(Un)muzzled: Dogs in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction

ABSTRACT

‘UNMUZZLED, among the pages of fiction the Dog meets us almost everywhere’

(Phil Robinson, ‘Some Notable Dogs in Fiction’, 1898)¹

The nineteenth century saw considerable changes in attitudes towards animals, especially those of ‘the friend of man’: the dog.² The 1835 Cruelty to Animals act, which banned dog-fighting, and the first dog show, which took place in 1859, mark the mid-nineteenth century as a particular moment in which the sentiment was cultivated that the dog was a household companion, to be cherished and prized, rather than an outdoor animal, to be beaten and mistreated. The growing pervasiveness of dog pet-keeping practices among the middle and working classes permeated the literary imagination of the period. This was noted by contemporaries, not least the author of my epigraph, the naturalist and journalist Philip Stewart Robinson, whose capitalized designation hints at its subject’s new-found status. Writing at the end of the century, Robinson’s round-up article takes his readers on a retrospective look back at the many dogs of Victorian fiction, from Bulls-eye in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), Frederick Marryat’s Snarleyyow (1837), Bran in Charles Kingley’s Hypatia (1853), and Roswal in Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825), to modern variations on the Gelert legend. His value judgements of these works return again and again to the supposed accuracy of their canine representation: ‘To appreciate the dog of Dickens, and the truthfulness of the portraiture, one has only to read Marryat’s extraordinary invention of the Dog-Fiend, a story of an utterly impossible dog’.³ This article seeks to disrupt this binary, contending that the special place of the dog in Victorian fiction relies simultaneously on the truthfulness and the extraordinariness of its representation. Through three case studies, it demonstrates the ways in which the figure of the dog thus comes to function at the disruptive intersection of the narrative and extra-narrative workings of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century.

Dogs of all shapes and sizes feature prominently in the work of Charles Dickens, Robinson’s model par excellence, and a novelist frequently attracted to the narrative potentiality of their boisterous characteristics. For Robinson, ‘No writer has ever shown a more intimate knowledge of canine character than Dickens, or more affectionate fidelity in the description of a dog’s way, its gestures and expressions, the smaller details of its behaviour or appearance’, singling out in particular Bill Sikes’s ‘miserable mongrel dog’ Bull’s-eye in Oliver Twist as ‘a work of art’.⁴ His appraisal comes after half a century of what Jerome Meckier has called the ‘realism wars’ of the period, in which novelists sought to establish and outdo one another in their representation of ‘the real’ and ‘truth’ to the assessment of their critics.⁵ Jed Etsy uses the same term to describe current theoretical debates on realism, which often take the subjective ‘characterological criteria of inner depth or psychological authenticity’, that subjective problematic of the realistic dialectic, as their measure.⁶ Robinson’s assessment of canine character, whose psychological interiority remained inaccessible if contested throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, centres rather on its physical manifestation: does the subject look and behave like a dog? And not just like any dog, but the ‘good’ domestic dog, bred for its loyalty and affection?⁷ This is the basic referential definition of the dog as character, participant in the narrative events of the novel, which I take as my starting point in this article. However, as I go on to show, Dickens’s dogs become more than instances of the reality-effect, and their function more than representational of their outward characteristics.

It is in Dombey and Son (1848), a narrative in which Dickens is centrally concerned with questions of appropriate emotional expression, that Diogenes the dog becomes his most complex canine subject. Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding’s observation that ‘The “general” memorandum for the final double number (MS V & A) [ . . . contains] a list of characters, ticked off as they make their final appearances (the Skettleses, Miss Tox and Diogenes the dog, in insertions in proof)’, proves that Dickens himself saw Diogenes as a character in the novel.⁸ In doing so, Dickens takes up and extends the new, special position enjoyed by the dog in the middle-class Victorian home, as both the closest species to, though not quite, a human. Yet the dog’s function relies on his being neither a character nor less than a character, but on the ways in which he exceeds the expectations of his role as a pet altogether; a notion reflected at its most basic level in the matter of naming. It is only upon Diogenes’s adoption into the Dombey household after little Paul’s death that Dickens explicitly refers to his namesake: ‘Diogenes the man did not speak plainer to Alexander the Great than Diogenes the dog spoke to Florence’.⁹ On the one hand, the name is simply a joke. In the same year, Dickens’s friend, the dog-painter Sir Edwin Landseer, exhibited Alexander and Diogenes, wherein a gold-collared bull-dog looks down on a shaggy dark cur; both artists thus pun on the dog theme associated with the Cynic (Greek: κυνικός, dog-like) philosopher, who praised the animal’s simple virtues.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Diogenes the dog must now carry the weightier associations of Diogenes the man. Even the nickname given to him by Florence, ‘Di’, reflects this doubleness, as well as further potential connotations of death. In a novel ostensibly concerned with the fluctuations of the material – ‘circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth’ – Diogenes becomes a crucial part of its affective economy.¹¹

