“Flush” - Co-Consciousness

D. K. W. College, Nellore

Virginia Woolf avers that life in a biography cannot have that high degree of tension as the life of poetry and novel can have. In Flush which is called a biography, she disproves her statement. Flush has a life of high degree of tension. It is on account of three reasons. First, the dog, Flush’s consciousness is portrayed so vividly that one is inclined to believe that there is a spirit or soul that makes patterns on the consciousness of the dog. Second, the book carries the mood of a great mind that interprets and indeed almost discovers itself. Lastly, she writes like one who has forgotten her sex. The reader is made “co­conscious” of these while going through the book. “Co-conscious” is to be aware of a subsidiary stream apart from the main.

The Story

Flush was Mrs. Browning’s dog. When she was Miss Barrett, she bought him from Miss Mitford of Three Mile Cross. Flush was a cocker spaniel. He passes through various experiences which “humanise” and “dehumanise” him. He gets used to the dark room in the Barretts’ home, 50 Wimpole Street. He slowly gets familiar with the street and the Regent’s Park. At first he is controlled, chained. Soon human love controls the spaniel. He loves to lie by her mistress’ sofa and live with his mistress. When Robert Browning visits, he grows jealous; human nature is on him. Once he even attacks Robert. The maid servant, Wilson, punishes him with sound beating. Miss Elizabeth is angry with the dog. Flush wins her by eating the stale biscuits brought by Robert Browning.

The climax occurs when he is taken prisoner by one Taylor, a self-styled dictator on dogs which go about without chains. He or his men would take possession of the dogs which have no chains. Taylor would give the dog on payment of ten pounds by the master. If the penalty is not paid, the owner will receive a parcel containing the head and feet of the dog. Flush experiences extreme misery in a dark room of Taylor’s slum dwelling. As he goes through the torture there, Miss Barrett undergoes agony at home. Taylor demands more than ten pounds for the dog. Miss Barrett’s brothers and Robert Browning expostulate with her against yielding to the ruffian Taylor.

Miss Barrett decides to pay the ransom; would not Robert pay ransom if Elizabeth were in the same position as the poor, loving Flush? At last a brother of hers fetches the dog.

On the 18th of September, 1846, very quietly, Miss Barrett leaves the house for Italy with Wilson and Flush, of course, running away with Robert Browning.

They reach Casa Guidi, the Browning’s home in Italy. Now Mrs. Browning complains of no headache, drinks wine and sleeps soundly. Flush is also a changed one. No more a snob now. He finds in Florence that all dogs are mongrels, with only colour differences. No distinctions. No dog stealers here, and all dogs are brothers. Mrs. Browning does not put him on chains. He roams about and knows all the lanes of Florence. He tastes pure love, simple love which brings no care in its wake, neither shame nor remorse. That he is here and gone like the bee on the flower is here and is gone. Today the flower is rose, tomorrow another flower; yellow spaniel or spotted does not matter much.

On the Martyr’s day Flush gets bored. He notices a bitch below. Seizing a chance, he makes off with her. She and he flee to the heart of Florence. “Only a star or two shine in the ripples of the Arno where Flush lay with the spotted spaniel by his side, couched in the shell of an old basket in the mud.” He passes through another period of jealousy when Mrs. Browning gives birth to a male child. Very soon he gets over it and becomes a companion to the baby.

Flush is then scourged with fleas. With no alternative Robert Browning clips him all over into the likeness of a lion. The dog suffers from the evils that flesh is heir to. Mrs. Browning indulges in the “Spirits of the Sun” connected with the crystal ball and Lord Stanhope. Being absorbed by the new marvel Mrs. Browning grows indifferent to Flush. Once he finds his mistress abstracted. He leaves the room, goes to the market and sits by the customary market woman. She is old, and he is old. He sleeps and remembers the experience at Taylor’s of one coming to cut his throat. He wakes up suddenly and runs in a state of horror. Children pelt stones, crying “matta.” Has he gone mad? He comes home, leaps on to the sofa where Mrs. Browning is reading. As she pats the dog gently for the second time, she finds that Flush is no more.

Canine Consciousness

Now if we read closely some passages from the text, we find how we are persuaded to feel with the dog. The passage which follows occurs when Miss Barrett goes out in her bath chair. Flush goes out with her, for the first time, walking in the street.

