in: “By birth he was a mongrel, if not a pure untainted street cur; he was shabby, vulgar, utterly ugly and common-place looking” (30). Unlike Dick, however, who resents the upper classes (2), Scamp is satisfied with his place in life, modeling, in keeping with middle-class ideology, appropriate lower- and working-class satisfaction with the social order: “The dog had all the large, though unconscious faith of his kind in his Creator. It had never occurred to him to murmur at his fate, to wish for himself the better and more silken lives that some dogs live. To live at all was a blessed thing – he lived and he loved – he was perfectly happy” (105). And while Scamp is as street-wise and calculating as Jenks and Dick, in his case knowingness is not a sign of danger; rather, it speaks to an essential quality of dog-hood that is as in-born and God-given as a soul. His first description proclaims, “If ever a creature possessed the knowledge that is designated ‘knowing,’ the dog Scamp was that creature. It shone out of his eyes, it shaped the expression of his countenance, it lurked in every corner and crevice of his brain” (30). Such a description of a lower-class child would be a marker of his or her utter ruin, but in a dog, a street cur in particular, this is high praise. Sagacious, clever, and “being of the genus designated as ‘knowing’” (120), Scamp is celebrated by the narrative for his ability to “resist his fate” (31) when his previous owner attempts to drown him, and for his use of the “pathos of his eyes, and a certain knack he had of balancing himself on the hinder part of his body” that allows him to win “Flo’s pity, and secure a shelter and a home” (31). Such honest manipulations in defence of oneself are, again, a direct challenge to narratives of innocence and dependency in a child, but in a child-like dog they can be lauded and admired. This is significant because the presence of Scamp allows for a safe relief of the constant tension caused between the recognition in the narrative of great inequity between rich and poor, and the over-arching ideological message that one must not challenge the social order but instead submit in the hopes of a place in heaven. In detailing the struggles Flo and her brother encounter in their attempts to be honest, the narrative compellingly voices class resentment: “For surely some people had too much; surely it was not fair that all those buns and cakes, all those endless, countless good things in the West End shop should go to the rich people; surely the little hungry boys and girls who lived, and felt, and suffered in the East End should have their share!” (22). There is no arguing with this point of view, and yet the narrative must argue with it, offering only submission unto God and uncomplaining servitude as a

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  173 solution. Yet the presence of Scamp offers some relief. Unlike Dick and Jenks and Flo, he is neither burdened by social rules nor has he an immortal soul to be lost. He is allowed the wherewithal to use his intelligence and street smarts to challenge social inequity because “he had a clause in his code of morals which taught him that when no man gave to him, then it would be right for him to help himself” (120). When Flo is hurt, Scamp takes it upon himself to help her and, playing on the social mobility allowed him as an animal, he pretends to belong to the baker so he can steal some bread: Here his demeanour totally changed, he no longer looked timid and cowed; the currish element very prominent when, with his tail between his legs, he had scuttled up Duncan Street, now had vanished; he walked along the centre of the road soberly and calmly, a meditative look in his eyes, like a dog that has just partaken of a good dinner, and is out for a constitutional: not one glance did he cast at the tempting morsels, so near and yet so far. … To the passers-by he looked like a very faithful, good kind of dog, who would fasten his teeth into the leg of any one who attempted to appropriate his master’s property. (120) The same act, thievery, which has marked Dick off as unclean, as someone with whom Flo can no longer associate because he is a cause of ­contamination, is, in a dog, an act of bravery and cleverness. Scamp can therefore embody everything that is perhaps enviable and admirable in the male street waif without, it seems, compromising his right to be within the domestic space. After this incident, Scamp is still welcomed as a member of Flo’s new home and, as Dick used to do, brings joy to the women within: “His eyes were on a level with the table, and he looked so at home, so assured of his right to be there, and withal so anxious and expectant, and he had such a funny way of cocking his ears when a piece of nice fried herring was likely to go his way, that he was a constant source of mirth and pleasure to the human beings with whom he resided” (146). This same splitting of the waif child from working-class identity and culture is evident in Ouida’s A Dog of Flanders. Though Ouida lovingly details the poor peasant boy Nello and his hard-working dog, yet her depiction of Nello’s peasant neighbors and grandfather demonstrates a class snobbery that underlies her critique of class prejudice. The dog Patrasche is owned early on in the text by “a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped his cart full with pots and pans, and flagons and buckets, and other wares of crockery and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the load as best he might, whilst he himself lounged idly by the side in fat and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wine-shop. …” (8). The use of Patrasche as a beast of burden, which was a common topic of animal-rights discourse in England, underscores an essential xenophobia in the text in which the backward European peasant is meant to provide a sharp contrast

174  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays to a never stated but always implied English comparison, in which dogs are given greater value and more appropriate use. The text does provide an example of a good peasant in the figure of the “gentle old man” (18), Jehan Daas, who takes Patrasche in and nurses him back to health after he is abandoned, broken and exhausted, by his brutal former master. Jehan also uses Petrasche as a beast of burden, but the text is clear that this is out of necessity, ventriloquizing animal-rights discourse by having Jehan assert, “It [was] a foul shame to bind dogs to labor for which Nature never formed them” (16). Despite his higher moral status in relation to his fellow peasants, however, Jehan is still represented as a man with a limited world view. His only desire for his grandchild, Nello, is that Nello should continue their peasant life: “I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that when thou growest a man thou couldst own this hut and the little plot of ground, and labor for thyself, and be called Baas by thy neighbors,” said the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed. For to own a bit of soil, and to be called Baas – master – by the hamlet round, is to have achieved the highest ideal of a Flemish peasant. … (34) Jehan is represented throughout as a salt of the earth, good-hearted peasant, yet the tone of the narration in commenting upon his dreams is quite dismissive: the “highest ideal of a Flemish peasant” is simply to reproduce the status quo and to continue on as one has into perpetuity. Generally, such a representation of working-class life would fall firmly within middle-class ideology of what was best for the lower classes. However, in this text, the child Nello is set apart from his peasant roots by a native spark of individuality. As Ouida describes, “The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an absorbing passion for Art. … Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse which is called Genius” (32–33). For Nello, redeemed from peasanthood by his singular gift, a potentiality belied by his birth, his grandfather’s dream for his future is one scornfully below his talents: “Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas by neighbors a little poorer or a little less poor than himself” (35). Such an attitude might be seen as a sign of dangerous rebellion on the part of a peasant child, but Ouida defends it in Nello by virtue both of his innate greatness and his blameless childhood: “… a certain vague, sweet hope, such as beguiles the children of genius, had whispered in his heart, ‘Yet the poor do choose sometimes – choose to be great, so that men cannot say them nay.’ And he thought so still in his innocence” (44). Nello’s “innocence” and “genius” are crucial here, as they simultaneously justify and forgive his restlessness, his desire for more than his current state of servitude. In its description of Nello as someone “who looked

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  175 only a little peasant-boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door,” while he is in fact “in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the god” (32), the text clearly suggests he is more than he appears, someone vastly above both his canine companion and the peasants who are his family and neighbors. If Nello is represented as being made of superior stuff than his peasant upbringing, then the dog Patrasche represents, somewhat painfully, the truer inheritor of Jehan Baas’s birthright. Patrasche, like Nello, is taken in by Baas and, like Nello, takes on a task for which he is unsuited but which he is willing to do out of love and devotion. Unlike Nello, however, Patrasche is not troubled by the light of genius and is therefore capable of fulfilling the role of peasant ably and faithfully: “Though he was often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he had to work in the heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of winter dawns … yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty with each day, and the eyes that he loved smiled down on him. It was sufficient for Patrasche” (25).9 Untroubled by dreams of Rubens, Patrasche finds satisfaction in brutal, endless labor, compensated only by a sense of duty fulfilled and the companionship of family. While Nello is connected to a larger cultural heritage in the inheritance of Rubens, of which the average peasant, the narrative suggests, is both unaware and therefore unworthy, Patrasche is connected by blood and lineage to a life of labor, a heritage he shares, the text suggests, with the backward and unchanging Flemish peasant: “Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly from sire to son in Flanders many a century – slaves of slaves, dogs of the people, beasts of the shaft and the harness, creatures that lived straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their hearts on the flints of the street” (6). Such a nature is admirable, Ouida suggests, but it is not the life for a genius like Nello. Pairing him with Patrasche allows the narrative to seem both to respect the virtues of peasant life – for dogs and true peasants – and to figure childhood as a separate category from working-class life. Nello is valued as a peasant boy, particularly because there is something in him that makes him more than a peasant. All of the positive aspects of peasant life and culture – if less attractive for Ouida because less cultured – are then transposed onto Patrasche. Nello is unmistakably separated from his class so he may stand in as a tragic exemplar of innocence wasted, of childhood potential that might be plucked from its surroundings and placed within a higher-class context in which its genius could flourish. Both Flo and Nello therefore represent a salvageable working-class childhood, with their canine companions acting as the working-class children Flo and Nello cannot be if they are to be raised above their position. It is important to note, however, that both these texts end in tragedy, with the death of dogs and children alike. What this demonstrates is that despite the separation of these children from their working-class origins, a sense of dis-ease remains in regards to the possibility of their full integration into a

