“About the dog there is to me something of the faun, of the forest-god, of the mingling of divinity and brutality such as met in the shape of Pan, of an earlier, fresher, wilder world than ours; and from the eyes of the dog, in their candid worship, in their wistful appeal, in their inscrutable profundity, there is an eternal and unanswerable reproach.” (Ouida 1891, 321)

With this sentence Ouida, nom-de-plume derived from babbling her name Maria Louise Ramé, concluded her essay Dogs, published in 1891 in The North American Review. Ouida was born in 1839 in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, but as her father was French, she felt more like a Frenchwoman than an Englishwoman. In her thirties she moved to Italy with her mother, with whom she had a close tie, where she lived until her death in 1901. She is buried in Bagni di Lucca at the Cimitero degli inglesi in a chiseled marble tomb, depicting Ouida lying on her deathbed with one of her dogs. Ouida’s persona was so relevant for her time that she features several biographies, the most famous of which is the one written by Elizabeth Lee in 1914, Ouida: A Memoir, who assess critically both her life as well as her work as a novelist, critic and humanitarian, providing first-hand material such as the correspondence exchanged with her editors and her thoughts on politics and society.

Ouida never had a child nor she married, thus incorporating an alternative vision of the emancipated woman, although she was very critical of the suffrage movement, and of women, in general. She spent her whole life writing many novels, short stories and essays while living with her pack of dogs and committing herself to antivivisectionism and love for animals, especially dogs. During her life she was used to carrying a portrait of her dog in a locket worn around her neck (Lee 1914, 41). Ouida’s passion for dogs was so remarkable that her first biographer, Elizabeth Lee, wrote that she was commonly known among the Tuscan farmers as “la mamma dei cani”¹ (Lee 1914, 95), and Ouida’s mother reported her daughter falling ill after the death of her dog. I will briefly analyze Ouida’s essays and works of fiction, in the context of the Victorian debate against vivisection and the contemporary outpouring of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals.

While nowadays Ouida’s work is relatively neglected, except for 1872’s novel A Dog of Flanders, which is still very popular, particularly in the Eastern Asia, and has been adapted for many screen and TV shows, between 1841 and 1900 Ouida was the second most widely published English authoress after Mrs. Braddon (Marucci 2009a). One possible reason for her falling into oblivion could be her extravagant personality, affecting her reputability. Another possible reason for her exclusion from the canon is the fact that she challenged the boundaries of conventional literature, avoided by the majority of Victorian women writers. Patriarchal moral culture of the period expected public women figures to be morally irreprehensible, and female fictional characters had to conform to that norm too, by being described as a saint or despised as a sinner. Ouida’s character as well as her own lifestyle ­- she was not married, wrote for a living, and led an individualistic independent life – suggests that the core of Ouida’s critique was not the woman but the commodification of female bodies used as tools in the marriage contract.

Studying the life of Ouida is particularly intriguing as her two natures, the writer on the one hand and the animalist on the other, mingle in a perfect way, testifying how deeply she was involved in advocating for a better treatment of animals as well as describing in her works the feelings of grief and bereavement for the loss of a beloved pet. Ouida decided to become a messmate with her dogs, often renouncing to return to England because legislation about quarantine did not allow her to bring her furry friends. For Ouida, sympathy for living beings, both animals and humans, was a political prerequisite in order to achieve as much freedom as possible. She was an enemy to science because she considered it the modern substitute for religion, a “New Priesthood” with a “brutalizing disregard of the mystery of life and its pitiless cruelty to helpless creatures” as she wrote in one of her letters to Henry Drummond (Ouida 1893) . In her article “A Plea on Behalf of Dogs”, which appeared in The Whitehall Review 1878, she states:

“I believe that the much-talked-of rabies would never be known if dogs were rationally treated and free to be happy in their own natural way.” She was also actively involved against The Dogs Act in 1871, a legislation stating that the court of summary jurisdiction could make an order to destroy dogs if there was any complaint about dogs being dangerous or not under proper control. (The Dogs Acts 1871)

Ouida’s opinions were pioneering not only in matter of vivisection and cruelty to animals. She had fresh and genuine thoughts on how a dog should live and be treated. For example, she was critical of dog shows in a moment where exhibitions such as the ones held at Crystal Palace were enjoying success and growing rapidly. In Dogs and their Affections (1891) she avows:

“All the shows and prizes and competitions and heartburnings, all the advertisements of stud dogs and pedigrees and cups won by this dog and by that, are injurious to the dog himself, tend to make external points in him of a value wholly fictitious, and to induce his owners to view him with feelings varying in ratio with his success or failure at exhibitions. The physical sufferings endured by dogs at these shows, the long journeys, the privations, the separation from places and persons dear to them, the anxiety and sorrow entailed on them, all these things are injurious to them and are ill compensated by the questionable good done to the race by the dubious value of conflicting verdicts on the excellence of breed and form” (Ouida 1891, 313).

Ouida attributed to dogs moral qualities such as unselfishness, devotion, and dignity, as well as moral and intellectual superiority. Elizabeth Lee describes Ouida in her memoir as:

“Surrounded by her great white Maremma dogs, occupied with her books and her painting, she seemed to pass her life in a sort of novel of her own. She wove a web of romance round herself and her belongings, and only showed interest in those things and people that could in some way be woven into it.” (Lee 1914, 83).

Ouida thought that other- than -humans’ intelligence as well as their ability to affect and to be affected was severely undervalued, suggesting that their minds exceed human ones not in quantity but in quality. As she states:

“The study of my four-footed companions has so persuaded me of their singular intelligence, their acute sensibility, and their most generous temper […], that I do but pay back a debt I owe when I endeavour, by any words that it is in my power to use, to plead for a little justice in this world to my dear comrades—the Dogs ( Lee 1914, 310)

However, Ouida’s thinking was not linear nor disembodied from the era in which she lived. “Canicide”, which appeared in The Fortnightly Review in September 1898, was harshly critical of British legislation regarding strays, but Pireddu has outlined how here Ouida herself is a victim of the overarching dualism of thought: “While animals are humanized and idealized, the human race becomes the epitome of bêtise itself, precisely in the French double allusion to both animality and stupidity. Either construction constitutes a differential operation in which the animal functions as the other of mankind, although for antithetical reasons” (Pireddu 2014, 117). She was a pioneer in linking animal and human oppression as a multi-faceted issue of disrespect towards the Other, as her lines taken from Puck testify:

“When will you give a Ten Hours’ Bill for horses? A Prohibitive Act against the racing of one and two year olds ? — a Protection Order for cattle? — and an Emancipation Movement for chained dogs? Nay — when will you do so much as remember that the coward who tortures an animal would murder a human being if he were not afraid of the gallows? When will you see that to teach the hand of a child to stretch out and smother the butterfly, is to teach that hand, when a man’s, to steal out and strangle an enemy?” (Ouida 1870, 167).

The “autobiography “Puck (1870) and the short stories A dog of Flanders (1872) and Moufflou (1882) center dogs as absolute protagonists and heroes of the plot, though they are not isolated from society but instead deeply entangled with it. While it is far too easy to dismiss these writings as sentimental, Mary Sanders Pollock states that she succeeds in creating an “ontological equivalence of human and canine” (Pollock 2005, 144), with her particular use of the free indirect narrative speech both for human and for dogs. In this case the talking animal is not used to anthropomorphize the dog, but to equate him to the human. While in the short stories, written for children, the representation of dogs is in third person and the protagonists Patrasche and Moufflou, though exceptional, are “just” faithful dogs, first-voice narrator Puck, a Maltese recounting his own story, has a strong personality (it could be argued that Puck serves as ventriloquist for Ouida’s judgmental thoughts on society), very different from the other canine protagonists of the novel, such as Fanfreluche, a toy terrier, “who ranks in our species much as your petites crevés and your pretty cocodettes rank in yours (Ouida 1870, 188). Puck is “very white, very wholly, very pretty indeed” (Ouida 1870, 2) but he assures us that he has studied life from a vantage point, as “from viewing life – all its cogs, and wheels, and springs – there is nothing so well as to be a lady’s pet dog” (Ouida 1870, 5). Puck, dog du monde but at the same time philosopher, considers himself a cynic, opening up to a train of thought about Ouida’s wit and love for cultivated play of words.