For the first time the whole battery of a London street on a hot summer’s day assaulted his nostrils. He, smelt the swooning smells that lie, in the gutters, the bitter smells that corrode Iron railings, the fuming, heady smells that rise from basements, smells more complex, corrupt, violently contrasted and compounded than any he had smelt in the fields near Reading, smells that lay far beyond the range of the human nose, so that while the chair went on, he stopped, amazed, defining, savouring, until a jerk at his collar dragged him on. And also, as he trotted up Wimpole Street behind Miss Barrett’s chair he was dazed by the passage of human bodies. Petticoats swished at his head, trousers brushed his flanks, sometimes a wheel whizzed past an inch from his nose, the wind of destruction roared in his ears and fanned the feathers of his paws as a van passed. Then he plunged in terror. Mercifully the chain tugged at his collar Miss Barrett held him tight, or he would have rushed to destruction.

Here Virginia Woolf dives into the depths of the consciousness of the dog and surfaces to the external conduct of the dog and then comes to the tug at the collar. When the author takes the reader into the consciousness of Flush, the reader thinks that the author is observing and remarking on the smells of London under the dog’s pretext. But when she surfaces to the external gesture of the dog an tug, the reader would incline to believe, likely a dog would be so conscious of smells and therefore he stops and gazes. Next as the van passes, the wind of destruction roars in Flush’s ears. At first the phrase, wind of destruction, would be taken for a poetic hyperbole and not an attempt to describe the dog’s awareness. But when the author says that Miss Barrett held him tight or he would have rushed to destruction, we feel the sound on the pulse of the dog. Virginia Woolf puts in the word, “defining”, slyly to prepare us for the ratiocinative consciousness of the dog here­after. The dive and surfacing makes us believe that the author has guessed rightly the dog’s mind with her intuitive or instinctual apprehension.

The dog moves forward with an yearning to experience the anticipatory smells roused by the sight of the flowers and the trees and the touch of the feet on the grass in Regent’s Park. It is an anticipatory reeling, roused by the past experience in her personal life at Three Mile Cross and the racial memories. But the heavy weight of chain jerks at the throat. The dog feels heavy because the pull restrains a desirable feeling. The author debates for the dog:

Were these not the signals of freedom? Had he not always leapt forward directly Miss Mitford started on her walk? Why was he a prisoner here? He paused. Here he observed, the flowers were massed far more thickly than at home; they stood plant by plant, rigidly in narrow plots. The plots were intersected by hard black paths. Men in shiny top-hats marched ominously up and down the paths. At the sight of them he shuddered closer to the chair. He gladly accepted protection of the chain. Thus before many of these walks were over a new conception had entered his brain. Setting one thing beside another, he had arrived at a conclusion; where there are flower beds and asphalt paths, there are men in shiny top-hats; where there are flower beds and asphalt paths and men in shiny top-hats, dogs must be led on chains. Without being able to decipher a word of the placard at the gate, he had learnt his lessons in Regent’s Park: dogs must be led on chains.

Thus the dog yearns to be free, but soon a close view of the plots intersected by the paths in the park and men in shining top­-hats, cause the fear of the unfamiliar. Here also the author dives into the dog’s awareness and surfaces to the safety of the chain and to the placard at the Regent’s Park gate which reads that dogs must be led on chains. Virginia Woolf “coincidents” in an amusing manner the dog’s realisaton of the security afforded by the chain and his looking upon the placard. Thus she coaxes us, to the belief that we are in the mind of the dog.

Sitting still or led on chain, he observes his people, the other dogs, moving in the park led by their masters. This time the author states the conclusion on the dog’s experience first: dogs are not equal, but different. Then she gives the experience of the dog for verification. At first we take the statement only as the author’s dig at human society. Later as the narrative progresses, we feel we are more in the mind of the dog. Flush mixes freely with the dogs at Three Mile Cross. In Wimpole Street and the vicinity the dogs are distinguished as in the park, Flush notices. He comes home and looks at himself in the looking glass. Finds he is distinguished with his feathered feet, smooth hands. He is equal to the best bred cocker spaniel. The author interposes here Miss Barrett’s observation: “‘He was a philosopher’, Miss Barrett thought, meditating the differ­ence between appearance and reality.” The former opinion of Miss Barrett is angular, a writer’s and the latter seems to be nearer truth. It is like lengthening a line by juxtaposing a shorter one. An impossible is made possible with a greater impossible juxtaposed.

The technique of the narration needs a comment. As it is usual in her, she proceeds inductively and deductively. When Flush realises that dogs are to be led chained in the Regent’s Park, she gives the experience and then the conclusion. When Flush realises that dogs are different, not equal, the process is deductive – conclusion precedes experience. To use a familiar comparison in Virginia Woolf’s writing, the flight of her mind In the passage is like that of a bird. It flies and perches on an external fact or opinion and flies again. Then, is thought process akin to the imaginative process?

