The affective uses of dogs: Pet-keeping in nineteenth-century England and America

By focusing on the human-dog bond, The Affective Uses of Dogs: Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century England and America studies how gendered subjectivities are formed through the management of the interspecies intimacies. In the course of the nineteenth century, petted animals became, particularly for the middle-classes, deeply important for their affective uses, reflecting a new ethos of "humaneness" that earned the dog a central place in the affective economies of the family. In their relationships with humans, dogs elicited love, terror, and loathing, and the regulation of these powerful interspecies affects produced bourgeois Anglo-American masculinities and femininities and transformed the dynamics of domesticity itself.

The "good" dog, discursively reduced to serve as a technology for the production of affect, was instituted in the family economy to perform positive services through its relationships with humans. In pursuit of domestic harmony, such pets were employed to bind increasingly disparate and insular family members, either by serving as common love objects (in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and Oliver Twist or common love projects (in Margaret Marshall Saunders' Beautiful Joe). The head of household (human, male) jockeyed in a fragile web of interspecies relations that threatened, in their sincere intimacy, to disrupt his power. Anxieties deepened with the increasing awareness of human dependency on the beloved pet—a love coded as an abjection, a site of ontological annihilation. The proliferation of convincing representations of animal interiority had the unexpected effect of producing the beloved dependent as an increasingly independent agent, and consequently, a potentially mutinous peer. Rising anxieties became entangled with fears of emasculation, especially as certain "dandy" pets were already too closely identified with women of a certain class. In Bram Stoker's Dracula and Jack London's The Call of the Wild and White Fang, we see attempts to defuse this potential for mutiny; interspecies love and care were circumscribed to run their potent course along a well-defined and finite track. In the case of Dracula, the companion animal (and companion woman) who takes up the position of affect-producing, economically useless dependent may be loved and treasured intensely, so long as the lover develops the paranoid willingness to kill the beloved, freeing the lover from an affective tie that endangers his elite position. In London's dog novels, domesticity can no longer contain this menace: the companion animal may be loved, but this love is painfully experienced as an externalized episode, away from the home, like a shameful yet tacitly sanctioned secret. Together, this dissertation argues that the human-dog relationship is a central site for the production of many of the central tenets of bourgeois gender and sexuality.