In each of the texts dogs are associated with natural forces and cycles, and with the ideal of freedom, as opposed to the captivity represented by modern culture. By virtue of their close affiliation with the canine character, the human protagonist experiences a re-connection to a natural, oceanic type of sensibility. This process of affiliation and of awakening perception constitutes a transformation in the human character which often adheres closely to Deleuze and Guattari's formulation of Becoming-Other, especially in its concern with a movement away from the captivity represented by modern culture and majoratarian ethics, towards an anti-anthropocentric, anarchic sense of liberation.
To some extent each of the texts employs a technique which ameliorates the immediate effect of the subversive material. In the case of Fluke, and to a lesser extent My Dog Tulip this strategy works like a Trojan horse, which protects the reader from the full force of the subversive material until the later stages of the text. In Sylvia and My Dog Tulip generic conventions of comedy and narrative tone are also employed to lessen immediate resistance to the texts' more serious themes.
Sylvia, the most recent of the texts, takes the most ironic and circuitous approach to the theme of instinctual re-connection. It's main method of doing so is to couch its serious undercurrents in comedy and in gentle cynicism. Very much the same technique has been employed over the past several years in films like City Slickers, which simultaneously ridicules the naive 'call of the wild' mentality of its hero, whilst eventually allowing those themes to subvert its ostensible post-modern cynicism. In a similar sense in Sylvia, Greg's desperate and inarticulate fumbling around with concepts like 'instinct', and Sylvia connecting him to what's 'real' are presented in a comic, gently derisive way, only to be subtly vindicated or endorsed later in the play. Early in the story the comic, derisive presentation is employed when Greg tries to communicate his sense of alienation to Kate. Again an opposition is constructed between language and instinctual gratification.
GREG
I have a need.
KATE
What need?
GREG
I'm not sure. But I have it.
KATE
Oh Greg.
GREG
It's a definite need.
KATE
Oh Greg
GREG
If I could explain it, Kate, if I could put it neatly into words,
then it wouldn't be so much of a need. (12,13)
Greg tells Kate he and Sylvia are 'bonded.' She replies, 'Ooo. Ouch. That's an overworked word, Greg.' (14) Later Greg's undifferentiated angst is made to look even more absurd. In his enthusiasm at the new-found sense of freedom which his late-night strolls through the city with Sylvia evoke in him, he tells her the city at night 'seems to be shaking itself down to its essentials... Food, shelter, sex. The basic things stand out at night.' (43) Greg is impressed at the way that he 'made eye contact' with 'that poor homeless woman huddled in the doorway', and 'that scruffy guy poking in the garbage for soft-drink cans'. He claims 'We recognized each other in ways we could never do during the day.' (44) His lines in this sequence are presented as a blend of naive, middle-class sentimentality and gushing new-age hypocrisy. Sylvia, who genuinely is connected with the forces Greg refers to, is suitably un-moved. She asks: 'Want to run that by me one more time?' Greg explains:
I guess what I'm talking about is instinct, Sylvia. Maybe we
have instincts we don't even know about. Maybe we are
experiencing basic pulls we don't even recognise... All I
know is you trigger those instincts in me, Sylvia. You
take me back in some basic way. (45)
The 'call of the wild' idea is lampooned again in the dialogue between Greg, and his friend and fellow dog-lover, Tom. Tom attempts to explain to Greg what is happening to him, by asserting that 'People who love dogs are biophiles. They're lovers of the bios - which is the Greek word for nature.' (83) Tom believes Greg's empathy with Sylvia is the consequence of his 'biophilic gene' being activated at an early age, by his parents exposing him to the company of animals. 'We've inherited these genes from our caveman days when we had to connect with nature in order to survive in it... and your relationship with Sylvia has re-activated that gene.' Kate's biophilic gene, on the other hand 'has become thoroughly atrophied.' (84) All of this - Greg's obsession with Sylvia, his own ramblings about instinct and 'basic pulls', Tom's theory of biophilia - are presented in a manner which invites the audience to laugh along; to concur with Kate's (and most critics') opinion that Greg's infatuation with Sylvia is just 'one of those things that happen to men in middle-age' (73). As the play continues, however, it begins to undercuts this sense of amused scepticism.
