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Canaries beyond the Coal Mine: The Plight of the

"Little Saffron Immigrant" in Victorian and
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Burton, Catherine Ann
2016

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Canaries beyond the Coal Mine: The Plight of the “Little Saffron Immigrant” in
Victorian and Postbellum American Literature

by

Catherine Ann Burton

A Dissertation

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee

of Lehigh University

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of English

Lehigh University

May 2016
 © 2016 Copyright
Catherine Ann Burton

ii
 Approved and recommended for acceptance as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Catherine Ann Burton

Canaries beyond the Coal Mine: The Plight of the “Little Saffron Immigrant” in
Victorian and Postbellum American Literature

Defense Date

D. Michael Kramp, Ph.D.

Dissertation Director

Approved Date

Committee Members:

Dawn Keetley, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Dolan, Ph.D.

Amber Rice, Ph.D.

iii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the love, support, and patience of my
best friend and husband. Aaron, thank you for sharing in my successes as well as seeing
me through the many late nights, deadlines, drop-offs, and far-flung conferences: you are
selfless and strong, and I love you. To my children Jack, Samuel, and Evelyn, whose
lives came into being alongside these chapters: you are the absolute joys of my life, my
greatest accomplishments, my best teachers. To my mother, whose soft, sweet voice read
to me from the very beginning; and to my father, who has perused all my essays with an
editor’s sharp eye and a tendency for creative extrapolation: thank you for instilling in me
a love of learning and critical thinking. And finally, thanks to my brother Nicholas, who
was my earliest captive audience: your relentless demands that I defend the power of
literature have made me a more articulate and responsible intellectual.

I am deeply indebted to my advisor, Michael Kramp. He has challenged me to think more

creatively and complexly, to write with more clarity and confidence. He has known
exactly when to push and when to give me space. Thank you, Michael, for encouraging
me to trust my instincts and for supporting me unconditionally. Thank you also to Dawn
Keetley, Beth Dolan, Amber Rice, and Rosemary Mundhenk, who have provided endless
rounds of valuable feedback and discussion. Jenna Lay has been a dedicated and
generous source of support and knowledge as I’ve approached the job market. And I am
grateful for earlier teachers who inspired and encouraged my writing: Ruth Fairbanks,
Margaret Higonnet, Thomas Recchio, Jean Marsden, and Sharon Harris.

Finally, to Emily Shreve and David Fine, two extraordinarily insightful, sincere, witty
readers and sentient beings: without your friendship and expert feedback, I would never
have been able to get this project off the ground. I would also be several hundred bird
puns poorer. Thank you so much for accompanying me on this journey.

iv
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures vi

Abstract 1

Introduction 2

Chapter 1: The Cultural History of the “Little Saffron Immigrant” 13

Chapter 2: Poeticizing the “Pet of the Parlor”: Canary Elegies,

Victorian Periodicals, and Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias” 54

Chapter 3: Dangerous Men and Clairvoyant Canaries in Bleak

House and The Woman in White 95

Chapter 4: “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”: The Violence of

Interspecies Relationships in Women’s Rights Narratives 139

Conclusion 186

Works Cited 190

Curriculum Vita 206

v
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: “Watering Birds.” 21

Figure 2: “No More, Alas, the Little Saffron Immigrant.” 28

Figure 3: “The Belgian Canary.” 34

Figure 4: “Scotch Fancy Canaries.” 37

Figure 5: “Two miners underground with canary cage.” 49

Figure 6: The Pet. 139

Figure 7: “The Pet Canary.” 145

vi
 ABSTRACT

This dissertation traces the nineteenth-century establishment of the canary as an

emblem of domesticity, violence, and sentience, analyzing the transatlantic cultural

phenomenon that influenced British and American authors from a variety of fiction and

non-fiction genres. My work reanimates an archive that has faded over the centuries,

restoring the “little saffron immigrant” to its place on a pedestal. In doing so, I show how

authors grappled with the ethical implications of nonhuman animal representation. By

examining Victorian-era appropriations of the canary, I reveal the domesticating powers