Although Puck is generally not included in the literary canon, neither in Ouida’s one, as scholars have not focused on Puck while studying the authoress, we have an exception in Marucci’s paper “Ouida’s Puck: ‘Animals are the Only True Humans’”, where he criticizes the literal quality of the novel but praise the use of some devices, stating that:

“The unprecedented novelty of the frame is that Puck is formally presented as a first-person autobiography of a dog, an ambitious stratagem taken from the fable, apt to reduce or more exactly to camouflage narrative omniscience, and a far from subtle mode to hit a number of targets with such an intermediation. The author’s omniscience is smuggled off by way of this canine perspective” (Marucci 2009, 272).

He then goes on in his enquiry, declaring that: “With Puck we face a reversal of the traditional hierarchy of narrative roles, as the novel posits a dog at centre stage and makes him look human cases from the canine-human point of view.” Talking animals are not an invention of Ouida, with the first talking dog being Cerberus talking with Menippus in Lucian XXI dialogue of the Νεκρικοί Διάλογοι², written in the second century, and with many other talking animals in literature. Puck’s novelty is that the dog does not just talk, he recounts his own biography, looking at human affairs from a canine point of view. Puck’s opinions flow both as a stream of consciousness and in exchanges with other dogs whom he meets during his vicissitudes around Europe. The reception of Puck was generally successful; poet Whyte-Melville wrote a praise bestowed on her work:

“I have just finished Puck and congratulate you indeed. To my fancy it is far the best of yours, good as the others are. It has all their imagination and dramatic power, with a vein of the most beautiful sympathy and feeling running through it, and a true poetry in the descriptions that is entirely independent of language, although clothed in the most beautiful and appropriate words. It is quite a work even a man might cry over, and that one would read many times and like better each time.” (Lee 1914, 58).

Puck’s Umwelt differs very much from those of Patrasche and Moufflou, not only because Puck’s country is England, while Patrasche is from Belgium and Moufflou is Italian, but because he belongs to a different social status. Patrasche is rescued by the child Nello and his grandfather, a poor milkman, while “Moufflou’s master was one of a family of poor but merry boys and girls. Their father had been dead five years, and their mother’s care was all they knew” (Ouida 1882, 97). Neither of the tales eludes a certain salvific narrative that presents dog as the only faithful buddies for wretched children, however the deployment of the plot is in neither case ordinary. Patrasche is found cuddling up next to Nello in Antwerp cathedral, both frozen to death. Moufflou runs from Rome to Florence to reunite with his beloved prostrated Lolo, who is about to die of hopelessness, but this results in another richer child, Victor, giving up his company. Victor generously renounces Moufflou because: “Moufflou was not happy with me” (Ouida 1882, 127).

A Dog of Flanders and Moufflou use a free indirect narrative style to convey a fairy-tale mood, but at the same time to narrate death or abandonment that occur at the end, and as animal memories are dependent on human writing, to memorialize animal mourning, loss and bereavement, mirrored in both cases by children. In Puck, the protagonist is rescued and comforted for some time by a stray dog, Bronze, who embodies kindness, gentleness and sorrow, adding to the canine characters a mirroring effect of vice and virtues that are found in human animal societies. These endings contrast sharply with the happy resolution typical of fairy tales, outlining the agency of canine protagonists, who consciously decide with whom they want to share their life and deathbed. As King observes, A Dog of Flanders has been targeted for children as “a result of marketing decisions that arose in 1890s and intensified in the early twentieth century” (King 2015, 361), as both the tragic ending and the sexual connotations of the relationship between Nello and Alois cannot be said to be suitable for children, let alone Victorian ones. Also in Puck the reader is left to wonder whether Gladys, a flower-girl, in becoming an actress has come to embody the stereotype of the demoniac femme fatale, a sexually charged woman that Ouida despises so much.

Puck satirizes society and criticizes the habit of the time of considering dogs only as ornament of a house. Patrasche and Moufflou actively take part in writing their own story of cohabitation with the human. This is probably the most important feature of Ouida, the fact that through her writings dogs, every dog, stands as a subjectivity, subverting the typical roles of narrative as well as cultural categories. Differently from other animalists of her age, Ouida is far from the perspective of a dog which is just a god spelled backwards, as well as the one perceiving compassionate behavior towards animal just a proof of a humane human being. She portrays non-human/human assemblages as a product of a co-creative evolution, even though she clearly posits dogs as superior to humans . While she may have idealized too much the trope of dog as loyal and faithful companion, I would generally agree with her in finding myself more comfortable in company of a four footed rather than of a human.