One device employed to subdue reader or audience scepticism, is to make the sceptical characters in the play look just as foolish, or more foolish than Greg. For instance, Greg's marriage counsellor, whose ostensible role is to confront Greg with the irrationality of his behaviour, calls himself/herself 'Leslie', and wears 'ambivalent' clothes so that clients can 'select' her 'gender'. The part is played by the same actor who plays both Tom and Phyllis, creating an ambiguity of gender which, whilst comical in the context of Leslie's questionable professionalism, adds to the ambiguity of species already invoked by the presence of a human portraying a dog. Leslie loses control of the session, tells Kate to divorce Greg and shoot Sylvia, and excuses hirself, hurrying offstage, with the excuse "I'm late for my shrink" (115). Similarly, Kate eventually proves unable to maintain her own scepticism. She admits to Leslie that when Greg looks at Sylvia 'There's a sort of deep, distant light in his eyes. A sort of... primeval affection.' (105). Kate feels she's 'up against something that has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years - ever since the first wolf came out of the forest and hunkered down next to the caveman by his fire.' (106). Irrespective of the comic context of its utterance, the revelation that Sylvia's main detractor and antagonist secretly regards Greg's attachment as a phenomenon with a biological, primordial origin does real harm to the conceit that Greg is just going through some sort of male menopausal 'thing', or as Leslie puts it, a retreat 'into a kind of pastoral nostalgia' (112).
These incidents, which undercut the amused scepticism characterising Sylvia means that Greg's comments about instinct, and Sylvia as a reconnection to primal 'pulls' has a subversive quality. Ultimately it refuses to be entirely dismissed as a 'mid-life crisis'. Critics frequently use phrases like 'increasingly demented' to describe Greg's infatuation, and stress that the play is a lightweight or whimsical comedy, but they have also acknowledged that the serious ramifications of the relationship between Greg and Sylvia constitute, in Helen Thomson's words, an 'under-developed' 'sub-text'. In an interview with the London Times Gurney says Sylvia is partly about 'instinct and the need for instinctual expression in an urban environment,' and tells Cameron Stewart in The Australian that his own dog, who inspired the play, is 'a liberating element' in his life.
Ultimately the transformative effect of Sylvia upon Greg's life is recognised, albeit in a less extreme form which does not threaten his marriage. Greg ends up with a 'real' job, working for 'Wildlife Conservation International' (132). In a certain respect Sylvia transforms Kate, too. Kate finally softens towards agreeing to keep her Sylvia ('As Shakespeare once said, "What the fuck"' (131)), and though she denies it, Greg tells the audience he caught her reading 'The Hidden Life of Dogs', with Sylvia's head in her lap (132). We are left with the feeling that Sylvia's revitalising, life-altering effect upon Greg is real, even if his perception of it may have been extreme, and required him to anthropomorphise her.
At first My Dog Tulip does not seem quite so concerned as Sylvia with natural forces and instinctual pulls, but to a large degree this is because Ackerley's carefully understated narrative style keeps such themes submerged, only allowing them to emerge in full force in the book's final chapter. Greg's mania and hyperbole exaggerate his self-perceived proximity to the forces which Sylvia represents - initially they even cause us to be suspicious of the whole process. By virtue of his constantly referring to 'natural pulls', Greg establishes a credibility gap which is only closed later in the play by the techniques outlined above. Conversely, Ackerley's fastidiously understated, even archaic style (Punch claim he writes 'with the mannered fascination of a seventeenth century gentleman examining his humours') understates just how attuned to Tulip's world he has become. As is examined in chapter four, this highly mannered, amused style also allows him to import subversive, anti-anthropocentric material into the text.
