In ‘Flush’, Virginia Woolf explores the ways Elizabeth and Flush experience confinement and liberation, focusing on how certain aspects of their identities inform these experiences. The parallels between Elizabeth and Flush’s experiences have led to the Feminist reading championed by Susan Squier that Flush’s confinement is an allegory of the position of the Victorian woman.1 However, not only is this reading anthropocentric in nature in its failure to account for the ways Flush’s experiences are particular to pets, it also operates under the assumption that Elizabeth is necessarily oppressed in all aspects which is not entirely the case.
Woolf presents confinement as inherently linked to class which in itself is tied to locality, evident through Flush’s movement from Miss Mitford to Elizabeth. When Flush leaves Miss Mitford’s humble “working-man’s cottage” dwelling and enters the affluent Wimpole Street as Elizabeth’s dog, he is immediately confined to a leash in his first venture outdoors with Elizabeth.2 When he dashes to run as he is accustomed to on his walks with Miss Mitford he is prevented by a “heavy weight… around his throat” but upon surveying the area, he concludes that “where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths and men in shiny top hats, dogs must be led on chains” (p. 22). Through Flush’s equation of features indicative of high society with the inability to roam free, Woolf illustrates Flush’s acceptance of confinement as a given in Regent’s Park. This is reinforced by the specificity of “here” in his earlier wondering “Why was he a prisoner here?” which explicitly depicts his difference in freedom as location-specific; in Regent’s Park is he is imprisoned while in the countryside landscape of Three Mile Cross he is free (p. 22).
Susan Squier writes that Flush operates as a “stand in for the woman-writer”.3 However, by taking this view, she neglects to appreciate the way that as an animal Flush’s body is policed differently to Elizabeth and other women in the novel. Throughout the novel (excluding the chapter ‘Italy’ for its cultural differences) Flush is confined to the whims of his female owners, a fate that is not completely mirrored in their relation to the men in their lives. Elizabeth literally confines him by commanding the leash that restrains him and beats him when she pleases but has autonomy, albeit limited, in her day to day endeavours with Flush. Similarly, in ‘selling’ Flush Miss Mitford dictates his subsequent life experience whilst exercising her agency in being able to do so independently of male influence. Whilst Flush and Elizabeth’s experiences of confinement are similar they are certainly not equal as the additional ways Flush is confined as a dog (by women no less) undermines the popular idea that Flush’s only purpose is to stand in for the female experience. Flush should not be read solely as a commentary on the oppression of women in the nineteenth century, nor should it be valued only for this.
The novel is largely domestic in that most of it takes place in the ‘Back Bedroom, seen by the feminist reading as a stifling existence symbolic of the limitations of Victorian women. However, Woolf’s depiction of Elizabeth’s experience in the confines of the room suggests that she is not entirely repressed. By sometimes limiting the third person perspective to Flush’s viewpoint Woolf creates ambiguity regarding Elizabeth’s attitudes towards her confinement. There are suggestions of physical and mental illness in Elizabeth as Flush observes that “Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid” and that sometimes while writing, “her eyes would suddenly fill with tears” then moments later she would “burst out laughing”, indicating possible hysteria (pp. 18, 26, 27). Through Woolf’s portrayal of her as unwell, Elizabeth’s room can therefore be seen as a temporary refuge until the recovery of her health.
Elizabeth also seems untroubled by her existence in the Back Bedroom as she recreates life outside of the room within it by receiving visitors, ritualistically eating dinner with Flush and immersing herself in writing which Layla Colon Vale rightly observes as a “type of liberation”.4 In writing, Elizabeth can mentally escape the confines of her room and express herself in a way that Flush cannot. Elizabeth’s ability to write also demonstrates the way in which class and gender intersect to allow someone to be simultaneously oppressed and privileged. Despite her womanhood, she is literate, privileging her over working class men who resort to entering an unscrupulous and often criminal workforce to earn money, exemplified by Mr Taylor. Woolf emphasises this class disparity by depicting the deprived neighbourhood of Whitechapel as just “behind Miss Barrett’s bedroom”, showing that while Elizabeth’s literacy liberates her, the Victorian working class are confined to a life of poverty by their illiteracy (p. 53). Her access to education is perhaps why Elizabeth shows no urgent desire to leave the room until Flush is stolen, implying that the comfort she receives from writing is enough to transform what may begin as a repressive state into an even voluntary experience.
