Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog
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as a phase in the evolution of the pre-human. Agamben touches on human sexuality, but
is silent on the status of women in the anthropological machine. Presumably a non-speaking
pre-human ape-woman is posited as giving birth to the non-animal Homo sapiens,
man, “the animal,” according to Linnaeus, “that must recognize [or read] itself as human
to be human” (cited Agamben 26). I correlate Agamben’s “open” with the shifting caesurae
between subject and object in Woolf’s metaphors and free indirect discourse, and read
Woolf’s mobile signifying dogs through Levinas’s stray dog.
I invite you to think of Paula Rego’s Dog Woman (1994) as the opening narrator of
A Room of One’s Own, who, it is not diffi cult to infer, has been chased like a dog from the
hallowed ground of patriarchal learning:
It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot.
Instantly a man’s fi gure rose to intercept me…. His face expressed horror and
indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was
a woman. Th is was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars
are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. (AROO 9)
Haraway makes only a little more explicit this famous Woolfi an analogy in recognising:
“Woolf understood what happens when the impure stroll over the lawns of the properly
registered…when these marked (and marking) beings get credentials and an income”
(88). Th at animals and women are excluded from traditional notions of enlightenment is
inferred in the “instinct” rather than “reason” that assists the speaker to realise her ironic
identifi cation by the Beadle, himself only one consonant away from the canine, as alien to
the institution of education. As patriarchy’s dutiful watchdog, he has hardly been secured
on the side of “reason” in this sentence. His double designation of the trespasser as both a
woman and, implicitly, dog shocks the wandering “I” who fi nds herself merely “walking,”
a self-defi nition by action and process, before she is so rudely hailed. A Room of One’s Own
becomes a lesson in how to resist this interpellation. But what may have slipped our notice
is that Woolf’s canine trope has already been initiated in the previous paragraph, where the
narrator refers to the burden of her agreed talk: “Th at collar I have spoken of, women and
fi ction…a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the
ground” (8). Th e very invitation to speak has already interpellated her as a dog.
Yet this collar metaphor speaks also of the shackles of human slavery. 2 “Like a good
deal of feminist protest literature,” Marcus reminds us, A Room of One’s Own “uses the
tropes of slavery to make the case for women’s oppression,” “brilliantly link[ing]” scenes
of violence against Englishwomen to violence against slaves (48). It would however limit
the resonance of Woolf’s rhetoric here to confi ne this convergence of racially marked and
gendered tropes of oppression to the prior historical record of the centuries of Atlantic
slavery, or indeed to the continuing British imperial context she was writing in. Th e slave
economies of classical Greece, and of Biblical times, are cited too; Woolf also addresses,
directly in places, the emergence of fascist and Nazi powers in Europe and their attendant
racism and misogyny. Woolf’s elusive narrator, who refuses a stable nomenclature or identity,
is doubly yoked by the metaphors of “dog” and “slave,” but the third yoke is surely
“woman.” Th e three terms coalesce at several points in the book, most strikingly in the
clinching argument on the prospects for women’s writing, which rearranges and amplifi es