of literature itself: the ways in which authors used—and continue to use—the written

word to exercise conservative, even occasionally violent, control over certain

populations. The multiple discourses of the canary also often defy the very domesticating

impulses they describe: in moments of contradiction and inexpressibility, readers

confront the familiar and yet utterly foreign presence of an animal who exceeds the

bounds of human control, whose identity refuses to be circumscribed by traditional

generic and expressive norms. Literary depictions of canaries take many shapes, promote

various ideologies, and carry multiple symbolic registers. But, regardless of authorial

intention, they also force their readers to grapple with the presence of a nonhuman animal

who is not ever completely captured or contained by the words on a page. Ultimately, I

argue that studying the effects of the nineteenth-century literary canary demonstrates how

literature can be an ideal mode through which to lay bare and raise provocative questions

about the limits of “the human.”

1
 Introduction

The Victorians’ love affair with canaries began early in the nineteenth century,

rising alongside the equally-romanticized cult of domesticity.1 Pet owners and breeders in

England and America gushed about the birds’ endlessly endearing qualities and declared

the canary to be the definitive domestic animal: the unrivaled “pet of the parlour”

(Boswell 139), the “universal favorite” of men, women, and children alike (Wood vi). By

mid-century, consumers had established these often yellow-feathered songbirds—highly

adaptable imports from the Canary Islands—as status symbols for the (aspiring) middle-

to upper-class home. Throughout the canary’s meteoric rise in popularity, however,

British and American societies underwent a series of dramatic, paradigm-shifting social,

intellectual, and political upheavals that challenged peoples’ beliefs about the categories

of “the human” and “the animal.” Emerging theories of evolution, growing resistance to

the traditional separate spheres ideology, the consolidation and expansion of women’s

and animals’ rights movements, and the ever-present projects of colonialism and Empire-

building all helped reshape the landscape of human/nonhuman relationships, rights, and

representations. The canary’s place in the home fixed it squarely at the epicenter of

ongoing debates, and authors, artists, and activists attempted to work through some of

these debates by invoking canaries in a variety of compelling and contradictory ways.

The key to canaries’ enduring success as both icons of convention and examples

of progressivism—and one of the primary reasons their textual history proves such a

1
As will be explained in more depth in coming chapters, these complementary cultural phenomena of pet-
keeping and domestic ideology similarly espoused aims of moral improvement and hinged on inherent
notions of benevolent superiority and the domesticating impulse.
2
valuable resource for modern-day scholars—was their profound connection to their wild

origins. Unlike other popular pets of the nineteenth century (dogs and cats especially)

who were thoroughly, irreversibly domestic, canaries were recently-domesticated

animals2 who would readily seize opportunities for escape, taking flight in order to take

back their freedom. The active processes of domestication, then, were an inherent part of

any canary discourse. For people intent on maintaining conventional social norms about

the home and “the animal,” canaries validated the domesticating impulse. Pet owners and

bird breeders prided themselves on successfully training canaries to be astonishingly

tame, docile, and physically malleable. In order to emphasize their skill and superiority,

they gladly celebrated the birds’ foreign origins and decidedly non-domestic history: the

wilder the bird, the more impressive their submission. Conversely, for those who sought

to complicate norms of domestication—pushing back against notions of human

superiority or feminine docility, for instance—canaries’ insistent and sometimes

disruptive wildness validated interpretations of animal sentience, domestic violence, and

myriad other progressive ideas.

