and cultural freight as canines do. The unattributed legend of Adam cited above is but one of many narratives that fill in what is missing from the biblical account and build upon a treasury of dog stories, legends, and myths. According to the Kato Indians of California, the creator was going around the world creating, and he took along a dog. “Nowhere in the story is any mention made of the creator creating the dog—evidently because he had a dog.”15 Not only is the dog a first companion in the creator’s opening activities; dogs are also the companions to the last human breath, guides to the underworld, and guardians of afterlife crossings both in myth and in practice. Cerberus, the three-headed dog, guards the gates of Hades, and in British folklore a large black dog with glowing eyes is a portent of death. In Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, the reservation priest is alarmed by a visit from the devil in the form of a malevolent black dog that enters through a window, puts its foot in his soup, and bargains with him for the life of a child.
Russell Hoban makes extensive use of this lore in Riddley Walker, his remarkable novel about post-nuclear-war England and its fragmented language. Riddley, the postapocalyptic Huck Finn of the title, goes on a quest to understand the story fragments that record the devastation. Early in the novel, he tells the story of “why the dog wont show its eyes,” explaining that when humans enticed the first dog to a fire, they saw that the dog had the “1st knowing,” and it shared that knowledge with them. But they misused this insight, and finally their cleverness and scheming brought humankind to the Power Ring and nuclear destruction. From then on, “day beartht crookit out of crookit nite and sickness in them boath,” leaving humans and dogs hunting each other in a desperate search for food.16 Riddley says he’s heard that dogs could be friendly, but he’s never seen it. But later in the narrative, as Riddley’s pursuit of the story of the destruction of the world begins to reknit the narrative, Riddley makes friends with a lonely black dog, signaling one more small measure of healing in the blasted landscape.
FIGURE 6
Roswell. Cabinet card, 1890s, 10 × 14 cm. Photograph by Bolander. Monticello, Wisconsin.
While we would not expect to see such portentous implications in family photographs with dogs, the Eden-to-Hades versatility of the dog in its mythological form does help explain some of its manifestations in ordinary daylight. For example, when bereaved families created mourning pictures of loved ones, and especially of children, it was not uncommon to include an image of a dog as part of the funerary decoration. Figure 6 is a memorial card. These mementoes usually feature a picture of the deceased from life, but the image is decorated with flowers, wreaths, and other funerary emblems. In American culture, the dog represents home, and in this context it reminds the viewer that the home is now bereft of the beloved child, although the presence of the dog could also be a throwback to atavistic mythological meanings associated with canines. The association of the dog with death takes on a different aspect when we look at archeological information. In North America we have evidence of dog burials extending as far back as 9500 B.C.E., and in more recent North American sites (from 6600 to 4500 B.C.E.), humans and dogs were buried together. As the anthropologist Darcy Morey notes, “considering the attention commonly lavished on dogs in mortuary contexts . . . it seems clear that they are about as close to being considered a person as a non-human animal can be.”17 Although many animals have served as metaphysical companions for humans, dogs seem to occupy a special category.
As an avid young reader of dog books, I imbibed many of these dog motifs. I moved quickly from picture books to adult-style narratives in which dogs or horses were no longer talking animals but main characters along with the humans. I remember my mother ordering two books for me, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I never did read Verne, but I still own that copy of Black Beauty. But alongside Walter Farley’s black stallion series and Elyne Mitchell’s brumby stories, I read Jack London’s wild dog adventures, Albert Payson Terhune’s collie stories, and Jim Kjelgaard’s Irish setter books. I also loved Fred Gipson’s less well-known Hound-Dog Man, preferring it to Old Yeller, which most children find horrifying because the dog dies. Inspired by these books as an adolescent, I yearned for a purebred collie and fed every stray that came by our back door, much to my mother’s consternation. We adopted some of them, of course, so there was never a time I was without a dog, or a dog book, for that matter. Collecting antique photographs of dogs unlocked the cascade of words about dogs that I’d absorbed during my own childhood reading.
Rereading these stories was fun and troubling at the same time. I hadn’t realized how much these beloved stories were romances about human-canine communication. Interestingly, we seem to be enjoying a renaissance of dog romance, most of it retailed in nonfiction accounts of personable, remarkable dogs and their human relationships. I do not reckon with these narratives in this book, however. As heartwarming as many of these stories are, they are largely one-dimensional accounts of the canine-human relationship. As such, they occupy the same cultural role as any conventional romance fiction, where the central relationship is at first tenuous or difficult, misunderstandings must be overcome, the owner finally learns to “read” the love object (who has been reading the owner all along), and they live happily ever after. My photographs certainly document the longevity of American dog love, but many publications before this one have already accomplished that task, as I’ve discussed in the preface. Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves provokes a different kind of conversation, one about the covert cultural meanings ascribed to the dog or marked by the dog’s presence in the photograph. The current spate of dog-valorization stories are not intended to stimulate cultural introspection; they are intended to make us feel better. While feeling better is a legitimate outcome of reading, it isn’t the only outcome I am pursuing here.
Furthermore, there is an unsettling underbelly to the romance plot. Romantic love can prove to be blind if not lethal. The romance plot is a formulaic structure that asserts the necessary domination of male over female, and encourages women to see their fate in these power-based terms. Through romance, women learn that they cannot trust their instincts in assessing the safety of relationship with any given male, and that they must be protected and rescued by that same male, whom they cannot understand but will come to adore.18 The romance plot may also encourage women to accept an implicit, and sometimes explicit, brutality in the relationship. Perhaps the heroine is foolish and hardheaded, and needs to be “taken” by force before she can see the rightness of the male’s conquest. A bad woman—someone who has used her sexual powers illicitly—is usually killed or otherwise punished in the romance plot. Our contradictory attitudes toward women are much like cultural ambivalence about dogs. James Serpell comments on the enigma of contradictory cultural attitudes toward dogs, observing that “ambivalence about dogs seems to be almost universal.”19 It seems that humans love and loathe dogs in equal proportions. We love them when they act least like dogs and most like adoring sycophants. Speaking generally, this mirrors cultural attitudes about women, who are praised most highly for being affectionate, beautiful, obedient, and servile.
The connection I’m making here, using the cultural and literary structure of “romance” to find women and dogs inhabiting the same script, is unsettling, but it is important to acknowledge the connection between women and animals, especially dogs.20 In the romance plot, dogs are to humans as women are to men. This also means that our romance with dogs has its dark side. Our domination and domestication of dogs has not always produced benevolent outcomes for dogs, any more than the romance plot has always produced benevolent outcomes for women. The literary device of the romance plot serves as an apt narrative model for how we construct our relational world with other sentient creatures. From animal experimentation to genetic engineering and dog fighting, men have ruthlessly exploited the canine capacity for assimilation. That is the shadow side. My photographs do not engage us in direct conversation about our cruelty to dogs, but they do reveal how we have used and manipulated animals for what are often ethically craven purposes. Although I want to honor the genuine beauty of the caninehuman relationship, I also persist