Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

106 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
Woolf’s citation of Pascal to the “pack of snarling, tearing, quarrelling jackals” in her
husband’s simile for Europe’s rabid colonisation of Africa, the jackals whose choice is to
subordinate African peoples to national, imperial order. Th e speaker of Woolf’s sentence is
aligned with the canine objects, not subjects, of canine “instinct”: the “woman,” the “fi ne
woman,” the “very fi ne negress,” and the “dog,” all of whom are aligned with “ce chien.”
And the very notion of “instinct” itself has already been undermined by the “dog woman”
narrator’s encounter with the Beadle.
It would be a grotesque misreading to conclude that Woolf herself runs with the jackals
and not the dogs in this sentence, or even that she has clumsily but unintentionally
aligned herself with the jackals in using the terms “Englishwoman,” “fi ne woman,” and
“very fi ne negress.” Woolf as jackal or as dog aside, we must attend to how her sentence
has been engineered to interpellate its readers as canine. Nor is it simply a matter of her
reader running either with the jackals, or with the dogs, or of realising, as Woolf’s slippery
syntax and sliding canine signifi ers encourage us to realise, that the potential for jackal and
dog, for “reason” and “instinct,” is there in us all. It is also the way her slippery, rhythmical
repetitive syntax and her sliding canine signifi ers have the reader reading and re-reading,
returning to images and fi gures, marking and re-marking their signifi cance, digging up
her half-buried allusions, and chasing them down. Marked and marking beings, we readers
(by choice, reason, or instinct?) leave our own traces on her tombstones and signposts.
Meanwhile Woolf declares herself a diff erent animal: “I’m the hare,” she records in her
diary of 1931, “a long way ahead of the hounds my critics” (D4 45).
Notes
1. A signifi cantly diff erent and much expanded version of this paper is forthcoming in Woolf Studies Annual.
See Jane Goldman, “‘Ce chien est à moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog,” Woolf Studies Annual
13 (2007): 49-86.
2. As if to confi rm that “the train of thought” is canine, a dog’s view of the terrain is off ered: “To the right and
left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat,
of fi re. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders”
(AROO 8). And again, the Biblical allusions to lamentation and to the burning bush (from where God
spoke to Moses of delivery to the promised land) speak of slavery and the prospect of emancipation.
3. Woolf makes explicit her engagement with misogynist canine troping, in A Room of One’s Own, when she
invokes Dr. Johnson’s infamous analogy for women preachers (AROO 72, 82-83); I’ve shown (Goldman
2006) how Woolf also derives, in her London Scene essays, a racially marked canine trope from Th omas
Carlyle’s pamphlet, “Th e Nigger Question.”
4. “I charge ye all, ye mariners, /Th at sail upon the sea, /Let neither my father nor mother get wit, /Th is dog’s
death I’m to die.” Made up version from Scott’s edition of 1833.
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. “Th e Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women.” Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Th eory (London: Continuum, 1990). Rpt. Th e Animal Ethics Reader. Ed. Susan J. Armstrong and
Richard G. Botzler. London: Routledge, 2003. 209-15
Agamben, Giorgio. Th e Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Dunn, June. “‘Beauty Shines On Two Dogs Doing What Two Women Must Not Do’: Puppy Love, Same-Sex
Desire and Homosexual Coding in Woolf.” Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries. Ed. Ann L. Ardis and
Bonnie Kime Scott. New York: Pace UP, 2000. 176-82
Eberly, David. “Housebroken: Th e Domesticated Relations of Flush.” Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts: Selected