In this article, I argue that Diogenes – and dogs in the mid-nineteenth-century novel more generally – cannot be considered simply or wholly as characters, but as canine bodies that become oversubscribed sites of unprocessed emotion. Recent criticism of literary anthropomorphism and research into the representation of non-human subjectivities, that extended search for the ‘inner depth’ of character, has somewhat obscured the more abstract and anomalous function of the dog in Victorian fiction. Studies of the biographical, and, therefore, verisimilar connections between real and imagined pets – Dickens, along with many other Victorian novelists, owned and wrote about multiple dogs – have had a similar effect. Yet dogs matter primarily in the ways in which they go beyond subjecthood, and the tensions between a pet dog’s uncanny humanity and preternatural instincts, combined with their abrupt textual appearances and disappearances in moments of heightened conflict, have a profound effect on the prose rhythms of Victorian fiction. I contend that it is the dog’s extralinguistic reach in the text which allows for the circulation of intense and often violent affects like grief, sexual desire, and anger, without compromising the structures of the realist novel, and that a tension between affect and realism is constitutive of the genre. I use the terms affect and affective flexibly, but always in line with the distinction made by Frederic Jameson, whose work I engage throughout, between affect as an unreified state of being and emotion as able to be expressed in language.¹² As such, this article is an intervention in a Jamesonian kind of history of realism, in which the representation of emotion is not a feature of but fundamental to its workings, and paying attention to its signifiers can re-energize readings of realism as a straightforwardly descriptive form.¹³ This is particularly important in the general context of the mid-nineteenth century when writers anxiously sought to distance themselves from the Romantic idea of the passions and to establish a more moderate model of the emotions, ‘to provide for an (imaginative) space for the emotions while simultaneously remaining in control of them’.¹⁴

My argument here is that the novel settles on the dog as a provisional solution to this socio-literary dilemma; its taming of the dog forms part of an attempt to tame ‘the very wildness of Romanticism’, to acknowledge but not become overwhelmed by affects that threaten to plunge it into the realm of sentimentality or melodrama.¹⁵ By establishing the singularity of the position occupied by the figure of the dog in mid-nineteenth-century fiction I necessarily re-focus Ivan Kreilkamp’s formative claim that ‘there is no realist novel without the presence, albeit often marginal or occluded, of the animal as a potential subject of domestication or friendship’ on the canine body most frequently linked with these overlapping potentialities; to adapt T. S. Eliot’s axiom, a dog is not a cat.¹⁶ Kreilkamp’s emphasis on the dual possibilities of domestication and friendship is reflective of the general critical propensity to deal with the narrative dimensions of these ‘minor’ characters. Where critics who have paid attention to the association of the dog with forms of emotional expression and mediation in these narratives – in other words, with affective work – have tended to read the domestic dog as arbiter of a gentle, sympathetic education, my work considers rather its persistent invocation as a site of turbulent affect.¹⁷ Consequently, it paves the way for a fuller understanding of the interrelationship between the liminal position of the dog and the fraught dynamics of the novel form at mid-century.

In her influential publication on the rise of the dog fancy in Britain, Harriet Ritvo writes that the dog was ‘the most physically malleable of all animals, the one whose shape and size changed most readily in response to the whims of breeders’, and that it was ‘the dog’s plastic body’ that accounted for its novel standing as favoured pet in nineteenth-century Britain.¹⁸ The plasticity of Diogenes’s body, as well as name, is visually evident in Hablot Knight Browne’s various illustrations of his alternatively shrinking and growing form.¹⁹ In one instance, Browne appears to compromise his faithfulness to the text by inserting Diogenes into the plate ‘Mr Carker introduces Himself to Florence and the Skettles Family’, despite his being left at home during Florence’s visit to the Skettleses in Chapter 24.²⁰ However, in the text, Diogenes’s narrative entrances are always purposeful rather than ornamental. None more so than in Chapter 18, ‘Father and Daughter’, with its misleading connective, as Florence, rejected by her father, flies directly from Dombey’s room to her own ante-chamber, where Diogenes sleeps:

‘Oh Di! Oh dear Di! Love me for his sake!’

