Title：Virginia Woolf’s Flush: The Ethical Dilemma
Abstract：Virginia Woolf’s 1933 novel Flush, her biographical fiction of Elizabeth Barrett’s dog... – and here I “must perforce come to a pause” (Flush, 124): while the description “Elizabeth Barrett’s dog” helps us, human readers, to locate the dog in the literary-historical human world, it subordinates the dog’s existence to that of the poet that owned him. The hesitation is absurd, of course: as if we could read about Flush in anything other than human words, as if there could be anything other than human readers of Flush. And yet that hesitation is generated by the ethical conundrums that Woolf’s book actively sets up and asks us to take seriously – more seriously than critics have done until fairly recently, and perhaps more seriously than Woolf’s own description of her novel as a “silly book” and “a waste”. I will consider these ethical questions with respect in particular to three points: 1) the way in which the cognitive and representational issues raised by writing from the point of view of the dog turns into a fierce critique of Victorian, and British, society and politics, dominated by a logic of substitutions that erases the inconvenient nature of poverty and injustice; 2) how the novel prompts questions about the nature of literary character and its anthropocentric bias, but refuses to choose between a humanist and (what we would now call) a post-humanist position, because our (inevitable) anthropocentrism must not legitimise the further substitutions that deprive subjects of their reality and intrinsic autonomy; 3) and finally how, by drawing, and at the same time rejecting, an analogy between child and dog, the novel refuses to resort to any, convenient, utopian or transcendent solution to the problem of humanity’s “inhumanity” (in Lyotard’s sense), embracing instead the condition of being caught, incessantly, in the negotiation of dilemmas that can’t be resolved and yet must constantly be addressed.
Bio: Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include fictional biography and autobiography; Joyce, Dante and modernist medievalism, and comparative literature. She is Editor-in-Chief, with Michael Lackey and Monica Latham, of the Bloomsbury “Biofiction” book series. She is an elected member of the Academia Europaea, and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association.