Unsurprisingly, authors from a variety of genres also fell victim to the canary’s

charm, singing the bird’s praises and diagnosing its problems in a broad array of non-

fiction and fiction texts. These authors produced a diverse body of literature—ranging

from care manuals to newspaper articles, elegies to novels—that, collectively, provides

compelling insight into Victorian-era efforts to domesticate human and nonhuman

animals alike. This dissertation traces the nineteenth-century establishment of the canary

2
An individual bird’s connection to the wild varied, as bird sellers regularly imported canaries directly
from the Canary Islands as well as bought them wholesale from local breeders. See Chapter 1 for more
details about these transactions.
3
as an emblem of domesticity, violence, and sentience, analyzing the transatlantic cultural

phenomenon that influenced those British and American authors. My work reanimates an

archive that has faded over the centuries, restoring the “little saffron immigrant” (“The

Legend of the Canary”) to its place on a pedestal. In doing so, I show how authors

grapple with the ethical implications of nonhuman animal representation. Ultimately, I

argue that studying the effects of the nineteenth-century literary canary demonstrates how

literature can be an ideal mode through which to lay bare and raise provocative questions

about the limits of “the human.”

Recent work by leading posthumanist and animal studies scholars has insisted on

the importance of initiating these processes of exposure and interrogation. Writers such

as Jacques Derrida, Susan McHugh, and Cary Wolfe have challenged traditional critical

approaches to textual animals: approaches that remain persistently selfish and dismissive

in their insistence on reading the creatures as symbolic figures of specifically human

concerns. Derrida, for instance, asks his audience to think more critically about the

relationships between humans and animals and to become more aware of the

“unprecedented proportions of th[e] subjugation of the animal”; he says about this

subjection that “men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from

themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of

this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide” (Derrida 394). In

particular he locates some of the worst violence against animals in the linguistic

representation and relegation of all other nonhuman living beings to a single term: “the

4
animal.”3 This violent habit is nowhere as poignant as in Victorian-era descriptions of

“the canary”: many texts collapse an entire species of individuated canaries into this

monolithic term, which becomes a crucial facet of their preference for a symbol rather

than a sentient creature.

But theorists insist that there are ideological and practical ways to end such

violence. Wolfe, focusing on literary study’s disciplinary blinders,4 locates a solution in

interdisciplinarity. McHugh suggests different interpretive practices, insisting that literary

animals can both “serv[e] as a metaphor for the poetic imagination and voic[e] the limits

of human experience,” and as such, “These peculiar operations of agency, these ways of

inhabiting literature without somehow being represented therein, present tremendous

opportunities for recovering and interrogating the material and representational problems

specific to animality” (McHugh 487). And Derrida, who passionately states that our

awareness “is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a

constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, everyone is held to” (397), suggests

that fundamental changes to widespread animal genocide might come from a more

careful deployment of language. To this end, he attempts to change our linguistic habits

by creating the word “l’animot” to more ethically represent the plurality of individuals

within the concept of “the animal.”

My project similarly seeks to emphasize the importance of authorial self-

awareness, highlighting Victorian-era examples of such pre-posthumanist moves as well

3
“Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give . . . They have given themselves the
word in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept: ‘the Animal,’ they say”
(Derrida 400).
4
Wolfe chastises literary scholars for our short-sightedness, pointing out that “We might have thought that
we, as students of literature and culture, could safely leave to the side the massive amount we have learned
from fields such as cognitive ecology over the past twenty or thirty years about animals and their
remarkable capabilities” (567).
5
as conducting my own readings with a careful eye toward selfish slippages. Part of this

process, then, involves a careful deployment of the terms “the canary” and “canaries”;

throughout these chapters, I use the former term to describe authors’ reductive

representations of the avian species and the latter to describe the multitude of animals

involved in certain discourses and transactions. The former acknowledges deliberate

symbolism; the latter is attuned to sentience.

The following chapters make important contributions to the growing body of

criticism that seeks to articulate literature’s value to the posthumanities. By examining

the facets of nineteenth-century appropriations of the canary, I reveal the domesticating

powers of literature itself: the ways in which authors used—and continue to use—the

written word to exercise conservative, even occasionally violent, control over certain

populations. The multiple discourses of the canary also, however, often defy the very

domesticating impulses they describe; in moments of contradiction and inexpressibility,

readers confront the familiar and yet utterly foreign presence of an animal who exceeds

the bounds of human control, whose identity refuses to be circumscribed by traditional

generic and expressive norms. Literary depictions of canaries take many shapes, promote

various ideologies, and carry multiple symbolic registers. But, regardless of authorial

intention, they also force their readers to grapple with the presence of a nonhuman animal

who is not ever completely captured or contained by the words on a page.