References

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Chez, Keridiana. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men. Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Dubuisson, Lorraine Michelle. “The Epitome And Portrait Of Modern Society: Ouida As Social Barometer Of The Victorian Era”. Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 555, 2013.

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Roberta Langhi is a PhD candidate in Public, Social and Cultural Institutions: Languages, Law, History at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli. Their current research sits at the intersection between Critical Animal Studies, English and American Literature and Queer Studies. Some of the issues they would like to investigate are: how dogs figure in literature in relation to urban and rural landscapes; how the human–dog bond can be of relevance to critical animal theory, comparing and contrasting pets and companion animals ; how dogs figure heavily in our imagination about sociality, nomadism and racial/species purity. The issues that will be raised will also engage with the long-standing involvement of feminist practice of care with animal activism and with animal welfare and total liberation.

Nikoleta Zampaki is a PhD candidate in Modern Greek Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Faculty of Philology in Greece, and a junior fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Studies (CIIS) of Tübingen University, Germany. She is studying and researching in the field of environmental humanities, which includes zoopoetics and animal studies, post-humanities, literary theory, comparative literature, and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau – Ponty. Driven by her desire to protect animals from various persistent dangers and threats, she has always been a passionate advocate for animal rights and animal rights movements. This motivates her to protect animal life by studying animals in both literary and cultural contexts.

Anja Radaljac: How do you (in your work) link the fields of environmentalism and  animal rights?

Nikoleta Zampaki: First of all, I would like to thank you, dear Anja, for inviting me to give this interview and for disseminating it in your network. It is wonderful to connect with other scholars globally and indeed to have my interview translated into the Slovenian language. The main focus of my research and PhD thesis, which is a work in progress, is the field of zoopoetics. I am analyzing animal life in poetry, especially in the American and modern Greek poetry of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It is wonderful to learn more about animal rights diachronically and to study the subject comparatively within various traditions.

AR: What can researching the literature of the past eras teach us? Why is it important in the context of animal rights? What about contemporary literary output?

NZ: I think that we have to examine the representations of animals in old literary texts (from the 12^th to 19^th century) closely in order to gain an insight into their role as being more than human counterparts, to distinguish their behavior from human behavior, as well as to discern different representations of animals in the texts (as a human’s friend, companion, enemy, etc.). The past eras have taught us diachronically that animals are present as human companions; there are many mentions of different species from the micro- as well as macro-cosmos, including horses, dogs, cats, birds, etc. When analyzing a text, one should focus on  animal behavior, both the external and internal aspects, animal psychology, sound patterns,  voices, even colors, and their interaction with humans.

Our analytical perspective draws on ontology, eco-phenomenology, metaphysics, etc. Throughout my upcoming book, titled Symbiotic Post-humanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy, and Art: Towards Theory and Practice, which I am co-editing with my supervisor, Prof. Peggy Karpouzou, we examine the concept of symbiosis within and beyond the human world, including animal life forms. Furthermore, I think that our current relationship with the world that extends beyond the human should be considered as symbiotic because we are all by nature in a symbiotic relationship with our environment. We are in an era of the eco-humanist and post-humanist novel; considering the interplay of the two, I feel that we are witnessing the dawning of another era, I call Symbiocene. Thus, our identity as global citizens in a changing world is shaped by the symbiosis we have with the world, which  includes other animals. However, we have to protect the animals and not exploit them for profit or other uses.

In my country, the volume of current literary output in this field is small, because most texts do not focus on animals, their rights, etc. One of my favorite new titles is Το Κήτος (The Whale) by Ursula Foskolou. This book features short but grand stories of survival and danger, and human story lines full of passion, feeling, experience and symbolism. The animal life forms symbolize the dynamics and power of the human world and the different psychological stages that we go through in our lives.

AR: What are the most prevalent ways of incorporating non-human animals into the literary text in the context of Greek literature?