Diogenes already loved her for her own, and didn’t care how much he showed it. So he made himself vastly ridiculous by performing a variety of uncouth bounces in the ante-chamber, and concluded, when poor Florence was at last asleep, and dreaming of the rosy children opposite, by scratching open her bedroom door: rolling up his bed into a pillow: lying down on the boards, at the full length of his tether, with his head towards her: and looking lazily at her, upside down, out of the tops of his eyes, until from winking and winking he fell asleep himself, and dreamed, with gruff barks, of his enemy.²¹

Becoming the nexus of Florence’s intense emotions of grief, but also of loneliness, longing, love, and disappointment, and commanded to take on the affective duties of absent father and dead brother – the possessive pronoun hangs deliberately unfixed – Diogenes’s representational function is stretched far beyond that of a pet dog. Thus, he is not only physically, but affectively malleable, becoming the locus of complicated affects that push against the boundaries of discrete, representable emotion. Crucially, he does so without understanding or needing to process them in the way a human subject would, allowing the narrative to move on from the maudlin scenes surrounding little Paul’s death. Critics have rightly interrogated Dickens’s complicated relationship to realist aesthetics, ‘since so much of Dickens appears as the avoidance or suppression of realism’.²² Yet dogs are uniquely positioned to mediate between the realist and the melodramatic elements of Dickens’s novels precisely because their signification works in the opposite direction: starting from their familiar, textual position as pets, they become sites where a threatening kind of excess can be located and at least partially avoided or suppressed. In the above scene, for example, Dickens is able to acknowledge but also characteristically to diffuse the build-up of heightened emotional tension through humour, with a detailed sketch of Diogenes’s ‘vastly ridiculous’ performance, before he eventually settles to sleep ‘upside down’ beside his mistress.

‘What might it mean to take Diogenes’s role seriously?’, Kevin A. Morrison asks in a recent article on the ideological function of the pet in the novel.²³ Where Morrison is concerned with the parallel narrative transformations of Diogenes and Dombey from beast to human, I am interested in the ways in which Diogenes’s representative function exceeds both these designations. Within the long sentence that describes Diogenes’s behaviour in the passage above hides Florence’s dream of a functional family, embodied in the image of ‘the rosy children opposite’. Diogenes’s presence mitigates the need for the processing of difficult emotions in this scene, and his affectionate unruliness will be invoked with the same purpose in a later chapter, after Dombey strikes and banishes Florence from the family home. The recurrence of this pattern of affective delay – carried out over several hundred pages – makes him instrumental in the build-up to the eventual coming together of Dombey and Florence. Upon reading the final instalment of the novel, Lady Blessington wrote to Dickens’s biographer John Forster:

The catastrophe of that bad man is so powerfully written, that I could wish the Number closed with it, for there is no going into the marriage of Florence, with all its simple and touching details, with the spirit with which they should be read, after the strong excitement of the previous pages.²⁴

For some readers, then, the powerful affective intensities conjured up by the text could not be fully dissipated through humour or traditional narrative resolution. I do not suggest that this impact was achieved through the figure of the dog alone, but that the body of the dog proved an ideal – if increasingly unstable – repository for excess affect in the novel.

