A Modernist Bildungsroman: Nonhuman Narrative and Multispecies Community in Virginia Woolf’s Flush

Abstract

In 1933, Virginia Woolf published Flush: A Biography, an experimental novel in animal narrative that records the life story of Elizabeth Browning’s pet dog. It receives scant scholarship, and critics treat it as serious work only to the extent that it is not concerned about dogs. It is the progress in animal studies that inspires more scholars to re-evaluate Flush as a biography of a dog. In this respect, this paper explores Woolf’s response to the form that Flush adopts, Bildungsroman, by the use of Gregory Castle’s theory of modernist Bildungsroman. Through a close reading of Flush, this paper attempts to investigate the author’s modernist canine presentation that parts with the tradition of Bildung. The present paper starts with an introduction to the relationship between modernism and the genre of Bildungsroman. Then, this paper continues to examine the author’s experiments in narrative and socialization that differentiate Flush from the tradition of canine Bildung. The nonhuman subjectivity demonstrated in the narrative of the cocker spaniel critiques the anthropocentrism that shapes the characters in animal biography. Additionally, the rejection of the hierarchy of breed and the dog’s embracing his identity as a mongrel embody Woolf’s pursuit of freedom in the autonomous Bildung plot.