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Popular Culture Review
humane, and, therefore, identity and the possibility of living together
with others is radically in question when animals appear in transgressive
spaces.
Romantic period animal literature shapes our understandings of
these relationships, boundaries, and spaces. Animal representations, both
as present creatures and linguistic constructs, are so familiar that they
essentially disappear into the everyday — until they become unfamiliar.
Byron’s works, both genuine and satiric, are provocative in each of these
areas, precisely because he engages the unfamiliar to tell the story of the
familiar.^ Daisy Hay portrays the duality of his character: “Byron was
capable of behaving appallingly, of being selfish, vain and
egotistical...which led him to assert his own importance and sometimes
into vicious comment about his adversaries. But he...had a talent for
making and keeping friends” (14).
Extremity characterizes the tenor of the discussion of
relationships boundaries and spaces—identifying moments of taboo, seen
as pathological, as the cases by which the appropriate, the normative,
may be known. Perhaps the most typical illustration of Byron’s
normative pathology is his reaction to the death of his dog. Boatswain,
who died of rabies on November 18, 1808.
When Byron memorializes his dog, he hails it as his only friend,
crossing the species divide. The sacred boundary between human and
dog is further distressed as he lauds the creature in human terms
suggesting that humans themselves do not live up to the virtues.
“Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog” memorializes
the dog as friend alongside the speaker or perhaps the speaker as dog:
Ye! who perchance behold this simple um.
Pass on—it honours none you wish to mourn:
To mark a Friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one,—and here he lies, (lines 17-20)
Animal bodies are living epitaphs inscribed metaphorically with the
presence of an other to be called to mind. The human interior doing the
memorializing does not match the exterior, and somehow darkness still
hovers over the chaotic face of the deep.^ The human surface is obscured
by language which makes most humans unable to access the mourning at
work in the inscription. The inscription marks the corpse of a kindred
beast, a friend, one who the author anticipates will not be deemed worthy
of the act of mourning by passersby. Here human depths and the heights