In order better to understand how the tripartite relationship between dogs, realism, and affect formed in the mid-nineteenth century, it is important to ask: what does the canine body, charged with all kinds of displaced emotion, offer the realist novel? In a foundational study on pet-keeping, Kathleen Kete writes of the dog’s appeal to the Parisian bourgeoisie: ‘Dogs were eternal children, captive outside of narrative, without a past, a future, or a culture’.²⁵ These qualities likewise gave them fictional appeal. In fact, Kete’s very terms – eternal, narrative, past and future – are crucial to Jameson’s conceptualization of the paradoxical structure of realism as a genre: ‘a tension between plot and scene, between the chronological continuum and the eternal affective present [ . . . ] marks out the space in which realism emerges and subsists’.²⁶ This is also to say that the struggle of narrative versus affective energies, the representable against the unrepresentable, is inherent in, and indeed productive to, the dynamics of realist writing. Despite timely contestations of the unity of the realist novel, these categories remain useful for our understanding of the balancing act required on the part of the aspiring novelist, quite aside from their success, in representing what would be considered a plausible reality.²⁷ That dog characters occupy the same narrative timeline as their human counterparts is self-evident. To illustrate the ways in which the figure of the dog simultaneously embodies an eternal present, I turn to the work of Dickens’s direct contemporary, Charlotte Brontë, whose novels are likewise filled – not coincidentally – with canine presence and powerful affect alike. Where Dickens usually calls on the dog to explore the conflicts of pre-existing family dynamics, Brontë’s works participate more often in what Monica Flegel abruptly calls ‘courtship via dog’.²⁸ Thus, the final reunion between Jane and the blind Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) is effected through Pilot’s excited recognition of the former, and a similar triadic relationship is enacted between Shirley-Tartar-Louis in Shirley (1849). In these moments, Flegel writes, ‘the [dog] represents a plot device that is simultaneously a purposeful device on the part of the courting male’.²⁹ However, the function of the dog here, and elsewhere, reaches beyond these two senses of ‘device’.

Firstly, despite the loyalty characteristic of real dogs, Brontë’s fictional canines – unlike in Dickens – are never blindly devoted to their owners. Her dogs show an instinctive discernment of, rather than submission to, ‘the courting male’, as seen in Tartar’s ‘singular partiality’ for Louis, while remaining the ‘dread enemy’ of the reprobate curates Malone and Donne.³⁰ An 1853 letter from Patrick Brontë to Charlotte, written from the point of view of Anne’s dog Flossy, humorously extols the merits of canine judgement in these cases:

As many things are done before me, which would not be done, if I could speak, (well for us dogs that we cannot speak) so, I see a good deal of human nature, that is hid from those who have the gift of language [ . . . ] Ah! my dear Mistress, trust dogs rather than men – They are very selfish, and when they have the power (which no wise person will readily give them) very tyrannical.³¹

Though Patrick’s veiled motive of dissuading his daughter from marrying his curate Arthur Bell Nicholls runs through the letter, it nonetheless illustrates the value the Brontës themselves placed on the figure of the dog, and showcases the imaginative experiments around its interior life in which the whole family participated.³² Particularly interesting here is Patrick’s emphasis on the dog’s extralinguistic and therefore privileged perspective. As becomes evident, the figure of the dog, unencumbered by verbal communication, is primed for affective work in the novel, exceeding Flegel’s assertion that it acts merely as a plot device. For the dog exists both within and outside of the plot, ageless and frozen in an eternal present, capturing the affective energies of moments that resist narrativization. While Diogenes and Pilot are both referred to as ‘old’ in their respective final appearances, they retain a perpetually youthful energy. Indeed, records of dog death in realist novels are extremely rare, and limited to reasons of necessity, such as the threat of rabies.

Brontë’s Villette (1853) provides a striking example of this premise in practice, and a counterpoint to Dickens’s recurrent canine characters. Here Sylvie, ‘a small spanieless (if one may coin a word)’, appears in only one chapter, introduced and discarded in a matter of pages, though Brontë’s intentional neologism points to her textual significance.³³ Distinctive in the sense that she does not belong to an individual but collectively to the pensionnat, Sylvie shows a self-selecting and mutual fondness for M. Paul, affirming him as a suitable love interest for Lucy. In a scene of silent yet remarkably overt sexual tension, Lucy watches from a safe distance as M. Paul works in the garden, ‘fondling the spaniel in his bosom, calling her tender names in a tender voice’, before he will watch Lucy in turn as she ‘caresse[s] Sylvie assiduously’ and the two gorge on bonbons together.³⁴ The silence, and relative stillness involved in this exchange are on the part of the humans, not Sylvie:

Again scampering devious, bounding here, rushing there, snuffing and snuffing everywhere; she at last discovered me in classe. Instantly she flew barking at the panes, as if to urge me forth to share her pleasure or her master’s toil; she had seen me occasionally walking in that alley with M. Paul; and I doubt not, considered it my duty to join him now, wet as it was.³⁵

The string of present participles wills the prose into action, accentuated by Brontë’s characteristic overuse of the semicolon, which allows only the brief, breathless pause. Thus, for both parties, the dog becomes not only a mediator, but a displaced object of vigorous, coded energy that prolongs its high intensity. There is a kind of violence inherent to this scene, previously unseen in Brontë’s more sentimental canine-couple mechanics, with the excess affect bleeding into the text, literally. Unable or unwilling to express her feelings – ‘At the moment, probably, he would have been glad to see something emotional in me. I could not show it’ – Lucy cuts her finger on a pen knife, ‘half on purpose [ . . . ] to get him to chide’.³⁶ The act of self-harm opens up the boundaries of the self-contained body to another in ways which the restrained correspondence and conversations which fill the novel have yet been unable to do. In a rare moment of self-exposure facilitated by the presence of the dog, Lucy offers herself up in all her exciting, rebellious potential, an alternative to the now quiet, obedient Sylvie.