My chapters move through a roughly chronological shift that occurred as writers

on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly progressed beyond conventional assertions of

symbolism and into more nuanced—if not always more generous—examinations of

sentience. Over the course of the century, authors from different genres took different

6
approaches to how they chose to depict canaries. These approaches typically coincided

with the extent to which they sought to reflect or repudiate social convention—especially

traditional forms of domestic ideology. Influenced by personal beliefs, cultural trends,

and imagined audiences, some authors used generic form to extend the project of

domestication: care manuals directed toward young children, housewives, and breeders,

or periodical poetry targeting middle-class readers. Increasingly, however, advancements

in scientific knowledge and burgeoning social reform movements challenged this project,

producing dramatic and disruptive effects in genres such as the novel and reform

literature.

I begin with a selection of nonfiction writing in which authors earnestly and

insistently map out conventional groundwork for the processes of symbolization that

catapulted canaries into their extreme popularity. In Chapter 1, “The Cultural History of

‘the Little Saffron Immigrant,’” I chart the various canary identities that circulated in and

between England and America throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter is divided

into sections based on the most prominent discourses involving the canary during the

period—trade, aesthetics, healing, and mining—but each of those sections also engages

with the varied processes of domestication that inevitably shaped such conceptions. The

first section sketches out the complicated networks of trade that facilitated the surge in

canary-owning in the period, while the following sections characterize the ways in which

those transplanted canaries were conceptualized. Contemporary bird manuals depict the

canary primarily as an objet d’art and secondarily as a healer. Though at times these roles

emphasized and praised contradictory qualities of the singing birds, in general they were

7
united in their belief that the canary was useful, a tool created specifically to help humans

achieve their goals.

The final section highlights an unusual development in the reception of the birds’

identities and a set of nonfiction authors whose preoccupation with discovery and risk

encouraged them to resist the birds’ dominant domestic image. The coalmining industry

regularly put into service thousands of birds a year to more accurately detect the presence

of harmful underground gases, and yet such practices are absent from contemporary

canary manuals and natural histories. The dirt, danger, and interspecies reliance of such

situations were antithetical to bourgeois values and so, astonishingly, manual authors and

natural historians chose to completely ignore these practices. However, writers within the

coalmining industry—scientists, journalists, and even miners themselves—wrote about

the birds with startling attention to animal sentience. Turning, then, to newspaper articles

and government documents, this last section pieces together the relatively suppressed

presence of the coal mine canary that has, ironically, become the most lasting legacy of

the species in Western culture.

In Chapter 2, “Poeticizing the ‘Pet of the Parlor’: Domesticated Canaries in

Victorian Periodicals,” I describe how authors used the conventional leanings of

Victorian periodical poetry to strip canaries of their subjectivity and deny their sentience.

From the late 1830s to the 1890s, dozens of canary poems appeared in mass market,

general readership literary periodicals, depicting canaries as willing captives, excellent

singers, and cheerful companions. These capable canaries express didactic lessons to the

men, women, and children who own and read about them by demonstrating certain

behaviors and attitudes most suited for a lifetime of captivity. However, my analysis

8
uncovers an inherent tension within these poetic depictions of the didactic canary. In their

capacity as cultural icons promoting the happiness of the home and guiding their human

companions, the canaries appear to be lively and influential creatures. Yet the poets of

these texts simultaneously deny the canaries’ vivacity—highlighting their supposed

obliviousness while suppressing their wildness and sentience—in order to control that

selfsame cultural power and influence. In order to be used, the birds are domesticated to

the point of objectification. Close readings of these poems expose this deliberate

containment, even as the poets themselves attempt to ignore, erase, or justify the birds’

(and by extension, humans’) resultant suffering.

