Shady Beasts, Animal Transgression, and Identity
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Boatswain succumbed. Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy write in their
history of the disease, Rabid, that “by insinuating itself into domestic
tranquility . . . rabies presented itself as a shocking subversion of order.
As such, it became an object of disproportionate panic throughout the
nineteenth-century” (94).’ This panic-laden disease is so shocking
because it reverses the expectation of domestic tranquility begiiming to
be expected by pet-owners. Byron’s attempt to restore domestic
tranquility suggests another moment in which the living memory of the
animal dead already (because it has contracted the incurable disease that
robs the inflicted creature of its self) confronts the living, forcing
abandonment of social expectations. Boatswain’s portrayal as innocent
and faithful even to death recalls Wordsworth’s “Fidelity” but reverses
the deceased: Wordsworth’s dead traveler with a faithful dog becomes
Byron’s dead dog with a faithful human. Moore records Byron’s
announcement of Boatswain’s death: “he expired in a state of madness
on the IS*, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his
nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to any one near
him” (68). Despite this, the perception of rabid dogs was far from
innocent or faithful. Wasik and Murphy suggest that “a death at the hand
of man seemed far less horrible to contemplate than one suffered in the
jaws of the devil” (94). The panic surrounding the disease is hard to
overestimate and the vilification of the relatively rare disease led to
canine massacres throughout Europe.'® The images of rabid dogs and of
mobs hurrying after them were as shocking as the symptoms of the
disease, which Harriet Ritvo characterizes as horrifying." The d