In fact, Sylvie’s beauty and behaviour reminds Lucy of her cousin, and previous rival in love: ‘I never saw her but I thought of Paulina de Bassompierre: forgive the association, reader; it would occur’.³⁷ Thus qualities typically associated with the canine or the human are temporarily dislodged from their respective origins and shared on a spectrum prompted by excess sexual desire: dogs and humans may be equally pretty, silky, fine-eyed, desirable. John Kucich has persuasively argued for ‘Brontë’s subtextual logic of endless desire’ as enabled by the continuous friction between repression and expression, which creates ‘a medium of pleasurable internal self-disruption’ for her protagonists.³⁸ The bodies of Sylvie and Lucy merge together within this medium, with the final mention of the dog coming through a collective object pronoun: ‘M. Paul, leaning over the desk, bent towards us’.³⁹ Some subsequent editions demand an even earlier exit and separation of the two by substituting ‘towards me’ for ‘towards us’.⁴⁰ It is clear that narratively this moment of heightened tension, signified and captured by Sylvie’s intrusion into the text, must pass, as a few chapters on, Lucy and M. Paul’s courtship turns to love. If the body of the dog is dispensable – the casual reader might not remember the spanieless – the affects attendant on this moment of awakening sexuality are nonetheless retained and carried forward to the oft-discussed tempestuous ending of the novel. Here, too, ‘strong excitement’ remains.

Various modern theorists have contended that the movement of affect between bodies is not limited to the human and so complicates the human/animal boundary. Borrowing the phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi writes that ‘we humans are in a “zone of indiscernibility” with the animal’.⁴¹ Sparked most notably by developments in evolutionary biology, such debates were already rife in the mid-nineteenth century among scientific and literary thinkers alike. It is generally known that the 1859 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species coincides with that of George Eliot’s first novel Adam Bede, placing the beginnings of her career contemporaneously with these discussions. Yet critics who refer to the category of the ‘animal’ in her works, and in Victorian fiction more widely, usually understate the continuing reliance of mid-nineteenth-century novelists on the figure of the dog specifically. While Eliot’s work includes a wide range of references to dogs, cats, horses, birds, tigers, panthers, chimpanzees, bears, squirrels, and even a guinea-pig, her fiction demonstrates the clear prevalence and privileged narrative status of the first relative to the rest. More than this, it helps to clarify the basis on which the canine-affective connection in the novel is built.

Written the year in which Eliot herself became a first-time dog owner, the presence of dogs in Adam Bede is especially pronounced.⁴² While descriptions of her ‘Pug’ fill Eliot’s letters, a fictional Pug, Juno, Gyp, Vixen, Little Trot and their various puppies appear in the pages of her novel. Indeed, Gyp, the eponymous Adam’s faithful dog, features in the text even more frequently than some of the minor human characters.⁴³ Part of the expanding tradition of canine representation discussed above, Gyp acts as affective intermediary to Adam in his familial and romantic relationships, in that he becomes a focus for Adam’s emotions, but the novel also begins to offer inversions of this structure. In a scene where the preacher Dinah visits the Bedes for the first time, it is Adam who provides a model for Gyp’s response:

The kind smile with which Adam uttered the last words was apparently decisive with Gyp of the light in which the stranger was to be regarded, and [ . . . ] he trotted towards her and put up his muzzle against her hand in a friendly way.⁴⁴

Adam’s smile and the tone of his voice appear infectious, with Gyp himself becoming physically ‘friendly’ towards Dinah as a result. Keridiana W. Chez sees Gyp as participant in the newly developing function of the pet dog as ‘an emotional prostheses’ to the middle-class male in need of affective education, but the flow of affect between Adam and Gyp here becomes symbiotic.⁴⁵ Of all the examples so far, it is the closest to resemble an exchange, rather than overreliance on the dog to make visible or guide the affective work of the encounter. It is important that Gyp’s behaviour here is both predicated on and enacted through non-linguistic cues, to which Dinah responds in kind:

“Poor dog!” said Dinah, patting the rough grey coat, “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.”⁴⁶

Dinah’s musings, with their repeated emphasis on ‘feeling’, play with the potential of a human-nonhuman continuum with a shared sense of affective capabilities, a theory Darwin would come to substantiate in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) by himself paying attention to ‘the expressive movements, under different states of the mind’ of the dog.⁴⁷ However, Dinah’s speech also identifies a point of imperviousness between the human and the animal in its very act: words.