After establishing this context, I turn to a periodical poem that did dare to disrupt:

Matthew Arnold's “Poor Matthias,” a little-known canary elegy written by the canonical

author in the last years of his life. Here, Arnold bravely acknowledges and accepts the

consequences of the intellectual and emotional capacity of his pet. Fueled in part by

scientific and philosophical advances made by theories of evolution, Arnold articulates a

perspective that acknowledges the cultural and biological importance of his canary. In

doing so, he establishes a politics of interpretation based on ethical, rather than humanist

or selfish, concerns. In his poem, the canary is sentient: a thinking, suffering being whose

existence is made all the more painful for his owners' careless ignorance. Arnold's ability

to see the bird as an organic being, rather than as a parlor knickknack or a piece of art,

demolishes idealized conceptions of domestication and domesticity. Instead, through

Arnold's reading, humans, rather than animals, are revealed to be the unfeeling brutes,

and violence is disclosed as an integral part of the process of domesticating.

9
 Whereas authors of canary manuals and periodical poems often stayed within the

ideological bounds of their typically conventional genres, the novelists I turn to in the last

two chapters took full advantage of the opportunities for nuance, complexity, and

progressivism that their genre afforded. Chapter 3, “Dangerous Men and Clairvoyant

Canaries in Bleak House (1853) and The Woman in White (1860),” examines major

Victorian novelists’ participation in canary culture. In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, canaries are the beloved companions of

prominent male characters who are largely defined by their violence: Lawrence Boythorn

and Count Fosco, respectively. Both men create specific identities in order to deceive

those around them; Boythorn projects a violent bluster of aggressive manhood that

overshadows his caring nature, while Fosco carefully cultivates a cosmopolitan veneer of

civility in an attempt to mask his ruthlessness. The tame canaries of these canonical

novels simultaneously maintain and refute the men’s deceptions; the “animality” of these

characters is, in true Derridean fashion, both concealed and revealed through the men’s

interactions with their pet birds.

Such complex interspecies relations occur at the service of the novels’

examinations of Victorians’ growing realization that domestic spaces were not immune to

violence. In Bleak House and The Woman in White, Boythorn and Fosco have access to

the most intimate proceedings of the homes they visit, and therefore their affectations of

civility, domination, and rage figure heavily into the novels’ claims about their

contributions to the overall viability of the domestic ideal. Whereas earlier chapters

demonstrate the ways in which canaries were utilized and invoked to bring tranquility to

the home, this chapter examines how those processes were complicated by the birds’

10
alternate conception as persistently animal(istic). It is my contention that Dickens and

Collins use canaries in their culturally-familiar capacity as markers of both placidity and

wildness to articulate a similar dialectic of civility and animality for men in the sacred

space of the home. Through their ability to conceal and reveal, canaries demonstrate how

the novels carefully consider the home as both a refuge from and site of (particularly

male) brutality, tapping into contentious Victorian debates that implicitly considered

where lines might be drawn—if at all—between humanity and animality.

Finally, Chapter 4, “‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’: The Violence of

Interspecies Relationships in Postbellum Women’s Rights Narratives,” details how the

dramatic and violent deaths of canaries in postbellum American women’s rights texts

signal heightened fatigue over ideal domesticity and its iconic avian representative.

Originally figured as a popular pet, the bird’s most insistent postwar image was that of

the worn-out warbler: a melancholy prisoner and tragic victim of intense domestic

pressure and abusive male power.

Authors expressed feelings of ambivalence over their complicity in recording this

transformation, acknowledging the regrettable necessity of articulating the dismal turn

while simultaneously reveling in an implicit and perverse enjoyment of the canary’s fall

from grace. Women writers and rights activists, especially, indulged in violent renderings

of canaries’ domestic impotence and irrelevance, revealing their satisfaction with the end

of an unattainable ideological era of femininity as well as their awareness of the bodily

dangers that sustaining and ending those beliefs might entail. This chapter looks at fiction

by Lillie Devereux Blake, Susan Glaspell, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, where

female protagonists respond to stifling domestic conditions and the deaths of their

11
beloved canaries with varying degrees of action. Ruiz de Burton, in particular, offers a

troubling option for ascertaining women’s rights at the expense of animals’ lives, as the

author’s main character methodically murders her canaries in order to take control of her

own future rather than perpetuate a convention of feminine helplessness. Ruiz de

Burton’s narrative, as one among many other texts that disrupt the traditional mistress/pet

canary relationship in order to produce scathing indictments of feminine and domestic

ideals, also demonstrates Americans' growing concern with how they might appropriately

discern and respond to the suffering of any subjugated beings.