Authorial Consciousness

For the mood and the mind of the writer inherent in the book, the narrative offers certain clues. Virginia Woolf says, in the already cited passages, that the prime lesson of “the bed­room school” is to suppress the most violent instincts of Flush’s nature. This is a pointer to be co-conscious. Her phrase, “an uncomfortable yet thrilling tightness”, is another. In the companionship of Flush and Miss Barrett we cannot help reading the companionship of the married who live together in bedroom for the whole of their lives, first by fascination and then in help­less obligation. On the very first night when left together, Flush and Miss Barrett look at each other:

Flush was surprised. Heavy curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright. There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other, each fell: Here am I and then each felt: But how different: Hers was a pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been all that; and he but no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other. Then with one bound Flush sprang on to the sofa and laid himself where he was to lie forever after on the rug at Miss Barrett’s feet.

Is the narrator thinking on the situation and conveying the feelings of the characters or Miss Barrett herself thinking on the situation? Much might be said on both sides. The narration ambles more on to the writer than to Miss Barrett unless we check with the letters of Mrs. Browning and the poem on Flush. The phrase, “Broken asunder yet made in the same mould”, at once reminds us of Adam and Eve, in Genesis.

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he woman, and brought her unto the man.
(After sinning)
And it will put enmity between thee and the woman.
And between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head; and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Man’s is the warm ruddy face of a young animal, instinct with health and energy whereas woman’s, the pale face of an invalid cut off from air, light, freedom. They are thrown together in life as the bedroom school demands. Did Jehovah punish so? Or man in the name of God?

Through the consciousness and the conduct of Flush, in relation to Miss Barrett, Virginia Woolf traces chiefly the misery of man in particular, and the misery of man and woman in general in the so called domestic bliss. Flush springs on to and tries where he is to lie forever after. Then attached to Miss Barrett he denies the other pleasure, the pleasure of Sunshine. Gradually he loses the capacity to fight with other dogs. He dislikes barking and biting. He comes to “prefer the silence of the cat to the robustness of the dog and human sympathy to either.” Once he goes downstairs. The savage Cuba hound in the house below bites him and sends him upstairs. Flush is no hero, Miss Barrett concludes, but why is he no hero? Partly on her account. Miss Barrett is too just not to realise that it is for her he has sacrificed his courage as he does the Sun and the air. This nervous sensibility of Flush has its draws. It is annoying when he moans piteously all night because he is not allowed to sleep in her bed, and when he refuses to eat unless she feeds him. So the narrative goes on. If  “he” is taken for man as husband in domestic bliss, one understands the point of Virginia Woolf for her mood through the book. This consciousness obliges us to live through the novel at a higher degree of tension. Who is bird in the cage then? Miss Barrett or Flush, man or woman?

Virginia Woolf always delves into the recesses of the mind not merely to find the origins of feelings, but also to discover what alternative to the bedroom school, for the relationship between man and woman to have a healthier adult life on earth. In the penultimate chapter of the book she writes that it is not true that Flush is fated to remain forever in paradise where essences exist in their utmost purity and “the naked soul of things presses on the naked nerve.” She adds: “The spirit ranging from star to star, the bird whose farthest flight over polar snows or tropical forests ever brings it within sight of human houses and their curling wood-smoke, may for anything we know, enjoy such immunity, such integrity of bliss.” The creatural predicament would not immunise human being to achieve the intensity of bliss located in the Paradise of Adam and Eve before the fall, by human imagination.

Flush is freed from the bedroom school love and also from the vanity when he suffers from the evil that flesh is heir to. The picture which emerges at the end of the novel is Mrs. Browning in her room indulging in the spirits of the Sun; Mr. Browning, in his room reading and writing; and Flush wandering at wiU with no fear or favour.

Forster said that there are spots of it (feminism) all over her work, and it was constantly in her mind. In Flush it is not found though she has enough temptation to quarrel with men, in Barrett’s tyranny. By being co-conscious of the author’s consciousness patterning on the consciousness of the dog and his situation, we understand how far she stretches her sympathy and imagination to understand “the male predicament.”

To sum up, Flush is intense with the mood and mind of the author living through the dog’s awareness, and adding a fragment to her vision or discovering one. It is uninhibited, performing a curious couching operation of the senses, as we see through the awareness of Flush. It as well evidences that the writer is above “the private stage of human existence where there are sides”,since she sympathises with man, being a woman. It is not only doggie without being silly, but a novel without being a mere biography.