The problem of language and speech is one that nineteenth-century writers return to again and again. In 1873, philologist Max Müller, whose work Eliot admired, would deliver a series of lectures at the Royal Institution on Darwin’s philosophy of language, an objection to his ideas thereon in his earlier work, The Descent of Man (1871).⁴⁸ In his second lecture, Müller stated:

I must call it inconceivable that any known animal could ever develop language. Professor Schleicher, though an enthusiastic admirer of Darwin, observed once jokingly, but not without a deep meaning, ‘If a pig were ever to say to me, “I am a pig,” it would ipso facto cease to be a pig’.⁴⁹

The same statement can be applied to the animal in the nineteenth-century realist novel. On a textual level, if a dog were to speak, the structures of realism would collapse into those of magical realism, fantasy, or children’s literature. Further to this, the dog would be displaced from its distinctive position at once within the narrative (as a character) and outside of the narrative (as the site of abstract affect). The affective dynamics of the realist novel, therefore, must insist on the nonverbal existence of the dog. For the first time, Dinah’s final observation – ‘we can’t say half of what we feel, with all our words’ – explicitly asserts this muteness as a potential advantage to communication, with speech and language rather rendered cumbersome. Recall, too, the ease and celerity with which Diogenes wordlessly ‘spoke’ to Florence, or Patrick Brontë’s letter, ‘well for us dogs that we cannot speak’. Eliot’s interest in a more potent, alternative form of affective communication, not only through but with the body of the dog, provides an acute self-awareness of the limitations of her own form.

In an essay on the affinities between Adam Bede and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), Gareth Jones looks to flip Dinah’s wording upside down: ‘The animal chorus is constantly present to remind us of man’s bestiality and his own dumbness when he seeks to express his more intense emotions’, designating humans as the ‘dumb things’.⁵⁰ Jones’s turn to the golden age of Russian realism is a helpful one, as it affirms the function of the nonverbal dog in the Victorian novel. Henrietta Mondry has argued that ‘[t]he dog is modern Russian culture’s most representative and most political animal’, ‘a site where body politics and politics are played out and where culture and nature, the sacred and the obscene, come together’, with the corpus of dog stories from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia rivalling that of its Western contemporaries.⁵¹ However, unlike the English, Russian authors often experimented with the thoughts and speech of fictional dogs in the course of the nineteenth century. As early as 1835, Nikolai Gogol in his Diary of a Madman imagines a reality in which the protagonist Poprishchin listens to the conversations and reads the correspondence between the dogs Meggie and Fidel. Later in the century, Anton Chekov’s ‘Kashtanka’ (1881) teases the reader with conditional lines like ‘If she had been a human being, she would probably have thought: “No, it’s impossible to live this way! I’ll shoot myself”’, but the heavy focalization articulates a canine consciousness, even if wryly distinguishing it from a human one.⁵² Certainly, it goes beyond Eliot’s transliterations of canine communication as simple affirmations of human language: ‘Gyp jumped and gave a short bark, as much as to say, “Of course.”’.⁵³

Tolstoy not only picks up on, but extols the inarticulacy of dogs. Early on in Anna Karenina, we are introduced to Levin’s setter Laska, a constant companion of his life on the estate. On one occasion, when her master comes home, it appears as though she, too, might speak: ‘she slightly opened her mouth, smacked her sticky lips, and drawing them more closely over her old teeth lay still in blissful peace’.⁵⁴ The stillness which follows this preparation might seem bathetic, but it is also unambiguously clear in its emotional import. The reader is thus conditioned to understand that Laska communicates effectively ‘in her own way’.⁵⁵ Yet in a notable scene in the sixth part of the novel, Tolstoy actually permits the reader entry into Laska’s mind during a hunt:

“Fetch it, fetch it!” shouted Levin, giving Laska a shove from behind.