The primal qualities, the animality which Ackerley was determined to convey are maintained by the book's many descriptions of Tulip as 'like a wild beast' (9), or as the narrator's 'savage lover and protector' (26). In addition Ackerley's relentless and painstaking, sometimes almost clinical concentration on basic functions of canine life, such as urination, defecation, sex, pregnancy and birth inscribe the text with an uncompromising physicality which enhances this effect. However My Dog Tulip is also very often a funny book, and its humour, deployed with a studiously maintained sense of British middle class propriety, serves a similar purpose to the gently deprecating humour in Sylvia: it provides a space into which the reader's hesitation about the text's more serious meanings or concerns can be displaced. In Sylvia's case the audience's sense of condescending amusement is supported at first, only to be subtly eroded. In the case of My Dog Tulip the reader is insulated from the full brunt of Ackerley's anti-humanist philosophy, the intensity of his love for Tulip, the dramatic transformation which their relationship wrought upon his real life - in essence from the anti-anthropocentric wildness of the text. The passion is there, but the humour keeps it at a less threatening distance, at least until near the end of the book.
Ackerley drops his diversionary comical tone for 'The Turn of the Screw' - the final chapter of My Dog Tulip - and the change of style and of content is potent. In this sense the humorous tone of the earlier parts of the book can be seen as contributing to the poignancy and effect of the final chapter, by providing it with such an extreme contrast.
In 'The Turn of the Screw' Tulip is finally revealed as a conduit through which Ackerley is able to encounter and appreciate the forces of wildness and instinct. She becomes an embodiment of nature and passion, a symbol of the transience of life, and a lesson in how it should be lived. Queenie, in Ackerley's words has 'the art of life... she provides me with my lesson' (Parker: 318).
Additionally, Tulip's vitality, and the natural setting of Wimbledon common in spring are placed in potent opposition to the text's listless and repressed human characters with pseudonyms like 'Mr. and Mrs. Blandish', and urban London, which has been the setting for most of the book. The result is a poetic prose which reveals its human narrator, seduced by a wild creature, in rebellion against the artificiality of modern culture.
Tulip is 'like a furnace' (137); 'a burning creature, burning with desire. 'Heat' is the apt word; one can feel against one's hand without touching her the feverous radiations from her womb.' (135) In the woods, 'our temple' (142), 'our haven' (132); filled with images of spring growth, she reverts to her feral self. Here, 'where the silver trees rise in their thousands from a rolling sea of bracken Tulip turns into the wild beast she resembles.' (132) 'It is Africa, and she is a jungle beast come down to the river to bathe.' She is 'momentarily conscious of her condition and is cooling her swollen vulva, her nipples and anus.' (134)
Ackerley turns the image of Tulip's sexual cycle, which has loomed throughout the book's many chapters on mating and reproduction, into a miniature of life itself. It becomes apparent why, when changing Queenie's name, he chose Tulip as a pseudonym: 'She is four, she is five, she is six... Spots of blood on the silvery shins. The torment, the wonder has begun again. Like a flower, like a door, the vagina is opening again' (140) (In We Think the World of You Ackerley uses the floral motif again when he describes Evie's 'pretty genital, shaped like the crown of a daffodil' (142)).
In My Dog Tulip both Ackerley and Tulip are marginal entities. She is a domestic creature who turns into a wild beast, Ackerley is a human who eschews human company, and moves towards a closer appreciation of instinct and natural cycles through his vicarious participation in canine experience. In one of his more famous quotes, Ackerley wrote that he considered 'life... so important and, in its workings, so upsetting, that nobody should be spared, but that it should [be] rammed down their throats from morning to night.' As Peter Parker puts it, 'In celebrating Queenie, Ackerley is celebrating life, in all its mess and muddle, and mourning its transience.' (317,8)
In the canine-human relationship presented in My Dog Tulip the proximity of man and dog in a way underlines that the barrier still exists: Tulip acts, Ackerley reflects, but his reflections are those of a man learning the urgency, and fragility of life, through contact with an exceptional, instinctual individual, a dog.
In their presentation of canine-human affiliation, their themes of access to oceanic forces or perceptions, and particularly in the rejection of mainstream, humanist ethics by their transformed human characters Fluke, Sylvia and My Dog Tulip adhere to aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Becomings-animal. Examination of the affiliations depicted, and the transformation of the human characters in the texts illuminate both the anti-majoratarian themes of the respective texts, and the essential anti-anthropocentrism of the concept of Becomings-animal.
