Canine Agency and Its Mitigation in the Characterization of Dogs in the Novels by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë

Abstract

As is well known to scholars of the life and work of the Brontë novelists, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë had three family dogs, Grasper, Keeper and Flossy. Less well-known is the fact that they included dogs in all seven of their novels. Emily is the best known on both counts, for her great bond with Keeper, and for the importance of the dogs in Wuthering Heights (1847), but also for the possibility that she may have held views about what can broadly be described as ‘human-animal equivalence’, a topic also of interest to current Animal Studies. In this article, I consider how the dogs in the novels are characterized, through naming and the attribution of sentience, but in particular in terms of the agency attributed to them in the language of the narrator and other human characters, including in relation to cognition. While there is evidence of attributed agency aplenty, from all three novelists, a sharp linguistic focus shows the cognition to be often mitigated. Emily does not stand out from her sisters in this respect. This characterization of the fictional dogs by all three authors offers something of a challenge to the notion of the dog-human binary.