“But I can’t go,” thought Laska. “Where am I to go? From here I feel them, but if I move forward I shall know nothing of where they are or who they are.” But then he shoved her with his knee, and in an excited whisper said, “Fetch it, Laska.”

“Well, if that’s what he wishes, I’ll do it, but I can’t answer for myself now,” she thought, and darted forward as fast as her legs would carry her between the thick bushes. She scented nothing now; she could only see and hear, without understanding anything.⁵⁶

This passage, and the chapter at large, offer complex ideas on the gaps between human and canine ‘understanding’. The narrator does not represent indirectly what the dog seems to be thinking (‘apparently’, ‘I fancy’, ‘as if’), but sets down exactly what she thought. I have quoted Constance Garnett’s 1901 translation here in part because of her choice to set the original ‘Чувствую’ down as ‘feel’ rather than Louise and Aylmer Maude’s preferred ‘scent’.⁵⁷ Although Laska’s reliance on smell is proved by the final sentence, ‘feeling’ gives a deeper sense of the intuitive affective realm in which she operates, and which remains inaccessible to the persistently language-oriented Levin, whose repeated barks of instruction invert their communicative capabilities. This is particularly pertinent in a part of the novel concerned with the breakdown in Levin and Kitty’s marital communication. Indeed, the body of the dog here bears witness to another intense affect: Levin’s jealousy of his guest Vesolovsky worked out within the socially permissible violence of hunting. In pronouncing judgement on his disorderly tracking tactics, the dog’s voice thus diagnoses a more serious affective disorder. In her work on first-person dog narratives, Laura Brown writes that ‘[b]y using or ventriloquizing human language [ . . . ] the imaginary dog creates a unique cultural opportunity to consider an alternative to the structures and limits of the present day’, but what Tolstoy does is question the need for language at all.⁵⁸ This opportunity to cultivate other forms of communication pertains not only to the cultural structures and limits depicted within the novel, but those of realism itself, as canine subjectivity offers a challenge to the ontological certainties of the form. However, Tolstoy’s experiment is as brief as it is remarkable, choosing to return to the necessary anthropocentrism of the realist project. Managing to shoot down two snipe after all, Levin asks, ‘Eh, Laska dear, will things go right?’, but she stays true to her word: ‘I can’t answer for myself now’.⁵⁹

Still, the lack of talking dogs in the Victorian realist novel does not preclude them from other forms of utterance, a notion implicit in Jones’s attention to an ‘animal chorus’. Dogs can, after all, deploy tone; the very ‘affective relay between subject and object’ crucial to Sianne Ngai’s conception of affective novel networks.⁶⁰ The sheer number of words for their vocalizations – barking, baying, growling, howling, whining, yapping – not to mention the modulations thereof, attests to their tonal range. Elisha Cohn finds the bark akin to human articulation, writing that ‘the dog’s expressive bark becomes a voice that demands attention’.⁶¹ By extension, the sudden cuttings out of canine voices, the silences between the barks, have an equally significant impact on the prose rhythms of realist writing. The first chapter of Book Four, aptly re-titled ‘A Crisis’ rather than ‘A Meeting’ by Eliot in the manuscript copy, marks a critical turning point in Adam Bede, as Adam fights Arthur in a sudden fit of anger, after finding him and his beloved Hetty kissing in the woods.⁶² We are told that Gyp accompanies Adam on this walk, ‘running among the brushwood’, and giving ‘a sharp bark’ upon himself discovering the couple, but thereafter he goes missing from Eliot’s description of the encounter.⁶³ This may be an oversight on Eliot’s part, as she focuses on this climactic moment between the two men, but it is conspicuous all the same. In William Small’s illustration of the scene for the 1869 Harper’s edition of the novel, Gyp is likewise absent, although he forms a central figure in the frontispiece.⁶⁴