The latter two texts concern, from the human's point of view, an 'alliance' with an 'exceptional individual' (Deleuze, Guattari: 243), resulting in a permeation of the human by canine modes of perception. Both relationships - Greg's with Sylvia, and Ackerley's with Tulip (Queenie) - consist of an alliance between human and canine, rather than a crude imitation of canine behaviour. Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between 'sentimental.. Oedipal animals', which 'invite us to regress' - and 'demonic' or 'affect animals' - affect being 'the power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel'; that instigate Becomings. (240,41).
It might be said that both Tulip and Sylvia qualify as 'demonic animals'. Ackerley makes it clear, in the first paragraph of My Dog Tulip that Tulip is no mere 'Oedipal animal'. He describes meeting a woman who is pushing a small dog along in a baby carriage. 'Very comfortable and peaceful the little dog looked as the old woman trundled him along among the flowers, chatting to him in that bright, encouraging way in which people address invalids.' (8) At the end of the book, Ackerley lovingly describes his dog as a wild beast, cooling her heated vulva and anus in a stream, and crunching on a young rabbit's skull. There is no doubt that Ackerley placed the Oedipalised dog on the first page of My Dog Tulip to emphasise exactly what Tulip is not, and perhaps to emphasise what he is not, or what he becomes unlike. Tulip, in 'The Turn of the Screw' is a conduit for impersonal, primal forces by which Ackerley is transfixed. His embracing of the forces which she represents parallels his rejection of majoratorian British culture (this theme is examined in more detail in chapter four.) Ackerley's affiliation with Tulip might draw him into contemplation, but rather than the narcissistic reflection which Deleuze and Guattari warn against, it is a rapturous contemplation of the beastly; a zoomorphism of the human self, rather than an anthropomorphism of the canine.
Greg's relationship with Sylvia is a Becoming-animal of a sort, and the threat that it throws up to Kate and to his own role in human society (his job hangs in the balance) contains elements of the radical, demonic affiliation of which Deleuze and Guattari write. Ultimately Greg's Becoming falters though, and he retreats from the radical implications of his canine affiliation, withdrawing to the human, albeit transformed and improved.
In James Herbert's novel Fluke the psychic transformation of the central character from human to dog involves a highly-realised Becoming-animal, which also demonstrates the anti-anthropocentrism inherent both in concept of Becomings, and in the modern genre of canine-human crossover texts. As in Sylvia and My Dog Tulip, the central human character in Fluke enters into a close, species-blurring affiliation with a canine, which leads to increased perceptions and awareness of the natural world, and of 'reality' in general. Unlike My Dog Tulip and Sylvia though, the human who learns instinctual freedom, and the canine who teaches him are literally the same character. On the book's first page, Fluke remembers his first thoughts on being born: "Who was I? What was I?" (7). An understandable confusion for a former human who has just emerged, more or less fully sapient but amnesic, from a canine womb.
Fluke consists of a first person narrative spanning several years of its man/dog protagonist's life. Some third of the way through, Fluke pauses to answer this rhetorical question, and his explanation constitutes a good summary of the main concern of much of the narrative.
So what of my feelings of being a man in a dog's body?
