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underworld.
19
There is a political geography to dog-stealing, therefore, not just in
the exploitation of the rich by the poor, of Wimpole Street by Whitechapel, but also
because the geography of bourgeois domesticity cannot be divorced from the
domination inherent in the political geography of 'domestication' itself.
Conclusions: to the doghouse
Few would in fact disagree that domestication is closely related to several strands of
domination
.
20
For Ritvo (1987:2), the Victorian age marked the working out of 'a
fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and their fellow creatures, as
a result of which people systematically appropriated power they had previously
attributed to animals, and animals became significant primarily as the objects of
human manipulation'. But 'domestication' is hardly confined to human—animal
relations alone: relations of domination are also evident in the 'domestication' of
human beings. Munich (1996) comments in this vein that women and servants
(including non-Europeans) were similarly patronised and domesticated, victims of a
sadoerotic kind of power which reduced humans to the status of 'pets'. And Tuan
(1984) makes this same point most insistently, by extending the definition of 'pets'
from animals to people and even landscapes.
21
But if affection and domination are
linked, in this
geography
of domesticated nature, then dog-stealing cannot be seen
simply in terms of criminal opportunism and bourgeois vulnerability. Flush's
horrible experiences point, as several critics have noted, to victimisation at the hands
of the dog-stealers
and
in the protective space of the bourgeois home from which he
was abducted. The equation of dog-stealers and domestic tyrants is indeed central to
Woolf's biography of Flush, and it should make us pause when considering the
ultimate significance of dog-stealing. The invalid Elizabeth Barrett in Wimpole
Street was as much a captive as poor Flush in Whitechapel. If dogs like Flush are
vulnerable in public spaces when off the leash, their chains forgotten in a moment
of woman's weakness, as Woolf points out, so are women let out into the public
space of the streets only under the restrictions of propriety and fear. Woolf's
Flush
is
abundantly illustrative of how an instinctive love of freedom can be turned in
patriarchal society to domestic anxiety and confinement: these are the lessons of
Victorian bourgeois morality (DeSalvo 1989:286-287). Just as Whitechapel and
Wimpole Street are spatially proximate, just as the geographies of affection and
commerce are inseparable, just as property and propriety are linked in zones of
circulation and possession, so too in a terrible way is the dog-stealer revealed as an
associate rather than an antagonist of the bourgeois patriarch. Dog-stealing is not
(just) an attack on the home, it might be taken actively to bolster domestic
ideology, acting to confine women, like pets, to the safety and security of the
household. Flush's brutal transportation from domestic hearth to criminal rookery
is a challenge to the moral geography of the bourgeoisie specifically in the ideal of
domesticity for which pets were such potent symbols. The phenomenon of dog-
stealing tested the limits to this domestication, revealing the vulnerability and
ambiguity of the bourgeois domestic world by putting a price on its interior world of