NZ: The most common way of incorporating non-human animals in literary texts in Greek literature is via symbols and metaphors. The stories, featuring animal agents who are either narrators or subjects of the narrative, thus reveal the animal world and the position of animals in a humanized world either as members of different species or as individuals. Animals have their own voices and our analysis enables us to listen to them and to articulate them in our texts and perception. There is always correspondence between humans and other animals, and this similarity is analyzed within the framework of eco-humanism. Animals are a part of our home (oikos); this underlying dynamic should drive the text and underscore our analysis. In a sense, animals create textuality and are as such part of our analysis. This entails the condition of complex involvement and at the same time fulfills the symbiotic intra- and extra- textual conditions.

AR: Could you give us some literary examples in the context of modern Greek literature that follow the idea of interspecies solidarity and/or building an interspecies community? What are some specifics in which non-human animals appear in such texts?

NZ: We examine the interspecies solidarity in prose such as Το Κήτος (The Whale) and Η Παναγία των Εντόμων (The Virgin Mary of Insects). The narratives are sometimes full of emotions, ontological concerns, anxiety for the future, as well as religious and metaphysical aspects of life and death. The poetry, for instance, of Angelos Sikelianos, praises animal life and takes inspiration from daily practices. Thus animal life is perceived and represented through metaphors, symbols, ontological and axiomatic statements. The poetic subject is in constant dialogue/interplay with the more-than-human world, always perceiving it, listening to it and taking on the role of an interlocutor by sharing anxieties, beliefs, etc. In Sikelianos’ poetry perspective animal life forms live symbiotically with the humans. All sides are perceived in terms of mutual respect and solidarity. You will soon be able to read more on Sikelianos’ zoopoetics in my PhD thesis, which will be translated into English.

AR: In which way does animal consciousness appear in modern Greek literature? Is there a tendency to establish non-human animals as first person homodiegetic narrators or does the third-person heterodiegetic narrator prevail? What do you believe is a better approach and why?

NZ: Animals are mindful agents having consciousness, feelings and can live either in animal communities or as individuals. They are multi-voiced beings in both poetry and prose. Moreover, they are anthropomorphized beings who care about human life, saving humans, even protecting them from evil. We can find many examples throughout modern Greek literature where animal consciousness drives the narrative or a poem (e.g. in Sikelianos’ poetry we can read a poem about an eagle, her consciousness, behavior and the interplay with human consciousness, etc.). We can see both tendencies: animals as narrators and subjects. The power of their voice is the locus that enables us to further and better understand the animal world.

I think that we can analyze the animal world through different perspectives, however I am adopting the eco-humanist perspective because it is neither reductionist to animals as non-human life forms nor is it textually restrictive. Animals create textuality and it will be wonderful to read post-humanist or civic narratives about them. It will be great to explore interdisciplinary fields such as environmental humanities, post-humanities, even robotics in order to further approach the animal world, and investigate any ensuing potentialities. Already many robots are being created that imitate the animal world but I am wary of the (un)ethical implications. The future is unpredictable and animals are civic agents as are humans, therefore we have to be careful when approaching the animal world and, indeed, be mindful of the underlying frameworks.

AR: Is it possible to define some similarities and differences between Greek and American literature in this sense?

NZ: Indeed, I could for instance compare Walt Whitman and Angelos Sikelianos’ zoopoetics. There are many similarities but also differences. Both of the poets praise, feel, even love different animals and their narrators are constantly in dialogue with the animals. I think that Whitman’s poetry comes across as more forceful than Sikelianos’. Namely, Whitman  expresses his feelings and senses directly: he is in close contact with the animals in different circumstances and conditions such as in his daily life, practices and in close personal contact. In contrast, Sikelianos stresses the ontological aspects between animals and humans. His thought is more deeply concerned with the functional aspects of animals that his narrators are constantly in dialogue with and with whom they create a symbiotic partnership in time and space.

In conclusion, both poets are in dialogue on the topic of animal life forms and I think that observing it through an ecophenomenological lens results in seeing the embodied experience of animals as enclosed within the human experience, especially considering the term “universal flesh”, a Maurice Merleau – Ponty’s concept that unites different species in an ecosystem and then shapes not only the bio-cosmic perception of each poet, but also our own. All are eco-flaneurs of this changing world; in this sense, we are all its citizens and our identity is shaped by a multitude of interactions between us and other animals. My vision is to share with species other than my own, as I believe this will help us create a better world.