ABSTRACT
Animal autobiographies were popular throughout the nineteenth century, and the high incidence of female authors in the genre has led some to examine the analogies that link female experiences of oppression under patriarchy with animal subjection: in The Old Brown Dog, for example, Coral Lansbury fi nds that animals in fi ction were often “surrogates for women” (1985, 88), while Tess Cosslett posits in Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction that some animal autobiographies may reveal their female authors “hidden affi nity with oppressed creatures” (2006, 76). While it is certainly true that such texts invite identifi cation with the animal through their fi rst-person narration, they also clearly demarcate species distance and diff erence. Cosslett reminds us, for example, that despite the parallels between humans and animals within animal autobiography, “There are some disquieting undertones in E. Burrows’s Neptune, which work in quite the opposite direction: Neptune insists how right it is of his mistress to whip him when he is at fault” (1869, 76). Similarly, the narrator of Frances Power Cobbe’s Confessions of a Lost Dog observes “That a master or mistress should rule, every dog is satisfi ed. He or she reigns over us by Right Human, which is a sort of right divine” (1867, 20). Such moments in which the animal accepts and supports his or her own domination lead me to examine the fi ssures at work in the narratives of love, control, companionship, and ownership within both Burrows’s and Cobbe’s texts in order to illuminate the complexities of female/animal companion species relationships in regards to the concept of mastery.