Well, they certainly never left me, but they didn't often
play an important part in my thinking. You see, I was
developing as a dog, and this development took up
most of my time. (78)(italics in original)
The main plot of Fluke is this: Nigel Clairemount Nettle is the co-owner of a plastics business. He is killed in a road accident, and reincarnated as a dog. He gradually regains memories of his life as a human, which lead him eventually to attempt to return to his wife and daughter. He finally realises that his attempts to re-insert himself into his former role as husband and father are futile, and instead relinquishes the remnants of his humanity, and embraces his animal identity. Most of the book however is spent with Fluke experiencing confusion and dissonance between his human and canine aspects: ' a strange conflict was going on. I knew I was a dog; yet instincts, senses - call it intuition - told me I wasn't' (23). It is highly unconventional to be presented with a sapient dog who talks about his human 'instincts': in Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, we would call Fluke, at least at this stage of the narrative, a molar dog emitting a molecular human - his corporeal form is that of a dog, but he has not entered fully into a zone of proximity with the canine; he is not yet 'barking... with enough necessity and composition' (Deleuze, Guattari: 275); however the eventual accomplishment of this transition constitutes the climax of the story.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that Becoming does not involve a transformation into a molar entity, but this does not disqualify Fluke. Fluke's molar form does not change during the text. He is born canine on the first page. The transformation through which Fluke passes during the story he narrates is entirely mental. It is, so to speak, a matter of his mind 'catching up' with the physical transformation which has already occurred. Appropriately the transition is largely made possible through Fluke's contact with two 'exceptional individuals' from the animal world: a mongrel named Rumbo, and an un-named badger, who appears close to the story's end. In the scheme of Fluke, 'exceptional individuals' are animals who have retained some awareness of their former incarnation as a human.
The twin processes which continue throughout Fluke, gradually emerging as the texts true concerns, are the gradual diminishment of Fluke's distinctive human qualities, to be replaced by distinctive canine ones, and his increasing appreciation of, and integration into an oceanic, naturalistic sensibility. As with the other texts, the transformation involves a psychic awakening and transformation, and a questioning of majoratorian culture, brought about by close affiliation, or in this case integration with a canine Other.
From the beginning of the text it is made clear that being a dog is a more vital and sensually rich experience than being a human. . Instinct and sensory stimuli are more intensely experienced. Fluke recalls that his new body 'quivered with awareness' (8); he can 'smell kindness' (11); 'feel... goodness' (20); food is consumed with an almost sexual rapaciousness. It isn't merely that ordinary sensations are experienced more acutely: dogs can see ghosts. "Have you ever seen a ghost?", Fluke asks his audience. "Probably not." (47) Fluke's rationale for this heightened sensitivity is that 'being closer to the ground somehow makes me closer to nature' (9) - which might seem glib, but ties in with one of his later remarks about human attitudes to other animals: 'They had learned to walk on two legs a long, long time ago, and had felt superior ever since.' (22) Each of the texts examined here question Aristotle's Scala Naturae, but Fluke's anti-anthropocentrism is intrinsic to the premise of the story, and is inseparable from Fluke's increased appreciation of the natural world, and his Becoming-animal.
The concept of Becoming-animal, the whole concept of Becomings, is intrinsically anti-anthropocentric, in that, in Deleuze and Guattari's formulation, 'Becomings are minoritarian' (291). All Becomings proceed through Becoming-woman to Becoming-animal, with molecularity and imperceptibility as the ultimate destinations. The same progression, away from a majoritarian primacy - humanness - is recreated in the transmigratory schema of Fluke. Fluke eventually learns that the secret of his 'freakish' identity is that all non-human animals were previously humans, though most do not recall this incarnation. Moreover, spiritual attainment in this system involves an anti-anthropocentric reversal of the usual association of sophistication with progress. The further beings have 'progressed' in this system, the further down the Scala Naturae they move: 'the more advanced of us', he learns, are insects (150).
Deleuze and Guattari use insects to illustrate the point that Becomings are minoritarian: 'It is not a question of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how "man" constituted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily... form a majority.' (291) In Fluke then, the progression down the Scala Naturae, with the gendered 'man' replaced by the ungendered 'human' as the 'majoritarian par excellence', is the equivalent to Deleuze and Guattari's progression towards imperceptibility, and in its anti-anthropocentrism, it is no less 'a political affair' than Becoming-minoritarian. (292)
Insects, the ultimately evolved beings, are more 'advanced' because 'they accept their lives' (151). This notion of acceptance is reiterated several times in the latter stages of Fluke. It is linked, Fluke suspects, to 'this great goal we're all reaching for - call it perfection, happiness, ultimate peace of mind, whatever you like' (155). The idea contains strong overtones of the concept of ego-death - as, for that matter, does the concept of becoming-imperceptible.