176  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays higher class. As orphans, Flo and Nello present a problem to the narrative. Their social mobility, in that they are not burdened by working-class family and community to whom they have ties, makes them salvageable, but that very social mobility is a source of anxiety, challenging as it does the fixity of class difference and social place.10 Though neither Flo nor Nello are constructed as villains in their respective stories, both share a primary restlessness, a desire for more that both sets them apart as worthier than their lower-class brothers and sisters and makes them emblematic of lowerclass dissatisfaction. Nello, as described, longs for something greater than his peasant upbringing, and Flo, early on in Scamp and I, demonstrates through her play at upper-class life that she is similarly afflicted with aspirations far above her class: “No vulgar ‘dook’ or ‘markis’ could satisfy Flo’s ambition; when she soared she would soar high, and when she saw the queen she would really know how to act the queen to perfection” (9). Both she and Nello show the potential to be more than they are and share the social mobility, as orphans, to be rescued to more than they have, but in providing them with more, both texts would tacitly make the argument that such children as they are should be given more, should have equal access to society’s benefits and privileges. And yet neither text is willing to go quite that far. Dying, either violently like Flo or as a result of poverty and social isolation like Nello, the threat these children represent is safely extinguished. They can be mourned for their potential without society having to alter its stratified structure to allow for its realization. Instead, both Flo and Nello can be reintegrated into home, family, and nation on a heavenly, rather than earthly, plane. One might wonder why, of course, the dogs have to die with them. In part, the dogs themselves are similarly figures of dis-ease, particularly Scamp, whose quick class performance in transforming himself from street cur to legitimate pet, as described earlier, gets at the heart of the debates about him throughout the novel, which continually center on the question of whether or not Scamp is a “good dog.” Certainly his ability to move from the street to the domestic hearth with ease underlines his own uncanniness, thus linking him to the orphan figure. But more importantly, I think, the death of the dogs alongside the children does much to promise a bridging of social inequity and difference possible in heaven, if not on earth. Much is made of the difference between Nello and Patrasche, one a “great, tawny-colored, massive dog,” the other a “small figure” with “little white feet” and a “soft, grave, innocent, happy face” (19). As well, though Flo and Scamp alike possess, respectively, “brown eyes, very large and soft” (5) and “soft brown eyes” (31) through which they gaze at the world with mute appeal, they are set apart as distinct types, as well as species: one gentle, innocent, and timid, the other knowing, comical, and feisty. By linking children and animals together in death, these texts promise a union that surpasses species difference, thus displacing social equity between humans with a kind of heavenly species equity between beloved

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  177 companions. Scamp and I, as an Evangelical text, is less willing to commit to all dogs going to heaven, of course, venturing only that such questions should be left to God (195), while Ouida’s far more secular text wholeheartedly embraces boy and dog as companions in the afterlife, with Nello exclaiming at the last, “We shall see His face – there … and He will not part us, I think” (86), foreshadowing the burial of the two “in one grave … side by side – for ever!” (90). But while both texts are not willing to commit to the same vision of heaven for dogs, both are united in their declarations that these children and animals are far better off dead. Scamp and I declares fully, “There are none we can leave contentedly, so certain that no future evil can befall them, as the two, whom the child always spoke of as SCAMP AND I” (213). A Dog of Flanders similarly asserts, “Death had been more pitiful to them than longer life would have been” (89). In so doing, both texts participate in what Frederic Jameson identifies as a primary aim of art and culture, whereby “real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm” (79). Through presenting them as blameless victims while simultaneously excluding them from the social system they threaten by the very possibility of their social mobility, these texts offer the death of children and dogs together as “The elimination of the orphan’s threat [that] results in the unification of the family and larger community” (Peters 48). In death, waifs and strays can realize their full potential as good children and good dogs, united together in a safe haven that places no undue burdens on the social structure of the world below. CONCLUSION Though middle-class “pets” and lower-class waifs and strays may receive very different treatment in Victorian texts, they all attest to the close association of children and domestic animals within the Victorian family and home. Though the child as pet is a trope often used to ridicule, pity, and/or critique the spinster, the bachelor, and the childless couple in the n ­ ineteenth century, yet it is a trope that is central to the normative construction of home, one that demonstrates the species confusion that reigns in the category of “dependent.” So long as children are constructed as somehow outside the category of human (as defined primarily by adulthood) and so long as pet animals are considered as eternal children, existing outside the life cycle of their own species, children and animals will be linked together as sometimes competing, sometimes companionate dependents within the home. It is certainly true such a close linkage between child and animal can, as ­Haraway warns, demean them both (37), but it is important to recognize that the child/animal trope so often othered onto those seen as failing to perform proper heteronormative domesticity is in fact a central feature of proper family life. Reproductive futurism, with

178  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays its attendant focus on the child and the child’s potential, which must be protected and safeguarded at all costs (usually, though, only at the cost of anything perceived as socially and sexually deviant), might seem to offer the child a bigger, better role in society than that offered to the domestic pet, on whom no future can be written. But the similarities between the two, both in terms of the role they play within the family and the care they can expect to receive when perceived as actual threats, demonstrates that reproductive futurism, while all about the child, actually cares not too much about children. And what does a pet mean, both inside and out of reproductive futurism? While the pet within the home can serve, as I have argued in the previous chapters, either to support the seeming necessity of a dependent in the home or to provide an alternative view of familial/interpersonal relations, the pet’s status as a creature without a future clearly places it outside of reproductive futurism. In my final section, I want to turn to an examination of animals and their families so as to recast the non-human animal as a being who has a lifespan of its own and, perhaps, a construction of time and relations separate from those that underlie the middle-class notion of the nuclear family. While I do not mean to suggest that it is fully possible to understand what cat or dog familial relations might mean to animals outside human domestication, I argue that how nineteenth-century authors perceived inter-familial relations between animals is crucial to understanding a human comprehension of animal families as something that exist prior to, alongside, or in competition with animal-human relations.

NOTES   1. Educated in European culture and Ancient Greek, Mabel despises English country pursuits and Rorie’s stated aim to be of “the soil that bred” him (I. 114), “a Hampshire squire, pure and simple” (I. 115).   2. Colleen Glenny Boggs observes further, “In fact, animals played an increasingly important role not just in moral education, but in children’s initiation into language itself – as indicated by the example of Aesop’s Fables in French: With a Description of Fifty Animals Mentioned Therein and a French and English Dictionary of the Words Contained in the Work (1852) (146).   3. Of course, animals such as rabbits could reasonably be placed in far more dangerous situations than the average child; the rabbit’s mother laments that “his disobedience will be his death, for our worst enemies are abroad to-day” (77). Being like children, and yet immersed in a world (hopefully) far more hostile and deadly than the readers of Band of Mercy experienced, these child/animal figures provided object lessons in which the failure to behave could result in dire consequences. While the work of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) attested to the fact that very many children faced danger and violence on a regular basis, its own paper for children, The League of Pity Paper, censored many of these details. For the child reader, the world of violence and danger was often filtered through animal protagonists.

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  179  4. Of course, as Mary Jean Corbett’s work on marriage with a deceased wife’s sister in the Victorian period shows, Regy’s marriage to one sister may not necessarily close off the possibility of erotic/romantic attachment to the second (see Corbett, Family Likeness).   5. As Pearson observes, “The comparison of animal and child training was … part of a larger culture that interwove the treatment of animals and humans, shuttling lessons in discipline back and forth across the species line …” (52).  6. Gina M. Dorré, in Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (Ashgate: 2006), argues that, “the horse was figured regularly in Victorian texts as a docile body, a noble companion, as well as a restive brute, informing prevailing ideologies of gender and class and presenting versatile, often opposing, and frequently potent cultural meanings” (9). See also Jennifer Mason’s chapter on “Corporeality, Class, and Equestrianism in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World” in Civilized Creatures.   7. As Denenholz Morse points out, “Gip’s dark skin and hair – ‘Gip’ is short for ‘Gypsy’ – complicate [the] narrative even further. If Gip is somehow the progeny of the nameless drunken mother and foreign father, then she is twice Other, an impoverished little girl of mixed race” (“Unforgiven” 109).   8. However, as Denenholz Morse points out, the fact that Sandy and Gip’s new foster family emigrates to Canada suggests that while saved, there is no place within England for a family such as this: “The children of the poor become exports, a ‘product’ too costly to keep in England. Reconstituted families occur in almost all of Stretton’s fictions (as in many of Gaskell’s and Dickens’s works), in which children and adults of different families end up as one new family united by Christ’s love. In this instance, the difficulty is perhaps that Stretton – like Elizabeth Gaskell at the close of Mary Barton, when her working-class family is relocated to an Edenic rural Canada – cannot truly imagine a place in England where such an anomalous family could thrive and prosper” (“Unforgiven” 109–110).   9. While I find Patrasche’s stalwart acceptance of his lot in life problematic when considered in terms of the class implications in the text, Mary Sanders Pollock points out that Ouida is able to make Patrasche sympathetic by primarily showing us the story through his eyes: “… Ouida’s dog character does not speak, but he models virtue for the humans around him (and reading about him), observes human behavior without quite understanding its worst features, and reflects upon what he sees. The narrator stands just outside the dog’s consciousness, reporting his observations and feelings. In fact, the human characters in this story rarely speak, either, and … the similarity with which human and canine points of view are presented reinforces Ouida’s point that human and animal subjectivity are equally real and important” (142). 10. In her discussion of orphans such as Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8) and Magdelen in Collins’s No Name (1862), Laura Peters highlights the freedom both villainesses gain from their orphan state: “Becky [Sharp] sees in her orphan state her own disadvantaged social position. … But Becky’s orphanhood becomes the agency through which she gains social place” (21), similarly, “lacking an identity Magdalen finds opportunity in her marginalised nameless position” (25). Both characters use their orphan status to their advantage, and the extent to which they wreak havoc on the domestic lives of middle-class characters speaks to the threat embodied within the figure of the orphan, “a figure [who] continues to provoke in the larger family – society – fear, anxiety, guilt, and inadequacy by its presence” (23).

