JIP (SHORT FOR GYPSY) is the spaniel belonging to David Copperfield’s innocent and inept first wife, Dora Spenlow, in Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel, David Copperfield. Naughty and spoiled, Jip behaves like most lapdogs in literature, challenging and menacing his mistress’s besotted lover, keeping his rival’s passion at bay. When David first approaches Jip, the spaniel “showed his whole set of teeth, got under a chair expressly to snarl, and wouldn’t hear of the least familiarity.” After their marriage, Dora and David are almost penniless; nevertheless, Dora insists that “Jip must have a mutton-chop every-day at twelve, or he’ll die!” She interposes the little dog between David and herself whenever her husband wants to have a serious talk with her, and when David buys his new bride a cookery book in the hope that she’ll learn some housekeeping skills, she uses it as a stool for Jip to stand on.
Jip signifies Dora’s exasperating childishness. Untrained and entitled, this irritating little creature barks at tradesmen, chews geraniums, begs for toast, snaps, howls, hides from everyone except Dora, and strolls around on top of the dinner table during meals (see WESSEX). He embodies the chaos and disorder of the Copperfield residence, and her devotion to him characterizes Dora as a child-wife, incapable of handling adult responsibilities. Dora and Jip are closely identified as a pair of useless, pampered pets. After suffering a miscarriage, Dora grows sick and weak; Jip, too, quickly begins to fade. “He is, as it were, suddenly, grown very old,” David observes. “He mopes, his sight is weak, and his limbs are feeble.”
In strong contrast to the frail Dora Spenlow stands the independent, intellectual Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Wise beyond her years, the idealistic Dorothea has no time for lapdogs, as we discover when her suitor, Sir James Chettam, offers her a “little petitioner” in the form of a Maltese puppy. This breed, thought to be the oldest of the European toy dogs and established in England during the reign of Henry VIII, has always been popular among elegant women (see ISSA). Careful to differentiate herself from her more conventional sister, Celia, who “likes these small pets,” Dorothea asserts to Sir James: “It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets. . . . I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy.” Dorothea rejects the creature as she later rejects Sir James. She dislikes his fawning, just as she dislikes puppies’ neediness. “They are too helpless: their lives are too frail,” she complains. “A weasel or a mouse that gets its own living is more interesting.”
“Ladies usually are fond of these Maltese dogs,” muses the perplexed Sir James. He later gives the puppy to Dorothea’s more appreciative sister, who eventually becomes his wife. Dorothea’s indifference to lapdogs distinguishes her as intelligent and mature, unlike the frivolous Celia, whose love of puppies suggests that, at least in emotional terms, she’s still a child. An article published in Tait’s Magazine in 1856 reinforced the popular opinion that only “very young ladies” can keep pets without censure, as the animals may be needed as “diplomatic agents” during courtship. “Ladies of mature age” who insist on keeping a lapdog, continued the article, should be “brought to a sense of shame for the rather low level at which they have arrived.”
In terms of cultural prejudice, we haven’t come far. It’s just as true today: in the arms of a fashionable young debutante, a well-dressed Chihuahua can be a charming fashion accessory, but in the lap of a lady in her sixties, it seems slightly sad. Women with lapdogs, according to popular opinion, are privileged, fussy, and indolent (as opposed to cat ladies, who are stereotypically disordered and unkempt). The lapdog is considered noisy and entitled, accustomed to riding in a designer carrier and eating gourmet food; it’s taken for granted that the ladies who dote on lapdogs are sad spinsters or lonely aunts.
Lapdogs, in other words, are associated with unfulfilled maternal instincts. While most people accept dogs as part of the family unit, they often feel uncomfortable in the presence of a childless woman and a dog, as if only when a dog’s not really “needed” can it be loved appropriately. By implication, then, lapdog-loving mothers are felt to have ambivalent relationships with their children, and in many cases this is true. The author Colette went nowhere without her French bulldog but rarely saw her only daughter, whom she left in the care of an English nanny. The childless Edith Wharton would keep her little dogs about her at all times, letting them join her at meals and drink from her teacup.
