Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
18
Thus Flint (1998: xxi-xxii) comments: '[W]e are faced with the fact that if for
Elizabeth Barrett, Flush was a love object, a person in his own right…for another set
of people he was an object of economic exchange: valuable for his breeding, his
pedigree, and because emotional worth could be turned into a site of blackmail.'
19
Drawn from life, Briton Riviere's painting of a dog-stealer in action comes layered in
irony. An animal painter like Riviere needed a dealer to provide canine models, but, as
the critic Armstrong (1891) notes, such dealers often dabbled in the illicit trade of
stealing and ransoming dogs. It is entirely possible, therefore, that a producer of
sentimental animal pictures like Riviere, engravings of whose pictures might be found
on the walls of many bourgeois homes, would employ dog-stealers to provide the very
subjects of his pictures; another form of trading in affection, perhaps.
20
The view that animals were in the Victorian age granted autonomous significance and
freed from moral subordination to human beings (Turner 1980) has largely been
superseded by the argument that sees in the ethic of care and affection another form of
domination and conquest. In her recent critical cultural geography of domestication,
Anderson (1997:478) demurs somewhat, insisting on a mix of moralities of control
and care, so that there is 'no simple imposition of mastery,' but nevertheless she
reinforces the point that the social-symbolic process of 'domestication' remains
enduring and problematic.
21
Elizabeth Barrett knew this, for sure—in poems like
Aurora Leigh
(1996:24) she
regrets an England whose nature is 'tamed/And grown domestic' (Book I: 634-635).
In her poetry, Italy, the refuge from the dog-stealers, stood in for a world of wildness
and passion; there is a vital critique of the domestic subjection of women here, wholly
as powerful and compelling as Virginia Woolf's plea for a room of one's own.
References
Anderson, K. (1997) 'A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication',
Progress
in
Human Geography
21:463-485.
Armstrong, N. (1987)
Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel,
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Armstrong, W. (1891) 'Briton Riviere R.A.',
Art Annual:
1-32.
Baker, J.H. (ed.) (1978)
The Reports of Sir John Spelman, Volume II,
London: Selden Society.
Browning, E.B. (1996)
Aurora Leigh,
New York: Norton.
DeSalvo, L. (1989)
Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and
Work,
London: The Women's Press.
Flint, K. (1998) 'Introduction' to V. Woolf,
Flush,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Karlin, D. (ed.) (1989)
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: The Courtship Correspondence,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
King, J. (1994)
Virginia Woolf,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lee, H. (1996)
Virginia Woolf,
London: Chatto & Windus.
Lorenz, K. (1954)
Man Meets Dog,
London: Methuen.
McMullan, M. (1998) 'The day the dogs died in London',
London Journal
23:32-40
Majumdar, R. and McLaurin, A. (eds) (1997)
Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage,
London:
Routledge.
Markus, J. (1997)
Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning,
London: Bloomsbury.