180  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays REFERENCES A. C. W. “The Disobedient Rabbit.” Band of Mercy Advocate 6.70 (October 1884): 73–80, 77–78. “Bend or Break: A Story for Parents.” Animal World 2.27 (December 1871): 44–46; 3.28 (January 1872): 59–62; 3.29 (February 1872): 76–79; 3.30 (March 1872): 90–92; 3.32 (April 1872): 102–103. Boggs, Colleen Glenny. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. London: Penguin Books, 1988. Burrows, E. Tuppy; or, the Autobiography of a Donkey. London: Griffith and F ­ arran, 1860. “Children and Pets.” The Animal World 10.119 (August 1879): 113–128, 125. Cook, Eliza. “The Violet Boy.” Band of Mercy Advocate 14.166 (October 1892): 74–80, 78–79. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Cunningham, Hugh. The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Davin, Anna. “Waif Stories in Nineteenth-Century England.” History Workshop Journal 52 (Autumn 2001): 67–98. Denenholz Morse, Deborah. “Unforgiven: Drunken Mothers in Hesba Stretton’s Religious Tract Society and Scottish Temperance League Fiction.” Other ­Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal. Eds. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008. 101–124. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. 1839. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. D. J. M., “The Gutter Child; or, Tiney and Tim.” Animal World 3.32 (April 1872): 97–112, 104–5. Dorré, Gina M. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Ewing, Juliana Horatia. A Flatiron for a Farthing or, Some Passages in the Life of an Only Son. 1872. London: Bell & Daldy, 1873. ———. Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls. 1875. London: George Bell & Sons, 1885. “Fast Friends.” Animal World 22.264 (September 1891): 129–144, 136. Flegel, Monica. Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century ­England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Harrison, Brian. Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Goodall, Allan A. “Young People’s Pets.” Band of Mercy 10.115 (June 1888): 49–56, 52. “Grandpapa’s Four Pets.” Cover illustration for Band of Mercy 6.71 (November 1884): 81. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays  181 Kidd, Kenneth. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. ———. “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18.1 (2005): 87–110. “Leo, Topsy, and Pip.” Band of Mercy Advocate 10.118 (October 1888): 73–80, 75–76. Lomax, Elaine. The Writings of Hesba Stretton: Reclaiming the Outcast. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Lowe, George. “On Kindness to Animals.” Reprinted as “Extract from an Essay” in Animal World 13.153 (June 1882): 81–96, 90. Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Meade, L. T. Scamp and I: A Story of City By-ways. 1872. London: John F. Shaw & Co., n.d. “My Snowdrop.” Band of Mercy 13.152 (August 1891): 57–64, 63. Nelson, Claudia. Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007. “Only for Fun!” Band of Mercy Advocate 3.27 (March 1881): 17–24, 19. Ouida. A Dog of Flanders: Being a Story of Friendship Closer than Brotherhood. 1872. Elbert Hubbard, 1906. “Our Black Cat.” Band of Mercy 3.50 (February 1883): 9–16, 10–12. “Partners in Distress.” Animal World 13.148 (January 1882): 1–16, 9–10. Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Peters, Laura. Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Plotz, Judith. Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood. New York: Palgrave, 2001. “‘Prince’ and the Kitten: A Story for Little Boys.” Band of Mercy Advocate 2.13 (January 1880): 1–8, 3. Pollock, Mary Sanders. “Ouida’s Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative.” Figuring Animals: Essays in Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture. Eds. Mary Sander Pollock and Catherine Rainwater. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 135–160. “Prisoners and Captives.” Band of Mercy Almanac. London: S. W. Partridge & Co., 1899. Robinson, F. W. Owen: A Waif. Vols. 1–3. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862. “School-Time.” Band of Mercy 60 (December 1883): 89–96, 90. Stretton, Hesba. Lost Gip. London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873. “The Favourite Pony.” Band of Mercy Advocate 2.13 (January 1880): 1–8, 2. “The Stray Dogs of London.” Animal World 8.97 (October 1877): 145–60, 146. “They Grew in Beauty, Side by Side.” Cover illustration for Animal World 21.245 (February 1, 1890): 17. “They Understand Each Other.” Band of Mercy Advocate 9.104 (1887): 57–64, 60.

182  Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays Thiel, Elizabeth. The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. “Two Kittens.” Cover illustration for Band of Mercy 10.117 (September 1888): 65. Wiener, Martin J. Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wood, J. Carter. “A Useful Savagery: The Invention of Violence in Nineteenth-­ Century England.” Journal of Victorian Culture 9.1 (Spring 2004): 22–42.

Conclusion Animals and their Families

In this final section, I turn to stories focused specifically on animals and their biological kin. In so doing, I am not suggesting we can truly understand what family means to the family pet simply by reading texts supposedly from the animal characters’ points of view, nor am I suggesting these works, in focusing on biological relations between animals, somehow offer us more “authentic” versions of family, i.e. ones made up entirely of biological relations. To do so would be to undermine the entire premise of this book, namely, that animals and humans living together do constitute family, that ideologies of the “authentic” animal problematically exclude both humans and their pets from the category of “animal,” and that biological kinship is not the sole or even primary basis for family. Instead, by looking at texts that purport to be about animals and their families, I want to ask what purpose these texts serve, particularly in terms of representing the grief the animals depicted therein feel when separated from their own kin. How are we to understand our own, often familial relations with animals, ones that are predicated upon non-human animals being separated from their own kin (and often species)? Do animal stories represent immersion in the human family as improvement over the (constructed as) lesser-familial ties of animal kin? Or are these stories meant to make us reflect upon our own role in disrupting animal kinship? The texts I deal with here can be divided into two broad categories: those in which the depictions of animal families occur only at the beginning of the text, before animals are adopted into human families, as seen in E. ­Burrows’s Neptune (1869) and Gordon Stables’s Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog (1893), and those which depict animals living together with their animal kin, such as Edis Searle’s Mrs. Mouser, or, Tales of a Grandmother (1875) and Madame De Chatelain’s Pussy’s Road to Ruin (1850). While both types of texts play with issues central to human families as filtered and explained through depictions of animal relations, there are marked differences between the two. The first more directly deals with issues of loss, addressing as it does the separation of animals from their kindred before they are placed within human homes. In their depictions of animals who lose mothers and siblings before arriving at their “true” families, these texts imaginatively negotiate the changing and disruptive nature of families in which events such as marriage, death, and childbirth

184 Conclusion both constitute and disrupt the first family unit. Nevertheless, by linking the human family with the privileged “second” family – that is, with the f­ amily constructed by affinal, as opposed to consanguinal, bonds – these texts ­inevitably privilege human/animal relations over animal/animal relations. By contrast, depictions of animals with their own families, particularly in those stories that focus on cats, often operate as thinly veiled explorations of working-class family life, demonstrating the divide between humans and animals was understood as similar to the divide between humans of different classes. In such texts as “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives,” for example, the alignment of animals and working-class people as alike experiencing hardship as a central feature of domestic life offers an opportunity to perhaps unconsciously acknowledge the fissures underlying the “fantasy of family,” as it obliquely addresses class privilege by demonstrating the extent to which the middle-class home relies upon the dissolution of other families to maintain the integrity of its own. Featuring cats and dogs who are expected to leave behind their families in order to obtain positions of often unequal servitude within their new families, these texts remind us that some families were required to be more temporary than others in order to support the edifice of the middle-class family as the constitutive unit of Victorian England. Such stories clearly use animal families primarily as a means of analyzing “foreign” families, such as those of the working class, but I argue R. M. Ballantyne’s Chit-Chat by a Penitent Cat (1876) does quite different work. In its sympathetic rendering of animal family life, Ballantyne’s text explores a form of intimacy that is at times explicitly non-human in its configurations and, in so doing, calls into question the supremacy of human relations. Fictional explorations of animal families occur almost entirely within children’s literature or in “animal autobiographies,” a genre that plays with ideas of animal alterity and with anthropomorphism in ways that deserve more analysis than space allows here.1 In short, the animal autobiography was a very popular genre in Victorian England and can be seen as developing out of the eighteenth-century “it-narrative,” an “odd sub-genre of the novel, a type of prose fiction in which inanimate objects (coins, waistcoats, pins, corkscrews, coaches) or animals (dogs, fleas, cats, ponies) serve as the central characters” (Blackwell 10). Early animal autobiographies such as Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little; or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751), for example, fit within the scope of the itnarrative, focusing less on the supposed speaking subject of the novel itself and more on the social world revealed through Pompey’s transition through it. As records of a thing’s movement through the world, it-narratives represent the polar opposite of the domestic novel, recording objects that “refuse relationships, existing in and of themselves” (Benedict 21). Some Victorian animal autobiographies, such as Ouida’s Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies (1870), are, as its lengthy title suggests, throwbacks to eighteenth-century it-narratives; there