It’s an unfair stereotype, of course—all kinds of people, including men, dote on their dogs—but rather than debunking it, my first impulse is to distance myself from it. I feel compelled to make it very clear that, although I love my dog to distraction, I’m not one of those women, and Grisby isn’t one of those dogs. He’s not a Chihuahua or a shih tzu; he’s a tough little bulldog, too heavy to ride in a carrier or snuggle on my lap. I want to deny and disavow, to insist how different my situation is, instead of thinking about why it’s so hard for a woman who buys sweaters for her dog to be taken seriously.
In some ways, after all, I am one of those women. I’m middle-aged, childless, and not officially married, and I dote on Grisby, who’s a lapdog in all but size. He’s certainly spoiled. I let him run off the leash, jump on the furniture, eat from my plate, sleep in my bed, and lick my face. I kiss him on the mouth and feed him anything he wants—hot dogs, pudding and cake, even ice cream. I’ve rocked him to sleep in my arms, thinking as I did so of the Duchess’s baby in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (“If it had grown up,” says Alice of the baby, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.”)
I confess: I even buy him sweaters. This was something I resisted for years. After all, I told myself, he’s all muscle—certainly strong enough to handle the cold. Then, one chilly winter’s day a few years ago, I overheard a conversation at the grocery store checkout.
“Look at that poor little dog shivering in the cold like that,” said the woman ahead of me.
“Mmm-hmmm,” responded the checkout girl. “That dog need himself a sweater.”
They were looking at Grisby tied to a parking meter outside in the snow. Noticing that he was, indeed, shivering, I realized he didn’t look tough at all; if anything, he seemed pathetic. At that moment, I understood that my reluctance to buy him clothes had to do more with my comfort than his. Since then, he’s accumulated a handsome selection of cold-weather wear, including a Burberry overcoat, a striped wool jacket, a plaid sweater, and a hooded yellow raincoat with little slits where his ears poke through. I love fastening the Velcro strap, pulling it tight around his bulldog belly.
It’s wrong, I think, to assume that a dog is a substitute for a child, just as it’s wrong to assume that dog love is necessarily of a different quality from human love. Still, it’s often true that a first dog is purchased or given as a kind of compensation for a loss, as when a child is given a puppy to make up for the death of an earlier pet. In her short and charming book Topsy, originally published in 1940, Freud’s friend and colleague Princess Marie Bonaparte describes being given her first dog as a way of making up for the loss of a beloved nurse. The princess refers to her first dog as a “talisman,” explaining that a dog can often function as a protective substitute, sometimes replacing the mother, though it can represent anyone who was especially well loved.
People’s love for dogs, then, may hint at a loss in their past, which is only one of the many ways in which canines can serve as clues. More obviously, a dog betrays its past treatment by its present behavior. By fawning, barking, or cringing, a dog can imply or accuse, inadvertently revealing the hidden dynamics of human relationships. It’s no surprise that one of the archetypal functions of literary dogs is to act as a pointer, drawing the discerning readers’ attention to signs they might otherwise overlook.
This motif finds its locus classicus in a Sherlock Holmes story—not the great detective’s most famous canine mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles, but “Silver Blaze,” in which Holmes points out the “curious incident” of a dog failing to react to a mysterious visitor. When a guard dog doesn’t bark at an intruder, Holmes remarks, it generally means he’s someone the dog doesn’t consider an intruder at all. The detective naturally respects canine skills in evidence gathering, occasionally borrowing his friend’s dog Toby when he needs extra help sniffing down a clue. This hound may be “an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher,” but Holmes defers to his expertise. “I would rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force of London,” he comments in The Sign of the Four.