It seems inconceivable that Gyp, who follows his master’s every move, would sit quietly by in a fight. As Martin A. Danahay reminds us, ‘[i]t was not only dinosaurs, apes or tigers that could enact violence. Cats and dogs are also members of the animal kingdom, not surrogate humans, and could also be shown as “red in hoof and paw”’.⁶⁵ Indeed, in Eliot’s next novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Yap, Tom Tulliver’s childhood dog, readily joins his tussle with Bob: ‘Yap, who had been running on before, returned barking to the scene of action, and saw a favourable opportunity for biting Bob’s bare leg’.⁶⁶ Thus Eliot’s sudden removal of Gyp from the scene defies narrative continuity in favour of its abstract significance. With the affect-absorptive body of the dog expunged, ‘Poor Adam’, in an echo of Dinah’s ‘Poor dog’, commits an act of near-fatal violence, ‘possessed by a rage that could find no other vent’.⁶⁷ The crisis alluded to in the title of the chapter, then, is not only a physical one, but one of character. For Gyp’s disappearance allows for a grappling with violent affect that poses a threat to human identity, almost to the point of destruction. It follows that it necessarily tests the boundaries of realism, teetering on the edge of sensation fiction. In this instance, Arthur survives, and Gyp returns to the narrative with a joyful bark.⁶⁸ Yet the volatility engendered by his inexplicable disappearance cannot be finally resolved, and returns double-fold as his final bark in the novel resumes its sharpness in preceding the news of Hetty’s infanticide.⁶⁹ Hetty herself encounters ‘a small white-and-liver coloured spaniel which sat on the front ledge of the waggon, with large timid eyes, and an incessant trembling in the body’ on the unsuccessful journey to find Arthur which will drive her to this desperate act.⁷⁰ But the uncontrollable shaking of the animal is indicative of a canine body that can no longer contain and dissipate these violent energies.

The popularity of animal autobiographies, including those of dogs, rises in the last quarter of the century, inversely coinciding with the dog’s more permanent disappearance from the realist fiction of the period.⁷¹ Eliot herself will have Dorothea reject the gift of a Maltese puppy in Middlemarch (1871), while Henry James chooses not to revive the poodle Stenterello from Roderick Hudson (1875) along with his mistress in The Princess Casamassima (1886). Indeed, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he will ‘put away the little dog’ in his fiction henceforth.⁷² This is more than prejudice against lap dogs. As I have shown, all breeds and sexes of dogs are liable to be used as signifiers of intense affect. Across the novels of Thomas Hardy, Gabriel Oak’s two sheepdogs and the mysterious mongrel dog who helps Fanny Robin reach Casterbridge in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) remain some of the last individuated dogs of the lot.⁷³ In this light, Oak’s shooting of ‘George’s son’, who ‘had no name in particular’, feels heavily symbolic.⁷⁴ In fact, in Hardy’s late novels especially, man becomes more like the stray dog of Russian realism, caught in a continuous struggle for survival in a society that does not value his existence, with the adjective ‘dogged’ emerging as the most frequent derivative of dog in his novels.⁷⁵ Further threats to the once impermeable human/animal boundary within evolutionary biology, physiology and the nascent field of psychology mean that by the end of the century it was no longer possible to conjure up distinct images of the emotional human subject and the visceral canine object that had proved so useful to novelists in the mid-nineteenth century.⁷⁶

‘Unmuzzled’, Phil Robinson called the dogs of Victorian fiction in 1898.⁷⁷ Yet, if we take muzzling beyond its literal meaning – ‘To restrict or curtail the activity of (a person or thing); to keep in check’ or ‘To restrain from speaking; to impose silence on’ – it is evident that the aspiring realist novelist must muzzle in order to depict the dog.⁷⁸ Presented as the companions of children, men, and women alike, dogs in Victorian fiction form arresting images of loyalty, liveliness and sincerity, but their representational function relies on the ways they press at the limits of representation rather than conform to their position as typical domestic pet. As I have argued, their presences (and absences) in the novel worlds they inhabit cast them in an over-determined, affective role that reaches well beyond their character-narrative status. In fact, it is the constitutive tension between this intra- and extra-narrative position of the dog that reveals the extent of their extralinguistic signification within the realist project in the mid-nineteenth century. Having built up and then dispensed with its canine tradition, by the end of the century, the novel stands stark in its anthropocentric fragility. It is a self-aware position, gained through a persistent process of questioning across the categories of the canine, the realist and the affective, without which subsequent experiments with the human-nonhuman continuum and the novel form – think, for example, of early twentieth-century transspecies transformations in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (1925) – would not have been possible.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Olivia Krauze is a PhD candidate in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is currently finishing a thesis on the concept of ‘violent emotion’ in nineteenth-century fiction and medicine. More broadly, her research interests include the history of emotions, affect studies, the medical humanities, and the novel tradition in England and Russia.

Footnotes