Conclusion  185 is little depth given to Puck’s character and his relationships with those who own him are shallow at best. But texts such as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and Gordon Stables’s Sable and White, though equally committed to portraying a wide social world through their talking animals, are nevertheless more thoroughly invested in their protagonists as characters with depth who form attachments to humans and other animals in their lives in ways that are central to both the narrative itself and the talking animal’s life as it unfolds. As Teresa Mangum observes, “In the literary milieu of fictive animals like Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe, animals became impossibly positioned as fully articulate subjects with a great deal to say to their human readers and listeners” (“Dog Years” 35). As a result, their lives and adventures more closely parallel those of human protagonists of fictional autobiography than they do the adventures of a lost watch. A focus on birth and upbringing is a central feature of most biographies and autobiographies, and animal autobiographies are no different in this regard. Many begin with some statement about the speaking animal’s lineage and family background, often through an assertion of the speaker’s good “stock.” For example, Neptune proudly relates he is the result of good breeding: “On my father’s side I come of an old and noble family, his ancestors having been considered for many hundred years past as being amongst the best bred dogs in Newfoundland” (Burrows 4). In Lucy D. Thornton’s The Story of a Poodle (1890), we are told the protagonist had a father who “came of a high-born race, who for generations had ranked first among their fellows” (1). Luath of Sable and White relates to the reader a speech made to his mother by their master: “… you are the best Collie on the show benches, and the Collie with the longest pedigree” (Stables 15). In Harrison Weir’s Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier (1848), length of pedigree is a primary concern for Bob, who proudly proclaims: “The family of Terriers from which I am paternally descended, are as ancient as any in the kingdom. They neither came in with the Danes, the Saxons, nor the Romans, but were of genuine aboriginal breed” (9). Such lineage from dogs is perhaps not surprising, given the attention paid to dog breeds as a mark of character in Victorian England, but lest we think cats are excluded from vanity in one’s good background, Mrs. Mouser similarly boasts of being “a cat of very good family” (Searle 2), while the cat in “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives,” published in The Boy’s Own Magazine in 1860, somewhat tentatively relates, “I think I came of good stock. My mother moved in the most aristocratic society, and I have heard her state, more than once, that the mouser attached to the establishment of the French ambassador was my father. …” (22). Whether presented, as in the case of the dogs, as markers of the speaking animal’s character, a character seemingly guaranteed by their breeding, or as humorous parodies of lineage, as seen in the cats’ more vague and therefore possibly less trustworthy accounts of family heritage, these gestures toward lineage and breeding nevertheless all assert the importance of family background, both

186 Conclusion to the speaking animal and to the reading audience, for whom such family background is seemingly required in order to authorize the animal’s account. Bob, Luath, and Mrs. Mouser are all worthy of speech in part through their establishment of themselves as beings who come from somewhere, whose family background stands in as a testament to their “character,” in all the loaded meanings of that word in the Victorian period. While these narratives of family help authorize the talking animal as someone with connections, someone who will provide an honest account of his or her history to the reading audience, it is also true that for the talking animal, kinship is primarily about rupture and absence. Family might have produced each of these protagonists but it is often only briefly, if at all, represented as a unit with whom the protagonist lives and has relations. Instead, what makes each protagonist significant is the extent to which they are separate from their family; in being unique – and often this means uniquely beautiful – these protagonists win for themselves human families at the expense of their own. In the case of Neptune, his desire to show off earns him the attention of humans, much to the dismay of him and his mother: “I could hear my mother’s whine of agony. I could catch the voices of my brothers and sisters crying out in sympathy. … Oh, how often had my mother warned me to beware of the jealousy and the vanity which were the besetting sins of my nature” (Burrows 9). Family pride might be that which authorizes Neptune’s account, but personal pride also represents a flaw in his nature, a “besetting sin” that both makes him worthy of adoption by humans and separates him forever from his animal kin. Luath is similarly pluckier than his kin, calling out to them upon seeing a stranger, “[L]et us rend him limb from limb. Follow me to death or victory” (Stables 16). Such courage deserts him, however, when it results in his loss of his family: “I glanced wistfully back at my brothers and sisters, who all sat huddled in a heap, and looking very much astonished. How sad I felt! Poor mother came on after us with her head in the air, but was driven back, and I’ll never forget her pitiful, anxious face …” (17). For Luath and Neptune, personal vanity leads to separations from their families, their stories acting as cautionary tales for the child audience about the dangers of rivalry within the family unit. By overvaluing themselves within their family, these dogs lose their joys and comforts, truly becoming the “singular” individuals they aspire to be by standing out from their siblings. However, such singularity is important because, in dog narratives in particular, it represents the opportunity for elevation from one’s kith and kin to a better family, that of humans. In the case of dogs, the loss of the original family unit is often easily displaced by the joy of discovering a new family, and in some cases, they have been prepared from birth to await this new family. Neptune mourns the loss of his mother and siblings but immediately is enraptured with his human mistress: “I felt instinctively that this was Cousin Kate, and that I should indeed soon learn to love and to fear my new mistress” (Burrows 12). The narrator of “Memoirs of a Poodle,” published

Conclusion  187 in Little Wide Awake in 1876, details his introduction to his new family, with whom he seeks to win approval, by drawing upon his mother’s lessons: “My behaviour at my dinner enraptured the lookers-on. I know nothing more disagreeable than to see a hungry dog throw himself eagerly upon a plate of food. Remembering the counsels of my tender mother, I ate little, nor did I allow myself a morsel to fall from my mouth upon the plate. My character was established at once for being clean and well-behaved” (Barker 13). In this case, there is not so much a disruption between his early family life and his new one as there is a natural progression from dog family to human family, with careful tutelage from the mother ensuring success in his next familial endeavor. Such narratives of adoption, of transitioning from one’s birth family to one’s new family, serve as models, I argue, for the transitions that occur in between first and second family, from one’s childhood home, for example, to one’s marital home. Having animals become part of human families vividly enacts the exogamy of marriage, and in leaving behind their kin and becoming pets, these animals are represented as “moving up” in ways that mimic the desired social benefits of marriage. While the loss of the original animal family is presented as traumatic or heartbreaking, it is always assuaged by the obtainment of a new domestic arrangement in which the pet animal finds a higher family, along with their true place in the world and best purpose. Hajjin, the narrator of Frances Power Cobbe’s Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867), speaks of the moment when “a dog really loves,” professing excitedly, “That day was coming for me very soon!” (16). Hajjin’s declaration, “My dear old mistress! I did not think then how you were to be the object of my whole life’s affections” (18) quickly establishes the supremacy of her new family arrangement over the old. In detailing the preparation for and expectation of the pet animal for a life of devotion beyond his or her original family, these kinds of stories particularly mimic that of a young girl’s preparation for married life, in which leaving behind the comforts of one’s first home is necessary for the young girl to be the wife and mother she is destined to become. Cat autobiographies are quite different, reflecting both the different status of cats as pets and the differing analogy they provide in regards to humans. For a cat, being a singular individual within the family unit is primarily about basic survival, highlighting the vulnerability of animals in a world that prizes the singular animal as pet but views the species as a whole as pests. Singularity is both that which distinguishes one cat from another and that which is forced upon cats through the destruction of their family unit in the interests of serving human needs. In Mary Pilkington’s Marvellous Adventures; or, the Vicissitudes of a Cat (1802), the protagonist describes how “orders were given that the whole of her [the mother cat’s] progeny should have their existence terminated as soon as they drew breath,” with only “the prettiest” kitten left aside (3). When the protagonist of “The Adventures of a Cat Through her Nine Lives” tells of her birth, she

188 Conclusion relates a similar story of immediate peril, in which the human mistress of the home wants all the animals destroyed as punishment for the mother cat giving birth to her kittens in the mistress’s prized leg-horn bonnet. While the child of the home wants to keep all the kittens, the mistress remonstrates, “All! goodness, child! Do you want us to be devoured by cats? Come, tell me which one you like best?” (23). For the human mistress, the cat family represents an imminent threat, if not truly to the human family’s lives then at least to their space and property, the image of the family “devoured by cats” suggesting a home overrun with animals. But to pardon the one cat they “like best” is to preserve the balance of the family home, with the singular cat kept as beautiful pet and useful pest control. The speaker of “The Cat that Went to the Cat Show” relates a similar beginning, saying, “I believe it is to my beauty only that I owe it, that I did not share the fate of my brothers and sisters, who were all drowned immediately” (A. E. B. 85). The violence of many cat-origin stories, particularly compared to those of dogs, speaks to their very different rendering of familial disruption. Many cat autobiographies detail far more complicated relations between animal pets and human families, ones that capture not the transition from one similar home and family to another, better one but instead, the perils of a life born into servitude and inherently unequal relations, in which belonging to a family does not mean one is an equal member of a family. In “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives,” for example, the protagonist presents in great detail her mother’s fierce struggle to protect her kittens from imminent death. At first she “purr[s] round the lady’s petticoat quite apologetically” (23), but upon hearing that her kittens will be drowned, her manner changes instantly: “On hearing this, our mother at once left off purring, and defiantly, and in the presence of all of them, leapt into the bonnet to our protection. … ‘Let ‘em,’ growled our mother – ‘let ‘em sew you in a bag and throw you into the pond, my children, and, the very first time I catch their baby asleep, I’ll – I’ll – smother it!’” (23). In this moment, the mother cat perfectly enacts the liminal status of the animal within the home, in which the family pet is both insider and outsider at the same time. The mother cat initially joins in with the human progeny of the family in trying to placate the difficult human mother, placing herself within the dynamics of the family, but in a moment, the mother cat becomes savage, threatening violence and repercussions on those who would destroy her own kin. Her role within the human family is revealed to be highly contingent and inherently performative, an act of affection that is put on out of necessity and replaced with fierce antagonism when it no longer serves to protect her. It is fitting, therefore, that the account of her savagery mixes both human and animal speech, capturing as it does her status as a creature unevenly caught between two worlds: “Ow – phit! You two-legged murderers and barbarians, to leave me but one out of eight such darlings! But I’ll be revenged. Up to this time I have been an honest cat; henceforth I am a thief! Mi-ow! phit!

