Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/7270
Title: Ladies Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush
Contributor(s): McDonell, Jennifer  (author)orcid 
Publication Date: 2010
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/7270
Abstract: On the death of her beloved dog, Nero, Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote to her friend, Lady Louisa Ashburton, that her famous husband, Thomas Carlyle was 'quite unexpectedly and distractedly tom to pieces'. She says that 'to some people' this may have seemed 'a fall from his philosophical heights', but for herself 'I liked him for it more than for all the philosophy than ever came out of his head'. Jane Carlyle draws attention to the gendered expectations surrounding affective relations with companion species, implying that Thomas shedding tears for a 'sentimental' pet may not be perceived by his friends and admirers to be behaviour befitting a man of reason. She was not alone among Victorian women in her assertion of the primacy of feeling with respect to dogs. The epistolary writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning provides a valuable historical record of intense affective caninelhuman relationships in the nature-culture borderlands of the intimate domestic sphere, where dogs occupied a precarious and ambiguous status at best. This essay contends that Barrett Browning's writing about her dog, Flush, complicates dominant theories of pet keeping, revealing that positive as well as negative affect is an important mechanism by which the boundaries that organise the species divide are questioned and transgressed. Central to this investigation is a reconsideration of Victorian constructions of sentiment and sentimentality, the pejorative connotations of which have ensured that both pet keeping, and women's relationships to pets, have been downplayed in scholarly discussion.
Publication Type: Journal Article
Source of Publication: Australian Literary Studies, 25(2), p. 17-34
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Place of Publication: Australia
ISSN: 1837-6479
0004-9697
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 220305 Ethical Theory
200503 British and Irish Literature
220306 Feminist Theory
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 950203 Languages and Literature
959999 Cultural Understanding not elsewhere classified
950504 Understanding Europes Past
Peer Reviewed: Yes
HERDC Category Description: C1 Refereed Article in a Scholarly Journal
Publisher/associated links: http://www.als.id.au/index.html
Appears in Collections:Journal Article
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

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