However, Woolf demonstrates through Flush’s adoption of elitist attitudes how confinement can also be detrimental. While at Three Mile Cross “he had known no difference between the tinker’s dog and himself” in Wimpole Street he learns that “he was a dog of high birth and breeding” (p. 23). Because of his confinement to the rarefied middle class human experience, once placed in Whitechapel where there are no class distinctions between breeds, Flush refuses to integrate with the ‘mongrel’ dogs, revealed in his sentiment that he “would rather die” than share their pail of water p. (55). Not only does his confinement to the Back Bedroom strip him of his animalism as “To suppress the most violent instincts of his nature—that was the prime lesson of the bedroom school”, it teaches him to view himself as more human than certain humans. Woolf shows that Flush believes himself to be superior to the presumably working class humans of Whitechapel through his contemptuous descriptions of them, seeing them as “ruffians” and “horrible monsters” (pp. 25, 55). By aligning the residents of Whitechapel with the monstrous (often animalistic in appearance) and not identifying this in himself, Woolf demonstrates Flush’s warped sense of self as a result of his socialisation in the confines of a middle class household and environment.
True liberation for Elizabeth comes as the result of her marriage to Robert Browning which Woolf explores through the tonal shift from the stagnant and dull mood of the chapter ‘The Back Bedroom’ to the liveliness of the chapter ‘Italy’. While many would view marriage as a sort of confinement for a woman in itself, by juxtaposing Elizabeth’s experience of freedom as an unmarried woman in London to her experience as a married woman in Italy, Woolf presents marriage positively as it brings the move to Italy and consequently her freedom. In London, Elizabeth and Flush are commodified (Flush as a pedigree dog in an environment where pedigree is currency and Elizabeth as a woman in a culture where women are possessions), meaning the outside world poses threats. When Elizabeth ‘liberates’ herself by deciding to fetch Flush from the “jaws of Whitechapel” she enters the male sphere of business and is exposed to a world “where vice and poverty breed vice and poverty”, forfeiting the safety offered by the confines of her home (pp. 62, 63).
In Italy, however, Flush and Elizabeth are liberated by the cultural difference in that class and gender divisions are much less rigid. Flush’s realisation that “the laws of the Kennel Club are not universal” forces him to abandon his elitist attitude, freeing him to revert to the exploratory, outdoor loving dog he once was (p. 77). In Italy both Flush and Elizabeth become their own masters as neither is dependent on the other for their happiness and comfort as they were in London. Rather, Flush is free to run outside and explore the streets of Florence with other dogs when he pleases, while Elizabeth, comforted by the knowledge that “in the streets of Pisa pretty women could walk all alone” is able to go outdoors uninhibitedly and engage with other men and women independently of male supervision (p. 76).
By rejecting the portrayal of confinement and liberation through the positive-negative binary it is typically associated with, Woolf demonstrates that the concepts are not always mutually exclusive. Through Elizabeth she shows it is possible to experience confinement and liberation simultaneously and through Flush she shows the influence of human ownership in a pet’s experience of confinement and liberation, allowing us to more closely appreciate the different factors affecting a being’s experiences.
Bibliography:
Squier, S.M, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985)
Vale, L.C, ‘Virginia Woolf’s feminist Flush’, Atenea, 34 (2014), p.89
Woolf, Virginia, Flush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
- S.M Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985)
↩︎ - Virginia Woolf Flush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.10. Subsequent references to this edition to be indicated parenthetically
↩︎ - Squier, Virginia Woolf and London
↩︎ - L.C Vale, ‘Virginia Woolf’s feminist Flush’, Atenea, 34 (2014), 89.
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