Conclusion  189 mi-ow! Ware hawk! look to your larder! … I’ve got crooked claws and strong jaws, and I’ll be the terror of the neighbourhood. I’ll teach the single brat you have left me to be a bigger thief than ever was hung at Tyburn!” (24) The text is largely sympathetic to the mother cat, yet her threats and imprecations are also sources of discomfort for the animal narrator, who begs us to remember “that she spoke under great excitement” (23). The narrator’s apology on behalf of her mother, combined with her assurances that she herself recovered from the death of her mother and siblings in “the course of a few hours” (24), allows this story of the mother’s suffering and death to work in two opposed ways, particularly in terms of the cat as analogy for oppressed humans. On the one hand, the story of the death of the children and the mother’s subsequent “unintentional suicide” by throwing herself against the cupboard door until she breaks her neck are tales of horror, meant to arouse sympathy for the helpless animals in a cruel, unjust world. Tess Cosslett observes, “[T]here is a clear formal parallel between the animal autobiography and the slave narrative, as published by the abolitionists to advance their cause. … [A]nimal autobiographers by writing in the first person bear witness to their human-like subjectivity, and often protest against humans who treat them like machines, rather than sentient beings” (80). While the cats here are not the same as the horses in Black Beauty, there is a disposability to the kittens as waste products of the mother cat, which is contrasted with her own highly emotional love for and protectiveness of them, that sharply recalls the separation of domestic slaves from their own children while forced to occupy a place within slaveholders’ families. As such, the narrator’s account of her mother’s and siblings’ deaths clearly participates in an animal-protectionist framework in its call for greater care for the feelings of animals, one that places the human reader uncomfortably alongside the oppressors and abusers of the novel. Nevertheless, the mother cat’s position as servant within the home also allows this account to serve as a cautionary tale for the middle-class reader. Insofar as the mother cat is figured as slave or animal, the mother’s actions are mostly sympathetic, but reading her as a servant makes her a far more complicated figure. The domestic cat was often figured as a working-class figure in animal autobiographies; in “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives,” for example, the protagonist speaks often about her need to obtain a “situation” (109) and her relationship with a feckless tabby who abuses her draws directly from narratives about the violence of workingclass domestic life. The fabulous Pussy’s Road to Ruin (1850) includes details in the upbringing of young Pussy that clearly indicate she is meant to be read as a kind of domestic servant: “Dame Tabby was very industrious herself, and she always sought to impress on little Pussy’s mind that she must not gad about, but endeavour to earn the food and lodging she received from the master of the house, by working as hard as she could”

190 Conclusion (Chatelain 4). And in Mrs. Mouser; or, Tales from a Grandmother (1875), Mrs. Mouser’s struggles with her ne’er-do-well kitten Smut closely mimic those of a working-class mother, as she tells him: “Nothing amiss had ever been laid to my charge, because I had been very careful to earn a good character for myself. …” (46), and “I did venture to warn him that a good home could not be easily got; and that if he wanted to have friends, he must try to behave better. Good cats deserved good homes, and generally contrived to get them. …” (111). In all these cases, cats operate as stand-ins for the working class, particularly for working-class domestic servants. The connection between house cats and domestic servants plays upon the seeming similarities between the two, both in terms of their usefulness and their potential for violence. The cat’s role within the home as useful predator combines savagery with service, and I argue that domestic servants, connected as they were to the lower classes who were similarly constructed as sharing a savage animality that might break out at any time, are imagined as being not so very different from the possibly feral cat. Pussy’s Road to Ruin, for example, lovingly details the fall of a well-raised domestic house cat, one whose mother has a good “character” and who has set for her daughter an example of proper service: “And Dame Tabby always wound up by telling Pussy that she must try above all things to become a good mouser as the surest way of gaining her master’s favor, and now that she was old enough, always took her with her whenever she went a-hunting, and spared no pains to teach her the art of catching mice” (Chatelain 8). If Pussy takes her mother’s advice, she will clearly be of great use to her master but instead, Pussy is led into vice by a “strange Grimalkin” (10) and, with him, engages in acts of theft and violence against her master’s and his neighbor’s property, even going so far as to take the master’s food from his own table. The image of her and the Grimalkin slaying a jackdaw in the garden directly references lower-class violence in its similarity to illustrations from the Newgate calendar, with the Grimalkin holding the bird by the neck and gleefully brandishing a knife while Pussy grimly holds down the bird’s legs. Mrs. Mouser similarly finds her young son infected with rebellion; he violently scratches his human master’s children and destroys their property, and when he is punished for it, his response clearly indicates a cat who does not know his place: “‘They dared to beat me! I’ll pay them out finely!’ stormed the little scamp, stamping his little black feet, and hissing, as only ill-tempered cats ever do” (Searle 40). Like Pussy, Smut is a cat who aspires to more, as seen further in his rejection of the occupation of mousing because “He was tired of such common food” (41). Smut and Pussy, in their failure to accept what Smut’s sister Snowball refers to as “our duty … what we were born for” (41), demonstrate the thin line of acceptable behavior for cats and household servants, for whom there is only either a “good character” born of dutiful obedience or a bad end for those who rebel. In light of the parallels between cats and domestic servants, the transformation of the mother cat in “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives” from “honest cat” to “thief” and “terror” reveals the anxiety

Conclusion  191 that underlies such portrayals of cat trauma within the middle-class home. Though clearly sympathetically imagined, the mother’s violence nevertheless elucidates fears about working-class resentment beneath the seemingly smooth surface of middle-class domestic life. However, the use of a cat, a mostly helpless victim of human cruelty, as a parallel for the servant arguably also reveals a sense of guilt in regards to class privilege. Though de facto members of the family, cats and servants are also vulnerable and unequal members within the household, and even obedient cats like Mrs. Mouser are capable of voicing their resentment of the loss of her own kin at the hands of their human masters: “Cats don’t care for their mothers, and their mothers don’t care for them, when they’ve grown up,” was Arthur’s answer; and I said to myself, “You little simpleton, what do you know about the matter?’ For I did care very much indeed. Snowball was my Snowball, and they had no business to call her theirs, and give her away, as if she were nothing at all but a toy, which they had bought at a shop. …” (125–26) There are two families at odds here: the cat family, which has no right to assert itself as a family, and the human family, who sees the cats as a combination of family member and possession, as something to be kept or to be parted with, according to the human family’s needs. In being an obedient member of the family, Mrs. Mouser must comply, even if her own rights to her family are violated. Even her son’s complaint before his exile upon threat of hanging for his misdeeds – “At first he declared that he should come back if he chose. He was born in that house, and it was his house” (110–111) – has a ring of truth to it; he was born into this house and it is the only home he knows, yet he has no more say as to whether or not he may stay there than does his perfectly obedient sister. All of these servants are of the home and part of the family, and yet not, and their own behavior, though essential to retaining their situations, by no means guarantees them a home. Their own familial relationships forced to be subordinate to their relationships to their masters, these cats might well harbor resentment about their role as supposed members of the family, and insofar as their relations mimic those of domestic servants, these depictions of cat families at odds with their human families may very well speak to an unconscious middle-class awareness of the injustice visited upon domestic servants within the middle-class home. Whether these stories detail dogs who discover new and better families destined for them or cats who dutifully, if resentfully, endure their unequal situations within more class-stratified versions of family, what both types of stories share is a representation of family as far more itinerant, impermanent, and shifting than the natural family as social building block would suggest. Family in these stories often comes across not as an unchanging aspect of life but instead as a series of relationships that continually, if not permanently and consistently, structure the speaking animal’s life. In Autobiography of

192 Conclusion a Cat; of the Cream of Cats, Too (1864), the narrator speaks of her many litters of kittens, one of which is drowned before her eyes, another of which “not one of them came into the world alive” (23), and finally, “two or three families which went one after another to various parts of the world as they grew up” (26). While the cat notes the first of these as being “the bitterest time” (14), yet her relations with her kittens and her feelings upon the loss of them are not dwelt upon; instead, her travels through life and her attempts to find a congenial situation for herself are far more significant to the overall narrative. In “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives,” the protagonist, as the title indicates, experiences many changes in her living situation, moving from one master and mistress to the next and experiencing much loss and hardship along the way. After witnessing the death of her kittens at the hands of her cruel tomcat “husband,” and then witnessing the death of the tomcat, she asks herself, “What had I got to live for – bereaved of my best friends, widowed, and kittenless?” (274). Nevertheless, she does go on to live two more lives, suggesting that one can recover from and move beyond even a catastrophic loss of family. While such a blasé attitude toward others might be expected of the cat, commonly constructed as more loyal to place than to people, we see a somewhat similar ability to move between “masters” in dog stories as well. In “Memoirs of a Poodle,” for example, Caesar is well loved by his wealthy family and even proves his worth to them by saving the life of their daughter; nevertheless, he is lost and recovered by various families throughout the novel, and each time accepts a change of name, status, and even occupation with seeming ease, expressing equal amounts of affection and loyalty for each successive family. Similarly, Lucy D. Thornton’s The Story of a Poodle details the loss and theft of Gaston from his master Robin, with him ending up as a performing dog, passed from one owner to the next. While one might expect that Gaston would express sorrow for the loss of his original home, the story instead focuses upon the grief he feels later at the death of the latest of a series of owners, a young peasant boy, Zacké. When José, as he is now called, is restored to master Robin in the end, the reunion is bittersweet, with “‘Gaston,’ as might be expected, … a little bewildered at first. Poor dog, he had experienced so many changes of home” (37). The replacement of the name José with the original Gaston suggests a restoration has taken place, but the narrative reveals that from the dog’s point of view, there is instead a divided loyalty to both beloved families: “I told him about my life. … He was so sorry for me when I told him how I loved Zacké; and he was not a bit jealous, but said he was sure he should have liked him just as much” (41–42). “Memoirs of a Poodle” presents a similar moment, in which Caesar, who becomes Fido, who becomes Fidèle, demonstrates love and fidelity to all his human masters: “My two masters amused themselves for some moments by calling me alternately by each of the names I had received. ‘Caesar!’ and I ran to Mr. Nelville. ‘Fidele!’ and I bounded off to Andre” (297).

