Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog
105
ing her husband’s citation of Pascal (Phillips 73), although this latter also marks her citation
with further anti-imperialist discourse that brings canine resonance to the allusion to
Berlin’s Sieges Allees. Woolf clearly leaves her own passing canine mark on Pascal’s Pensée,
a rhetorical feat she performs in tandem with her resignifi cation of Dr. Johnson’s dog.
Th e canine signifying on canine signifi ers, in the two sentences that precede the sentence
in which the “very fi ne negress” fi nds herself, strain the collar on the gender and racial
and national markers of both the subjects and objects of the act of colonial inscription
and appropriation explored here. But Woolf has already marked similar territory in Jacob’s
Room, where Clara’s dog “Troy” marks the statue of “Achilles,” monument to colonial
imperialism (273), and where Jacob himself furnishes the familiar Johnsonian analogy for
his account of the reviled presence of women in King’s College Chapel: “No one would
think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path…
the way he wanders down an aisle…approaching a pillar with a purpose…a dog destroys
the service completely. So do these women” (50). Likewise the gravel path here returns
in A Room of One’s Own, as does the sacred architecture of Cambridge University. But in
the “fi ne negress” passage, the canine trope is also doubly racially marked, while similarly
mobile between subject and object status. Furthermore, following the scent of the Johnsonian
dog trope in Th e Voyage Out, I have shown Woolf to smuggle in a semitically marked
and marking dog to the already unsettling “fi ne negress” passage (Goldman 2001). “Fine
woman” and “fi ne negress” recall Mary Datchet’s epithet for “Sailor,” the pet dog of the
suff ragist leader Miss Markham, in Night and Day: “A very fi ne dog, too” (ND 70). Th e
suff ragist dog, Sailor is also an allegory of lesbianism, according to Dunn (177).
Marcus exposes the colliding historical, aesthetic, and colonial discourses that inform
the term “fi ne negress.” She also scrutinises the term “pass”: “Th e narrator’s gaze is raced
as well as gendered and powerfully erotic…. Was Woolf aware of the racial meaning of the
word pass?” (44). Woolf certainly seems aware of the canine qualities of passing (Levinas’s
stray dog becomes relevant here). Th e narrator’s gaze reifi es the “very fi ne negress” as “art
object” and “sexual object” for Marcus, who posits “a polished fi gurine the viewer confl ates
with the African woman it resembles” (55, 57). And why not a statue, too? Th e slippery
canine turns of Woolf’s preceding sentences certainly encourage this reading of the negress
as a co-sign of the tombstone, signpost, and monument that the canine Alf, Bert, or Chas.
mark when they pass, but that women do not mark when they pass, and as a cosign of the
“fi ne woman” who when passed by Alf, Bert, or Chas. causes them to murmur, “Ce chien
est à moi.” Again, the subject and object of passing perform an intricate dance.
Just how fi rmly is the “narrator” collared by the term “woman”? Not a unifi ed subject,
famously, she speaks in many personae, but, I suggest, she is always and already speaking
through a canine morphology. Her citation of the primary utterance of appropriation
“Ce chien est à moi” is thus complicated by her own demonstrable canine morphology,
hailed (interpellated) as she has been all through A Room of One’s Own as woman, slave,
and dog. Momentarily accepting the collar of “woman,” she refl ects on “one of the great
advantages of being a woman.” But how far is she speaking as a woman at all (she is pointedly
not a self-designated “Englishwoman”), and as a woman in the fi rst person, when she
admits “one can pass even a very fi ne negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman
of her”? “One” can mean both “I” (nominative) and “a woman” (accusative), but it has a
certain distance from both. Th e canine instinct of “Alf, Bert or Chas.” is aligned through