Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog
irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience
to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fi ne woman go by, or even a
dog, Ce chien est à moi. (76)
103
Here Woolf prefi gures patriarchal colonialism and inscription as a dog marking its territory:
women, unlike men, then, do not mark out territory as a matter of “irresistible desire” and
“obedience” to “instinct.” Th e act of writing is expressed as “a refl ex reaction ingrained in
any European male” to appropriate and colonise (Phillips 73). But even as she reproachfully
fi gures men writing as colonial patriarchs, which are in turn fi gured as dogs pissing on
signposts and monuments to the dead (themselves fi gures of signifi cation), she is also aligning—in
the same sentence—the object of this very process, the “fi ne woman” with dogs:
“Ce chien est à moi.” Marcus recognises this crucially presents women’s signature as erasure,
but while she connects “ce chien” to Woolf’s earlier citation of Johnson’s canine trope, she
ignores the dogginess of Alf, Bert and Chas. Th e double-gendered dog is both subject and
object of colonialism. Th e repeated “even” (“even a dog;” “even a very fi ne negress,” herself
reprising the “fi ne” of “fi ne woman”) strengthens the analogy between dog and negress,
amplifi ed in the next sentence, to show the dog as interchangeable with “a piece of land or a
man with curly black hair.” Th e dog as usual performs a number of vehicular tasks: its tenors
are both men and women, English and African, coloniser and colonised.
But who is speaking in this sentence? It is not a simple matter of plumping for either
Woolf or her narrator: there are too many voices, citations, and ventriloquised citations
compressed here. It begins by “speaking generally” of canine men provisionally called “Alf,
Bert or Chas.” who are then the murmurers of “Ce chien est à moi” (“this dog is mine”),
itself a citation of Blaise Pascal (Pascal 295), but which comes to Woolf, as Phillips points
out, via her husband’s book, Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920) (Phillips 73). Already,
deictic functioning is in crisis: the “ce” of “ce chien,” the this-ness of “this dog,” is receding
just as “Alf, Bert or Chas.” recede. Th e proposition “Ce chien est à moi,” in keeping
with Woolf’s free indirect mode, has no speech marks to collar it as the direct speech of
“Alf, Bert or Chas.,” nor as the verbatim citation of Pascal, albeit a citation of Leonard
Woolf’s citation of Pascal in the epigraph to his book on Africa: “‘Th is dog is mine,’ said
those poor children; ‘that is my place in the sun.’ Here is the beginning and the image of
the usurpation of all the earth.”
Virginia Woolf has omitted from the epigraph Pascal’s amplifi cation of the claim “Ce
chien est à moi” as the originating cause but also the image of all colonial appropriation.
“Ce chien est à moi” has, then, a self-consciously fi gurative pedigree. But Woolf also elides
the information that these words constitute the directly quoted speech of “ces pauvres
enfants” (Pascal 295). Pascal has “poor children” as the origin of the primary utterance
of appropriation, the universal image. Pascal universalises an instinct to appropriate by
making the most innocent and the least wealthy his image of possessiveness. But Woolf
sheds Pascal’s “pauvres enfants,” and the didactic “voilà” that Leonard Woolf retains. In
her analysis, the poor are themselves the objects of appropriation, and the prospects of
the poor to become poets is the basis of her argument, something she presses at the close
of her book in her adapted citation from Quiller-Couch that embraces the images of the
poor, women, slaves, and a dog.
Th e sentence that comes between those of “ce chien” and the “fi ne negress” is also slip-