Conclusion  193 Tess Cosslett has identified “the most recurrent pattern” of ending in the animal autobiography as “the recognition scene, which leads to a peaceful rural retirement with sympathetic owners” (89). For her, these endings suggest that “there is no life for these animals outside human society. When a human autobiographer gains social recognition and acceptance, and/or romantic fulfilment, a further phase of active life and independent accomplishment can follow. But for the domestic animal, the only sequel is retirement and death” (91). While I agree this ending characterizes most of these texts, I do not necessarily accept the conclusion Cosslett draws. For dogs such as Cobbe’s Hajjin and Burrows’s Neptune, there is definitely the sense that the life of these animals begins and ends with their human owners. But for many of the cats and dogs I examine here, the restoration to a caring human family, while certainly providing a symmetry to their narratives that brings their many adventures to a close, does not erase the variety of the lives they live in the interim, nor the evidence in the text of the pet animal’s capacity to find family in a variety of venues and with a broad number of both humans and other animals. In their depiction of pet animals who move from family to family, and between animal kin and companionship and human owners and mistresses and masters, these stories reveal that families might be as disposable to the pets as the pets often appear to be to their human families. And while it is possible to read the pet animal’s ability to move from home to home, from family to family, as evidence of a lack of loyalty and depth of feeling, a lack that is perhaps meant to mark them as lesser beings, I believe these stories also allow space for the authors to both fearfully and perhaps envyingly imagine family as something that can be lost, replaced, left behind, and rebuilt. Cosslett sees more scope for humans in the stories they tell for themselves, but I cannot help but observe that while Adam Bede, Agnes Grey, and Dorothea all find their stories at an end with the obtainment of marital partner and progeny, these animals experience family as something far less fixed and determined. The delightful Chit-Chat by a Penitent Cat (1874) by R. M. Ballantyne goes a step further than these animal autobiographies, blending human constructions of family with closely observed animal behavior so as to create a hybrid vision of family that is similar to, yet also decidedly other than, the familialism of Victorian discourse. For example, when Dingey speaks of his mother and sister, he does so in ways coincident with typical narratives of motherhood and sisterhood, saying of his mother, “Oh! how she loved me; and no one can conceive the strength of my love for her!” (9–10), and of his sister, “As I sat gazing at her with wonder, she put forward her soft threecornered mouth and kissed the point of my black nose. From that moment I loved her as tenderly, almost, as my mother. I threw my arms round her neck and hugged her” (13). But if Dingey’s love for his mother and ­sister echoes affective relations in human families, the narrative demonstrates that their ­physical relations are quite different: “Instead of embracing my ­sister, as I had intended to do, I pretended to fight with her. I fixed my teeth

194 Conclusion gently in her neck. …” (13–14). While the reader might be tempted to see this moment as an infantile misstep on the part of the newly born Dingey, Ballantyne makes clear that such a mixture of affection and aggression, of fighting and playing, are central to the cat family’s relations: I am quite sure that human creatures do not understand the extreme pleasure, the wild joy, that fills a kitten’s heart when it sees its mother’s four legs, and its little sister’s four legs, and their two tails, twirling together in a heap of confusion. I trembled with eagerness to join in the wild embrace, but their movements were so quick that I could not see how to attack them; so I shut my two eyes tight, set up all the hairs on my body and tail, stuck out every one of my eighteen claws, and, uttering a frightful shriek and a fuff, plunged into the midst of the fun. Words cannot describe my feelings. I was quite mad. I tugged, and tugged, and yelled, while they did the same to me and to each other; then we flew asunder, put up our backs and tails, and glared at one another fiercely. (28–29) Dingey describes here not just a mixture of playfulness and fiercesomeness but also a joyful coming-together of bodies, a surrendering of one’s self to a tangle of tails, and teeth, and claws that puts aside any hierarchy of age, gender, or birth order in favor of family experienced as a bundle of limbs and fur. The mother’s assertion that begins this engagement, “There’s nothing like being happy” (25–26), signals that far from the aged departer of wisdom, manners, and morals such as those depicted in texts such as Mrs. Mouser, we have here instead a mother who educates her kittens in the joys of the present and the physical, one who teaches them the pleasures of animality over the benefits of character and doing one’s duty. That these lessons and experiences set this cat family apart from humans is made very clear by Dingey who, rather than looking forward with trepidation or anticipation to life as part of a human family, instead expresses pity for humans as creatures who cannot comprehend the pleasures of cat existence. His belief that “Words cannot describe” his “feelings” directly challenges the construction of animal muteness as a sign of lack, and his “I am quite sure that human creatures do not understand the extreme p ­ leasure” of cat life is further echoed in his statement, “Oh! how exquisite it is to feel one’s hair stand on end! Human creatures never feel this pleasure. They have no hair to stand on end, poor things. …” (28–29). For Dingey, there is no privileging of human experience or human relations over his own; in fact, his very cat-centric point of view carries over into Dingey’s opinions on his human master, of whom he merely says, “We lived in the house of one of those long two-legged creatures called Man. Our man was a very kind one, poor thing, but silly, – at least I thought so, the more I saw of him and his companions” (15–17). While he does mention that the man has children, he says next to nothing of them because this human family is largely beside the point;

Conclusion  195 this is a story devoted instead to cat experience and cat ­familial ­relations. In his detailing of a kitten’s sense of bodies and boundaries that are deliberately set apart from human experience, Ballantyne attempts to imagine animal experience in ways not inherently anthropomorphic, in ways that, in fact, perhaps envyingly imagine a form of intimacy and identity that is freer and more expressive than allowed within the human family. Unfortunately, if realistically, the story of Dingey and his family ends very abruptly with, as many animal tales do, the disruption of the family unit: “Ah! how my heart mourns over those happy by-gone days. … I was taken rudely from my dear mother and sister at last. I was put in a basket and carried away, I know not whither, and I never saw them more. Oh! it makes me very sad when I think of my little sister and my mother. Alas! alas! fuff! mew!” (70–71). Ending the text itself with (an approximation of) the cat’s own voice is appropriate, as it preserves what the sudden conclusion of the tale makes clear: cat experiences of family are the central preoccupation of this text, rather than their life with humans. But this mournful ending also provides a vivid representation of what it means for an animal to become part of the human family, namely an end, often, to the companionship of their own kind, a companionship that Ballantyne makes clear humans cannot compensate for, however much we consider animals as part of our own families and homes. Most of the texts considered here, of course, barely recognize animals as a separate species from humans, instead writing both dogs and cats as though they were small, furry humans, concerned with the same issues of class, gender, and domestic relations as were their human readers. As Cosslett observes, “The project of creating identification between the human reader and the animal protagonist means that the differences between animal and human consciousness are not much explored” (70). As a result, texts that focus upon animal families, with the exception of Chit-Chat from a Penitent Cat, only marginally explore the concept of family as something that might differ greatly from or have different significance for animal kin than for human ones. In part, this fact suggests that the normalization of the family unit, and the perceived need to represent it as so fully “natural” that animal themselves were organized similarly, was exceedingly strong in the period, particularly in texts aimed at children. But I argue that the sadness encapsulated at the end of such a charming text as Ballantyne’s also speaks to another reason behind the cultural silence on the concept of animal familial relations, particularly in terms of our domestic pets. I believe that we do live with our animals in ways that often enrich both human and non-human animal lives, and that animals as part of the family and as domesticated species within human society more broadly are an inescapable fact of modern life. Yet I think anthropomorphism in representations of animals in the family demonstrates the extent to which we demand animals become part of the family on our terms, rather than allowing our companion species relations to challenge what family might mean in ways that confront human supremacy of the concept.

196 Conclusion Having said that, I believe the texts studied throughout this book ­ emonstrate the truth of Haraway’s assertion in The Companion Species d Manifesto: “Stories are much bigger than ideologies” (17). The presence of the pet as an often essential feature of the human family and the human home in Victorian domesticity encourages us, I argue, to recognize all familial arrangements as predicated on a careful negotiation of the endogamous and the exogamous, of family that is connected by blood and family that is connected by affinity. We might “confuse” our pets with our children, our significant others, and our siblings, but such confusion is central to all intense relationships, however much we might attempt to rigidly define them by terms such as “mother,” “sister,” and “child.” We define ourselves as human by defining our pets as animals, but at the end of the day, they share our beds, our lives, and our families. Perhaps no future can be built upon them, but they might instead remind us that familial and personal relationships, even short and transitory ones, have value beyond the imperatives of futurity and social and affective “investment.” NOTE  1. There are several excellent studies of animal autobiography, including Tess Cosslett’s Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 and Margo DeMello’s edited collection Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing (Routledge: 2013). See also Teresa Mangum’s “Dog Years, Human Fears” and Colleen Glenny Boggs’s chapter on “Rethinking Liberal Subjectivity: The Biopolitics of Animal Autobiography” in Animalia Americana.