In Fluke then, the concept of Becoming is synonymous with the progressive displacement of self-reflexivity by immediate, instinctual experience. Speaking of his disappearing memories of his humanity, Fluke says 'All I know is that I forget more and more what I was and become what I am.' (189). What he is becoming, as he stated in the book's opening pages, is 'closer to nature'.
Dogs might be 'closer to nature' than humans, but Fluke must still learn to accept these heightened faculties, and at the same time abandon his pretence of being human. Some of this transition is narrated directly by Fluke, but the narrative represents the process in a number of complimentary ways which don't immediately draw attention to themselves. The major example is in a gradual transition of setting. The story takes place for the most part in urban London, in junkyards and marketplaces, but moves during the second half into a rural setting, as Fluke goes in search of his human family. First there is a fairly substantial sequence in a country village where Fluke resides for a time as a household pet. After this, the narrative moves into a wholly wild setting, involving a meeting with a vixen (a wild canine; which reminds us of the marginal status of domestic dogs in this regard; that Fluke is a marginal member of a species which is itself marginal) and it is in the deep woods that Fluke meets a badger, who also recalls having once been a man, and who tells him 'The man you were is dead.' (149); 'Forget your past, your family - they're nothing to do with you now.' (153) Fluke is shocked by this advice, but before very much longer he learns to accept it. Even before his final, cathartic embracing of the canine and instinctual, we are alerted that the transition is immanent. In his earlier, urban life he had been squeamish about his companion's killing of some baby rats. Reflecting on this squeamishness, he recalls
'It has, in fact, taken me a long time to come to terms with
the brutality of animal life, and of course it was my
'humanness' which hindered my progress (or regress -
however you care to look at it)' (73)
Close to the end of the story he briefly mentions eating a rabbit he has killed: '(sorry, but canine instinct was taking over more and more - I was quite proud of my kill, actually)' (178). Tulip's killing of a rabbit at precisely the same structural point in My Dog Tulip - 14 pages from the end - serves a similar purpose in terms of its forceful association of dogs with natural cycles, and in each book's momentum towards a representation, in its final pages, of instinct as opposed to civilisation.
Finally Fluke accepts the badger's advice, and, after a symbolic visit to the grave-site of his former human incarnation, finally relinquishes his grip on his human identity:
now my search was over, a ghost had been vanquished.
The ghost was my humanness. I felt free, free as any
bird in the sky. Free to live as a dog. I ran for nearly a day and when I finally dropped, the last remnants of my old
self had been purged. (189)
This correlation of dogs not only with instinctual experience but with freedom and with pleasure occurs in all of the texts: the concept that canines experience the world in a way which is fundamentally liberated, that humans might participate in this liberation by close affiliation with dogs, and that to do so it is necessary to abandon or resist majoratorian ethics. This theme comprises part of a set of oppositions which is constructed between, on the one hand, dogs, freedom, pleasure, instinct and natural forces, and on the other hand, human culture, civilisation, and laws, rules and customs which restrict natural expression and experience.
One of the subversive aspects of My Dog Tulip is the way in which Ackerley constructs Tulip's natural freedom of expression, in opposition to captivity represented by the constraints and proscriptions of English society. This opposition is posited most clearly in the transition which occurs in setting, tone, style and subject, in the 'The Turn of the Screw'. Prior to this final chapter, the setting of My Dog Tulip has been mostly urban and suburban London, now Ackerley and Tulip escape to the woods; their 'haven', and 'temple'. The transition from urban to rural setting is used to precisely the same effect as in Fluke. The assortment of pathetic, repressed or pompous middle class characters like the Blandishes are banished, replaced by the image of Tulip, 'a burning creature' running free. The journey to the woods is even presented as an escape which may be thwarted at any moment by the forces of British propriety. Ackerley and Tulip must contend with a bus conductor who, Ackerley knows from experience, may sabotage their escape plans if he discovers Tulip is in heat. '...he might be outraged and order us off. It is not a situation in which the English are notoriously quick with sympathy. And we must not offend him on any account.' (130)
For Ackerley the freedom and enjoyment of instinctual pleasure which Tulip embodies is anathema to English culture. 'This business of obedience is deeply ingrained in the English character;' he wrote in his diary. 'I find it one of their most repulsive traits.' (Parker: 269) In My Dog Tulip he complains about council rules which demand that dogs not defecate freely in public places. Privately he wrote: 'The only training I ever gave Queenie was to set her free' (Parker: 272). This freedom extended to the freedom to have sex with whom, and wherever she chose. 'Whatever the consequences might be she must have carte blanche' (Tulip, 156). The appendix of My Dog Tulip, withheld from the original edition by his publishers, consists largely of a plea for canine sexual liberty, and here his contempt for the restrictions of British society overflow.
