Her statements have nonetheless led to a variety of readings that reveal the puzzling nature of the novel. A fairly recent return to the centrality of the dog has moved away from anthropocentrism and shed light on its implications in our perception of man-animal relationships while exposing the artificiality of imposing any form of hierarchy thereupon.
The modern, post-war perspective of the early s allows Woolf to use Flush as the conveyor of modernityβnot merely because writing the biography of a dog questions the established societal and literary codes, but also because the de-familiarization of the human world through animal eyes aims at reconfiguring the phenomenological world.
The gaze Flush is made to cast upon our world offers a rare insight into its reality and into the possibility and limitations of representation, in a paradoxical attempt to elude the inescapable filter of human perception and the rigidity of words. Then she would make him stand with her in front of the looking-glass and ask him why he barked and trembled.
Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is? That was real at any rate. Flush In writing Flush , Virginia Woolf offered a doubly displaced representation of reality, so that one is not merely faced with a historically distanced and critical recollection of the Victorian era, but also with a reconfiguration of the world enabled by the distance between human and animal worlds.
As a dog, Flush both breaks and bridges that gap. Mixing with the smell of food were further smellsβsmells of cedarwood and sandalwood and mahogany; scents of male bodies and female bodies; of men servants and maid servants; of coats and trousers; of crinolines and mantles; of curtains of tapestry, of curtains of plush; of coal dust and fog; of wine and cigars.