REFERENCES A. E. B. “The Cat that Went to the Cat Show.” Little Wide-Awake: An Illustrated Magazine for Children” (date unknown). 85–87. 19th Century UK Periodicals. Accessed July 15, 2011. Autobiography of a Cat; of the Cream of Cats, Too: Illustrating the Truth of the Proverbs Respecting Them. London: Emily Faithfull, 1864. Ballantyne, R. M. Chit-Chat by a Penitent Cat. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1874. Barker, Mrs. Sale. “Memoirs of a Poodle.” Little Wide Awake: A Story Book for Children. London and New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1876. Blackwell, Mark. “Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory.” The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in ­Eighteenth-Century England. Ed. Mark Blackwell. Bucknell University Press: Cranbury, N.J., 2007. 9–14. Benedict, Barbara M. “The Spirit of Things.” The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Ed. Mark Blackwell. Bucknell University Press: Cranbury, N.J., 2007. 19–42. Burrows, E. Neptune; or, the Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog. London: Griffith and Farran, 1869.

Conclusion  197 Chatelain, Madame de. Pussy’s Road to Ruin, or, Do as You are Bid. Translated freely from the German. London: Joseph, Myers & Co., 1850. Cobbe, Frances Power. The Confessions of a Lost Dog. London: Griffith and Farran, 1867. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Coventry, Francis. The History of Pompey the Little: or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008. Mangum, Teresa. “Dog Years, Human Fears”. Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. 35–47. Pilkington, Mary. Marvellous Adventures; or, the Vicissitudes of a Cat. London: Vernor and Hood, 1802. Searle, Edis. Mrs. Mouser; or, Tales of a Grandmother. London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, 1875. Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. New York: Doubleday, 1922. Stables, Gordon. Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog. London: ­Jarrold & Sons, n.d. “The Adventures of a Cat Through Her Nine Lives.” The Boy’s Own Magazine Volume 6. London: S. O. Beeton, 1860. Thornton, Lucy D. The Story of a Poodle. By Himself and His Mistress. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1890. Weir, Harrison. Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be written by himself. London: Grant and Griffith: 1848.

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Index

Adams, C. 22, 54 Adams, J. E. 36, 54 Adams, M. 49, 54 A Dog of Flanders see Ouida A. E. B. 188, 196 A Flatiron for a Farthing see Ewing, J. H. A History of our Cat, Aspasia see Parkes, B. R. alterity 5, 6, 113, 184 animal autobiography 38, 184–95 animality 2, 16, 116, 163, 190, 194 Animal World ix, xi, 61, 95, 138, 139, 141, 144, 147–50, 152, 157–62, 167–68, 180, 181 Anstey, F. 49–52, 53 anthropomorphism 5, 6, 184, 195 Argyle, G. 31, 54 Autobiography of a Cat; of the Cream of Cats, Too 191–92, 196 bachelors 10, 13, 33, 53, 65, 69–70; and dogs 102–4, 111; and sexuality 11, 103, 109, 111–12, 115, 130; as misogynists 121–3; as “society’s pet” 91; in comparison to spinsters 65, 96, 110 Balfour, C. 1, 12, 15, 69–73, 92–93 Ballantyne, R. M. 14, 184, 193–95 Band of Mercy, Band of Mercy Advocate ix, xi, 141, 143, 147–9, 151–2, 167–8, 178, 180–2 Barker, Mrs. S. 186, 192, 196 Barnaby Rudge see Dickens, C. becoming-animal see Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. “Bend or Break: A Story for Parents” 11, 157–62, 180 Benedict, B. M. 184, 196 bestiality 9, 71, 111, 113, 114, 132 Berg, M. 23–5, 26, 27, 38, 44, 54, 99, 125, 136

Berger, J. 3, 9, 15, 101 Black Beauty see Sewell, A. Blackwell, M. 184, 196 Boggs, C. G. 5, 9, 15, 132, 149, 178, 196 Braddon, M. E. 13, 56, 80–4, 94, 99–100, 143–5 Brontë, A. 12, 17, 19, 23, 26, 27, 54; Agnes Grey 23, 24, 26, 37, 38; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 20, 27, 44, 99, 136–7 Brontë, E. 155, 156, 180 Brown, L. 6, 8, 36, 18, 54; the lady and the lapdog trope 22, 40, 43, 68, 121, 134 Bruhm, S. and Hurley, N. 136, 137 Bulwer-Lytton, E. 12, 66–9, 79, 94 Burrows, E. Neptune 38–40, 54, 183, 185, 186, 193; Tuppy 165, 180 Byron, G. G. 100, 137 cats 2, 11, 15, 18, 25, 50, 147; and domesticity 60–2, 184, 189–91; and spinsters 12, 56, 5, 60, 63–4, 79, 81–2, 84, 87–9, 92, 110; and women 19–21, 12, 77, 100; as anti-pet 60, 74; lineage 185; victims of violence 157, 187–89, 192 Chatelain, M. de 183, 190, 197 Chit-Chat by a Penitent Cat see Ballantyne, R. M. children and childhood 2, 7, 13–14, 26–7, 56, 78, 85, 89, 90, 116, 136, 146; and pet-keeping 5, 22–3, 46, 149–50; animal progeny 188–9; as progeny 8, 9–11, 12, 22, 29–30, 42, 44, 46, 49, 62–4, 73, 86, 96, 97, 107, 132; as waifs and strays 140, 162–9, 170–2, 179; childishness 19, 42–3, 52, 67, 84, 86, 91, 125–7, 129, 139–43; child-rearing 5, 8, 19, 85,

200 Index 155–162, 179; children’s literature 5, 11, 52, 67, 74–5, 147, 178, 184, 196; link with animals 1–2, 3–4, 9–12, 18, 22, 62–4, 71–3, 75, 89, 124, 127–34, 135; see also orphans Cobbe, F. P. 14, 187, 193, 209 Coleridge, S. T. 165 Collins, W. 13, 179; The Two Destinies 56, 84–91, 94, 95; The Woman in White 13, 124–34, 137 Confessions of a Lost Dog see Cobbe, F. P. Cook, E. “Chapter on Old Maids” 62–4, 94; “The Violet Boy” 168, 180 Corbett, M. J. 3, 7, 15, 152, 179 Cosslett, T. 22, 54, 147, 189, 193, 195, 196 Courtney, W. L. 105, 111, 137 courtship 8, 12, 17, 25–33, 40–2, 49–51, 115 Coventry, F. 184, 197 cruelty see pets, and cruelty Cunningham, H. 163, 170, 180 Cyon, E. de 59, 80, 94 Danahay, M. 97, 98, 135 Daston, L. and Mitman, G. 18, 54 David Copperfield see Dickens, C. Davidoff, L. 7, 15 Davidoff, L and Hall, C. 5, 7, 15, 25 Davin, A. 168, 180 Deleuze, G. and Guattari F. 15; becoming-animal 2, 3, 78–80; pets and the family 2, 3, 78 DeMello, M. xi, 196 Denisoff, D. 125, 137 Denenholz Morse, D. 136, 169, 179, 180 Dickens, C.; Barnaby Rudge 13, 97, 113–16; David Copperfield 17, 34–5, 40–3; Oliver Twist 116–19, 169, 179 dogs 2,3, 11, 12, 15, 31, 33, 64; as family 5, 6, 10, 18, 23, 60, 62, 124, 145–6, 151–2, 186; as male companions and rivals 96–8, 100– 101, 104, 106–123; curs and strays 116, 117, 163, 167, 169; dying, disappearing 42–51, 175–7; lap-dogs 2–3, 18, 21–3, 27–9, 67, 98–100, 134, 145–6, 151–2, 186; lineage 172, 175, 184–85; hunting and working dogs 28, 30, 32, 99, 126, 129, 145, 173–75 domesticity 1, 74, 77, 127, 135, 169; and cats 20–1, 60–2, 74; and dogs

22–23, 26, 29–30; and domination 127–30, 132; and men 42–3, 97–98, 119, 121–2, 124; and pets 4–5, 139, 146; and reproductive futurism 8–9, 62, 96, 177; and women 26, 30, 31, 42, 43, 60–2, 68, 73, 78, 84, 121, 171; animal/human 1, 60, 64, 75–9, 122–4, 124–34, 150–5; threats to 51, 53, 78, 97, 105, 119, 120, 140, 162–3 see also children and childhood; familialism; fathers, fatherhood; mothers, motherhood domination see pets, and domination; domesticity, and domination Donald, D. 100, 101, 137 Dorré, G. M. 179, 180 Doughty, T. 56, 94 Drift, A Story of Waifs and Strays see Balfour, C. Edelman, L. 15, 110; reproductive futurism 8–11, 48, 56, 68–9; sinthomosexual/ity 8, 72, 85 Eliot, G. 12, 20, 27; Adam Bede 12, 13, 19, 20, 36, 37, 97, 121–4; Middlemarch 12, 17, 27–9 Ewing, J. H. 14; A Flatiron for a Farthing 153–155, 180; Six to Sixteen 103–104, 137, 139, 145–6, 151–2 familialism 6–7, 13, 17, 43, 46, 47, 193 family 1–12; animal families 14, 184– 95; animal/human families 56–7, 72, 77, 89, 97, 121–30, 196; animals as members of 2–5, 9–11, 15, 23, 26–7, 45–6, 60–1, 97, 135, 139–52; as an ideal 6, 8, 23, 97–8, 141; as institution 3, 5, 8, 9, 48–9, 56, 58, 69–70, 80, 81, 84, 86, 91, 127, 132, 140–1, 144, 163–4, 169, 176, 177, 179, 184, 185–6; the “natural” or nuclear family 1–5, 6–7, 9, 13, 14, 42, 44, 46, 52, 60, 91, 124, 128, 130, 135, 152, 169, 178, 191; the wider family 7–8, 13, 57–8, 62, 74 see also domesticity; familialism fathers, fatherhood 5, 7, 8, 13, 25, 97, 103, 154; and masculinity 25, 103, 120, 123–4, 143, 156, 158–60, 161; in Adam Bede 45–6, 123–4; in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 44–5; in The Woman in White 128–134; see also patriarchy