in order that she not be douched and ruptured, other dogs
should not be whipped, I should not be fined for
allowing her to copulate in public, and the English race
should not be affronted, carte blanche must be
modified:' (156,7)
Ackerley had for decades been an advocate of gay rights, in a culture and era when such a stance was highly provocative. Peter Parker writes that Ackerley 'began to regard park rules (about dogs) as a part of a general infringement of liberty, imposed by the same people who declared homosexual acts illegal:' (268) Indeed, during the last years of his life Ackerley became a passionate advocate of animal rights, and a vehement critic of the idea of human supremacy, such that he was sometimes accused of misanthropy (Parker: 406).
In representing the restriction of canine freedom as an emblem of social repression Ackerley was ahead of his time. Writing forty years after My Dog Tulip, Marjorie Garber comments, 'the laws regulating dogs - and their owners - have begun more and more to mark the limits of "freedom" in an increasingly urbanized, and litigious, society.' (1996: 207) Garber discusses the 'leash law' conflicts between dog-owners and police in New York. Interestingly, The London times reports in an interview with Sylvia's A.R. Gurney, that he was fined $100 by the New York Police dept, for letting Lucy run free in Central Park, and In Sylvia Gurney constructs the same opposition between canine freedom and social repression that Ackerley employs. For Greg, Sylvia represents liberation through a reconnection with the instinctual. Kate, on the other hand, who repeatedly casts her ballot for Shakespeare, society and culture, claims she wants 'freedom from dogs' (21)
The theme of canine and human captivity is even more prominent in We Think the World of You. Frank 'rescues' Evie from her incarceration in the tiny pantry of a working class slum. A very large part of the story is taken up with his desperate plans to accomplish this goal. "It's freedom she needs, not restraints", he tells her custodians (35). Evie's incarceration in the Winder's family home is also used to parallel the incarceration in prison of her original owner, and Frank's lover, Johnny. When Frank writes to Millie Winders, Johnny's mother, complaining about Evie's living conditions, he invokes Johnny directly, claiming 'Since he's a prisoner himself and knows what loss of freedom means he would not be so cruel as to condemn his dog to a similar fate.' (80)
When Frank manages to get Evie away from the Winders family, and release her on Hyde Park, he says "Now I had the pleasure I had promised us both, the pleasure of setting her free upon grass.' (69) What is significant is that the promise was made to himself as well as to Evie. Ackerley wrote of Queenie that she possessed 'the art of life' (318). So do Evie, Sylvia, and (eventually) Fluke. As with Ackerley and Greg, Frank shares in this freedom by contagion:
enough, I must caper too; and who could have resisted
such ebullience of spirit, which caught one up into itself
and the buffeting wind?' (69)
I have tried to show in this chapter, how dogs in these texts are used to represent instinctual, natural forces; how humans in these narratives are shown to benefit from contact with canines, being transformed, and reconnected with some pre-reflexive, perhaps oceanic sensibility, and how all of these ideas are constructed around a broad idea of freedom, which is intrinsically anti-anthropocentric, and is opposed by the forces of modern culture and civilisation. In the remaining two chapters attention is focused upon the various modes of equality which the texts employ to allow affiliation between human and canine, and finally, how each text deals with the radical, subversive and shocking concepts inherent in its own anti-anthropocentric motifs and themes.