(Un)muzzled: Dogs in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the relationship between dogs as fictional constructs and the shifting dynamics of the novel form in the mid-nineteenth century in order to account more fully for their particular importance to realist writing. In revisiting three canonical novels associated with the realist tradition, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), it demonstrates the ways in which writers regularly rely on dogs in depicting moments of deep personal and interpersonal conflict. Where most previous analyses of animals in Victorian fiction have tended to treat them as minor characters within their respective human narratives, this article is attuned to the affective functions of the domestic dog in contexts that exceed mere verisimilitude, exploring the significance of the connection between the dog’s textual body and the intense experience of grief, sexual desire, and anger respectively. I argue that the dog’s simultaneously narrative and extra-narrative position in the emergent realist novel reflects the genre’s larger formal tensions, generated by the representation of excess affects. These tensions are closely linked to the novel’s primary mode of representation: language. I conclude that it is the dog’s extralinguistic presence, predicated on its inability to encode affect in language, that marks it as the ideal, if increasingly unstable, nexus of powerful, unprocessed emotion in the mid-nineteenth-century novel.