Index   201 Flegel, M. 163, 180 Fleming (Flemyng), A. 21 Freud, S. 115, 128, 137 Fudge, E. 4, 15, 27, 36, 60 Fulford, T. 105, 137 Garber, M. 4, 9, 10, 18, 21, 54, 115, 135 gender 1, 5, 10, 12, 13, 15; and pet-keeping 18, 28, 33, 98; and power 36–40, 62, 114, 151, 166, 195; performance 48–9, 53, 88, 97; relations 48, 60, 87, 124; roles 28, 41, 43, 48, 52, 57–8, 114, 141, 150, 156 see also bachelors; fathers, fatherhood; mothers, motherhood; spinsters Giffney, N. and Hird, M. 10, 15, 132 Goodall, A. A. 150, 180 Gordon, E. and Nair, G. 37, 48, 54, 57, 58, 59, 78 Gray, R. 52–3, 54. Greg, W. R. 58, 94 Gruen, L. 99, 137 Hallenbeck, s. 27, 55 Hatten, C. 6, 7, 8, 15, 45, 55 Haraway, D. 2, 15, 140, 186, 196; pets as children 3, 140, 165, 177; queering animal studies 10 Harrison, B. 166, 180 Helbeck of Bannisdale see Ward, M. heteronormativity 8, 11, 23, 41–2, 51–2, 90, 129, 132, 177; and men 102, 103, 110, 121, 123–5, 129, 134; and women 56, 77, 80, 87; see also queerness, queer theory and sexuality Hill, B. 57–60, 80, 94 Howell, P., 98, 137 Holmes, M. S. 85, 87, 94 Hufton, O. 80, 94 Jameson, F. 177, 180 Jeffreys, S. 93 Kete, K. 4, 9, 15, 16, 146; cats 19–20, 60, 74; dogs 22, 101; pets as members of the family 4, 5, 9; pets in the bourgeois home 1, 55 Kidd, K. 136, 137, 157 Kranidis, R. 12, 16, 57, 59 Kreilkamp, I. 2, 5, 6, 11, 16, 141, 146, 156, 162, 164, 181 Kuzniar, A. A. 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 115, 132, 138

Lane, C. 93, 94, 116 Lansbury, C. 22, 55 Lomax, E. 169, 181 Lost Gip see Stretton, H. Lowe, B. 16 Lundblad, M. 2, 16 Mangum, T. 5, 6, 16, 100, 138, 185, 196, 197 Marcus, S. 89, 95 Mason, J. 4, 16, 149, 179 Marryat, F. 104, 105, 110; The Dog Fiend 13, 97, 104–112 Marvellous Adventures; or, the Vicissitudes of a Cat see Pilkington, M. McCrea, B. 8, 16, 72 McHugh, S. 21, 55, 111 Meade, L. T. 14, 140, 168, 170–3, 175–7, 181 Memoirs of a Poodle see Barker, Mrs. S. Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier see Weir, H. “Miss Jemima’s Cat” see Gray, R. Moore, G. 117–119, 136, 138 mothers, motherhood 1, 5, 7, 14, 45–6, 49, 50, 61–2, 81, 83; animal motherhood 185–196; in Adam Bede 21; in A Flatiron for a Farthing 153–4; in Agnes Grey 23–5; in David Copperfield 42–3; in Middlemarch 29–30; in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 20; in The Two Destinies 86, 89; spinsters and motherhood 12, 56–60, 62–5, 67–9, 71, 73, 77, 78 Mrs. Mouser; or, Tales from a Grandmother see Searle, E. My Novel see Bulwer-Lytton, E. Nelson, C. 58, 59, 95, 151 Neptune: or, the Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog see Burrows, E. Nussbaum, F. 80 Ogden, D. 29, 55 Oliver Twist see Dickens, C. orphans 10, 47–8, 69, 71, 140, 145, 152; as uncanny 140, 162, 164, 169, 176, 177 Ouida A Dog of Flanders 14, 140, 170, 173–7, 179, 181; Puck 184 Oulton, C. 17, 55, 102, 136 Owen, a Waif see Robinson, F. W.

202 Index Parkes, B. R. 13, 73–8, 95 patriarchy 1, 6, 9, 20, 22, 31, 33, 42, 79, 98–101, 111, 127–8; see also fathers, fatherhood Pearson, S. 4, 16, 37; connections between children and pets 1, 3, 4, 9, 135, 139, 141, 146; pet-keeping 5, 23, 160, 179 Peters, L. 140, 162, 164, 169, 177, 179, 181 pets 3, 9, 15, 33, 92, 97; and class 5, 51, 106–108, 116–18, 163–6, 167–77, 189–91; and cruelty 6, 25, 38, 98–100, 109, 111, 117, 118–19, 122, 148, 155–162, 166–7, 187–9, 192; and domination 3–4, 18, 32, 106–8, 127–8, 158; and literature 5–6, 21–2, 30, 46; and narcissism 3, 17, 101; anti-pets, 21, 74, 79, 84, 106–8, 116–118; as characters 23, 37–40, 119, 183; as children 1, 2, 3, 4, 9–10,56, 63, 69, 73, 93, 125–30, 133, 139, 140–9; as means of courtship 26–33; as surrogates 17, 24, 45, 60, 62–4, 118–19, 123–4, 134, 150–5, 196; as symbols and analogies 18–22, 49; disappearing, dying 41–52; “pets” 20, 23, 29, 35, 41, 42, 71–2, 91, 113, 139, 141; petkeeping 3, 4, 18, 22–3, 30, 69–72, 75, 149–50; “pet love” 4, 9, 11, 56, 67, 131–2, 134 Pilkington, M. 187, 197 Plotz, J. 146, 181 Pollock, M. S. 179, 181 Prins, Y. 74, 95 Puck: His Vicissitudes, Adventures, Observations, Conclusions, Friendships, and Philosophies see Ouida Pussy’s Road to Ruin see Chatelain, M. de queerness, queer theory 8–10, 85, 88, 110, 132, 136; see also sexuality reproductive futurism see Edelman, L. Ritvo, H. 4, 9, 16, 116, 120, 135 Robinson, F. W. 163–6, 181 Rogers, K. 20, 55, 60, 61, 74, 93, 100 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) xi, 139, 141, 149, 156–8, 166–8 Runions, E. 132, 138

Sable and White see Stables, G. Sanders, C. R. and Arluke A. 33, 34, 55 Scamp & I see Meade, L. T. Searle, E. 183, 185, 190, 197 Sedgwick, E. 51, 55, 101, 125 Sewell, A. 185, 189, 197 sexuality 1, 10, 11, 12, 15, 85, 109, 136; animal 19–20, 21, 61, 74, 115; female 19, 22, 32–3, 43, 58–9, 93; heterosexuality 8, 36, 47–8, 63, 86, 103; homosexuality 11, 51–2, 85, 110–12, 125, 136; male 47, 53, 115; see also heteronormativity and queerness, queer theory Simons, J. 15, 16 sinthomosexual/ity see Edelman, L. Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls see Ewing, J. H. Snyder, K. V. 103, 138 spinsters 3, 12–13; and pets 60–4, 66, 69–73, 78–9, 82, 84, 87–9, 92; and sexuality 9, 11, 58–9, 63, 67, 85, 87, 90, 93; as anti-social 78–84, 93; as excess or surplus 57–8, 59–60, 65–6; as failed caregivers 67, 71–2; as objects of pity 56, 63–4, 78, 87; as salvageable 52–3, 68–9, 73; as scholars 57, 59–60, 80–4, 92; in comparison to bachelors 96, 104, 107, 110, 124, 134; spinster-clustering and female companionship 74, 76, 77–8, 79, 84; see also mothers, motherhood Stables, G. 183, 185, 186, 197 Stretton, H. 168, 169, 179, 180, 181 Surridge, L. 32, 55, 98–99, 118–119, 125, 136 “The Adventures of a Cat through Her Nine Lives” 184, 185, 187–192, 197 The Black Poodle see Anstey, F. “The Cat that Went to the Cat Show” see A. E. B. The Confessions of a Lost Dog see Cobbe, F. P. The Dog Fiend, or Snarley-yow see Marryat, F. The History of Pompey, the Little see Coventry, F. The Stray Dogs of London 61, 95, 96, 101, 138, 167, 181 The Story of a Poodle see Thornton, L. D.

Index   203 Thiel, E. 16; natural family 1, 2, 7; spinsters 67; trans-normative families 69, 152 Thornton, L. D. 14, 185, 192, 197 Tosh, J. 55; homosociality 101; manliness 25–26, 97; men and domesticity 42, 97 Tromp, M. 118, 127, 136, 138 Tuan, Y. 3, 9, 16, 18, 110, 128 Tuppy: or, the Autobiography of a Donkey see Burrows, E. Turner, J. 22, 55, 157, 166

Vicinus, M. 74, 95 Vixen see Braddon, M. E. Von Hacht, B. 92, 95, 123 Wagner, T. 90, 95 Walton, J. K. 136, 138 Ward, M. 30–4, 46–9, 55. Weir, H. 36, 55, 101, 185 Wood, J. C. 120, 138, 166 Yabrough, W. W. 75, 95