On other occasions, a dog will draw attention to a vital clue the human characters have failed to observe. In David Copperfield, Dora’s secret engagement is accidentally revealed when the naughty Jip steals a love letter from her reticule, and her frantic attempts to get it back arouse her family’s suspicion. By breaking all the rules, Jip is a living embodiment of Dora’s unruly id. The dog enacts everything Dora strives to repress, sabotaging all her attempts at domestic routine, bringing chaos to the tea table. Elsewhere, it’s not the dog itself that provides a clue but rather an item associated with it. A case in point is the ball left out by Bob, a wirehaired terrier in the Agatha Christie novel Dumb Witness. In this mystery, Emily Arundell, a wealthy spinster, is seriously injured when she trips over her pet’s toy and falls downstairs—at least, this is what the evidence suggests. Yet as it turns out, Bob couldn’t possibly have left his ball on the stairs, as he was outside all night; the “accident” turns out to be a crime perpetrated, it appears, by one of Emily’s grasping young relatives.
Interestingly, the human transgressions inadvertently revealed by literary dogs are often sexual in nature, and usually committed by women: consider the folktale motif Dog Betrays Woman’s Infidelity. An early version of this motif can be found in the anonymous thirteenth-century French romance The Châtelaine of Vergi, in which a lady accepts the love of an admiring knight on the condition that he never speak of their affair. To ensure secrecy, she instructs him to hide in the garden whenever he visits her, and to wait until her little dog comes out to fetch him. One day, during a public feast, she hears a joke about her “well-trained dog,” and believes—wrongly—the knight has betrayed her, dying of despair. The motif is also found in La Fontaine’s fable “The Wonder Dog,” which is based on a story from Ariosto’s fifteenth-century epic poem Orlando Furioso. In this tale, a fairy transforms himself into a magical lapdog in order to encourage a love affair between Argie, wife of a judge, and the chivalrous young Atis. The dog can perform so many amazing tricks that Argie decides she has to have the little creature at any price, even if it means betraying her husband (and it does).
In art as well as literature, lapdogs conceal or betray sexual secrets. In 1811, a portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb, who was the wife of the future prime minister William Lamb and would later have an affair with Lord Byron, was exhibited at the Royal Academy. At the time the portrait was being painted, Lady Caroline was involved with a young aristocrat named Sir Godfrey Webster, and the portrait, by Eliza H. Trotter, contains a coded reference to this affair. Lady Caroline is painted with her arm around a miniature bull terrier wearing two collars, one of which appears to be a bracelet of gemstones. Both the dog and the bracelet were gifts from Sir Godfrey; when her infidelity was discovered, she wrote, “I tore the bracelet off my arm & put it up with my chains in a Box. . . . I have written to desire some one will fetch the dog.”
Anne de Cornault, the unhappily married heroine of Edith Wharton’s ghost story “Kerfol,” makes the mistake of giving her lapdog’s collar to her lover, Lanrivain, as a memento. When her husband asks her about the missing collar, Anne says the dog must have lost it in the undergrowth of the park. Her husband says nothing, but that night, when Anne goes to bed, she finds something horrible: the body of her lapdog is lying on her pillow, “still warm.” She takes a closer look, and “her distress turned to horror when she discovered that it had been killed by twisting twice round its throat the necklet she had given to Lanrivain.” After this, every dog she takes for a pet ends up strangled on her pillow; in the end she “dared not make a pet of any other dog, and her loneliness became almost unendurable.” Many years later, Anne de Cornault’s estate, Kerfol, remains devoid of human presence, haunted by a pack of eerily silent hounds.
In Luigi Pirandello’s play Each in His Own Way, the lusty Donna Livia owns a lapdog that expresses equal affection to two different men, revealing them both to be her secret lovers. In The Great Gatsby, George Wilson discovers—after her death—that his wife, Myrtle, had recently purchased “a small, expensive dog-leash, made of leather and braided silver”; he realizes she must have been having an affair since the Wilsons have never owned a dog. In Colette’s short story “The Bitch,” a soldier on leave in Paris calls unexpectedly on his mistress. She’s not home, but the sheepdog he left in her care greets him with rapturous joy. Since the dog seems eager for a walk, the soldier takes her out, and she leads him happily on her usual evening stroll, right up to the door of a strange house where the soldier’s mistress, we gather, is lying in another lover’s arms. In each of these stories, man’s best friend does him the dubious service of showing him how—and with whom—he’s been cuckolded.