photographs can illuminate the ways in which we use dogs to perpetuate malign and benign value systems. As I demonstrate throughout Picturing Dogs, these images offer further evidence and narrative for understanding race, class, family, and gender in American culture. In these photographs, the animal body—in this case, the dog—communicates the presence of multiple “pernicious,” “subliminal,” and, I would add, sentimental and fervently affirmed value systems in American culture. The dog in the picture is part of a larger system of visual rhetoric.
The American preoccupation with respectability and achievement leans toward an index that involves the display of material goods. The dog came into play when “breeding” emerged as one of those watchwords designed to isolate the uncouth. Americans did not invent the snobbery of breeding, but we were quick to assimilate its implications. Speaking of the English, Harriet Ritvo shows how pet keeping became respectable among ordinary citizens, who came to think of the pet as a reflection of oneself, such that “most observers felt that ownership of mongrels revealed latent commonness.”30 It is no accident that the fascination with pure dog breeds coincided with the rise of nativism in American life, as political and cultural pundits used animal metaphors to analyze and judge human society. Chapter 2 considers the contribution of literature and photography to the American concern with material appearances, and the role of the dog in facilitating this kind of representation.
American racism and resistance to racism are represented in ways both saddening and surprising. Images of African Americans with dogs can be found throughout Picturing Dogs, but the ambiguous meanings of “animal” and “dog” take on ominous proportions when dogs and African Americans are in the same frame. The material in chapter 3 bypasses the spectacular racism of “black Americana images” and looks at ordinary photographs and snapshots of black and white people with dogs, wherein the gaze of the viewer may readily and inadvertently reinforce the insult offered to black subjects through the original composition.
The mystery, and sometimes playfulness, of family life surfaces in chapter 4. These photographs represent and misrepresent the reality of American family life. The display of home, children, and dog all go to the heart of the American dream. At the same time, these images surface the unarticulated dimensions of power and gender and race that are explored in other chapters. Defining “family” has become a way of excluding unwanted intruders. And yet the facility of the dog’s representational value undercuts the severe family boundary drawn by cultural purists. Several animal studies theorists have commented pointedly that the canine body stands in for the marginalized other. Teresa Mangum argues in “Dog Years, Human Fears” that the aged dog speaks for the aged person in literature, a sentimental strategy that upholds the value of marginal creatures. Marianne DeKoven and Cary Wolfe argue the same thing in relation to women. Following Carol Adams’s thought in The Sexual Politics of Meat, Wolfe endorses the idea that the sexualized bodies of women and the edible bodies of animals are both housed within the same “logic of domination, all compressed in what Derrida’s recent work calls ‘carnophallogocentrism.’”31 In fact, because most marginalized persons are at one time or another represented as animal rather than human, the dog, with its cultural fluidity, is most likely to stand in for any number of marginalized persons, not just women.
Chapters 5 and 6 follow up on the gender discussion initiated in chapter 4 by examining the collusion of literature with long-standing gender prejudices. Hunting photographs indicate the women who are missing from the cultural narrative, while also documenting male anxiety about masculinity at the turn of the century. Moreover, while the appearance of the woman hunter issues a cultural challenge to constructs of American masculinity, the female hunter also challenges current feminist positions about gendered perspectives on animals. Finally, the anxiety of white manhood is inflected by male attitudes not only toward women but toward African American men as well. While women seem to be excluded in the masculinity narratives, African American men may find themselves either assisting the great white hunter or being displayed as the prey, as is well documented in lynching photographs. Ironically, this same group of photographs invokes a well-attested cultural fascination with wilderness and American Edens, the narrative headwaters where childhood, innocence, and new beginnings are perpetually renewed, even if those paradisal cultural locations are not accessible to every American.
Traces of gender, race, and class dynamics knit all of these images into a cultural whole. In the conclusion, I revisit the perspectives of animal studies and visual studies in order to reflect upon what we can learn from a photographic collection like this one. An animal studies approach takes animals seriously as significant presences in our lives. We can learn more about ourselves as human animals by understanding more about what animals experience, on the one hand, and by understanding what animals contribute to our own understandings as persons, as a culture, on the other hand. In Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin looks patiently at each animal species—its unique abilities and requirements—by way of suggesting what each species can offer us and how we can better communicate with them. While the word “human” is the foundation for the word “humane,” we humans fall far short of that implied value in our behavior toward animals. Being more humane in our treatment of animals could lead to our becoming better humans. Thus it seems appropriate to acknowledge the Edenic longings that we attach to the canine body, and while I have undermined its efficacy in places, I also want to validate the honesty of that yearning. I don’t want to lose sight of the beauty that is expressed through a collection like this, so I allow a closing set of photographs to tell that story, and perhaps it is the story of our yearning for a more perfect and peaceful world.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF DOGS
Early in this project, one of my writing group members asked, “Why dogs?” I wanted to whip a smart answer back—“Because that’s what I collected.” But her question made me realize that, as much as I love horses, there is a reason why the antique dog pictures are so appealing. Of all domesticated animals, dogs have become our best friends forever. Cats are too independent to appeal to a broad spectrum of human personalities, and horses, which are more like magnificent aliens in our world, require a much different kind of communication from dogs. Horses can see nearly 360 degrees around them, but not immediately in front of them, because they need to be constantly surveying the landscape for predators. Despite the fond imaginings of horse owners, most horses would prefer to be with the herd, and their herd behavior makes them malleable to our interventions, which must be composed more of physical cues than voice and facial messaging. The cues we give to horses have to be unlearned from what we know about dog behavior, because what dogs respond to seems so natural. I talk too much to my horse, but I never talk too much to my dog, who responds alertly to tone, face, and physical cues all at once. We’ve learned that when a horse licks its lips and chews, it is mulling over what you have just tried to teach it, but the horse still has to decide whether it wants to comply. A good deal of enlightened horse training these days is more about the way we ask for cooperation than about the brutal “breaking” that once passed for training. Like dogs, horses are greatly romanticized, but they are also much more like mythological creatures who haven’t quite realized how powerful they are, so they tolerate our impositions without fully joining our culture. We don’t “ask” for a dog’s cooperation. We assume that will happen once the dog understands what we want, and we assume that the dog wants to cooperate no matter what.
More than any other domestic animal, dogs are cultural travelers, crossing back and forth from the canine to the human world, bringing their exotic animal natures into our homes while learning our language and our manners. Indeed, we are so close to dogs that we easily recognize the truism that owners and their dogs come to resemble one another over time, in much the same way that longtime married couples begin to resemble each other physically. A diversity of writers insist that there is something special about dog love. Marjorie Garber, for example, calls attention to the anomaly of masculine