My conclusion briefly considers the canary’s twenty-first century legacy, from

climate change to home security systems. The irony of the birds’ popular new symbolic

representation of all things animal sentience and interspecies connectivity should not be

minimized, and yet—there is something like progress, or at least a sense of increased

self-awareness, in such representation. It is my hope that this project’s reconstruction of

nineteenth-century canary narratives continues to push our theoretical and practical

conversations forward, offering more capacious and honest ways to think through our

relationships with human and nonhuman others and ourselves.

12
 Chapter 1

The Cultural History of “the Little Saffron Immigrant”

“The history of the canary has been one of perpetual imprisonment and of the

transformation of his appearance and character. He has become what may be called an

artificial bird.”

~The Globe-Republican (31 May 1895)

“The canary is, without doubt, one of the most charming pets that can possibly be

possessed . . . I will venture to say that there is no bird more engaging in manner than a

canary; nor any more gay, happy, and cheerful in confinement, and withal so harmonious;

their power of memory and imitation is perfectly wonderful, and the attachment of many

of those birds to the individuals who supply their daily wants and treat them kindly is

widely known” (209).

~Robert Wallace, The Canary Book (1893)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the canary had firmly cemented its place in

British and American popular culture. The nature of that place, however, was a point of

contention and often downright contradiction. Though the birds were widely praised,

“beloved and esteemed by all classes” (Wallace 209), the reasons for such admiration

varied widely. The quotations featured in the epigraph above were both intended by their

authors to be complimentary descriptions of the canary, reasons why others should fall in

love with the “charming pets.” However, each demonstrates a preference for different

13
qualities: the first highlights the bird’s artificiality, while in the second, the author depicts

an “engaging” bird full of life.5 Such contradictions ran rampant among the

heterogeneous masses of men and women for whom the canary was a source of

enjoyment. To many, the beautiful bird was an example of everything domestic and

delightful, even a sign of masterful human achievement over wild nature. For those

interested in the birds as parlor decorations, a canary’s perceived artificiality was the

primary goal; for those relying on the bird as a living carbon monoxide detector, the

objective was to maintain its visible vitality—a signal of safe air.

As such, the multi-faceted history of the canary always comes back to a reliance

on malleability. The emergence of various theories of adaptation and evolution in the

nineteenth century—frequently attributed to Charles Darwin but appearing well before

The Origin of Species’ debut in 18596—meant that most people in England and America

were familiar with the concept that humans and animals were malleable creatures,

adapting to their environments and gradually changing over time. This discourse of

inherent malleability, however, was exaggerated and exploited in contemporary

conceptions of the canary. In order for canaries to mean so many disparate things at once,

the birds needed to be understood as (and transformed into) unusually flexible creatures.

This understanding most frequently appeared in conjunction with the canary’s

physical state: Victorians believed the bird thrived in varied climates as well as could

heartily withstand and even benefit from intense breeding manipulations. But malleability

5
It is important to note that although our modern sensibilities hope to read the first quotation as an unusual
moment of insight about the cruelties enacted on the birds at the time—its emphasis on “perpetual
imprisonment” surely seems to convey condemnation—the author in fact meant the description to be an
admirable estimation of the canary. More about the bird’s objectification will appear later in this chapter.
6
Prominent early-nineteenth-century theorists included Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Lyell, and Alfred
Russel Wallace.
14
was also a characteristic of metaphoric and metonymic conceptions of the canary.

Authors used the birds concurrently as emblems of causes like colonialism, domesticity,

women’s rights, childhood, and mining safety: representing multiple things at once

without any sense that such conceptions were hypocritical or contradictory. Importantly,

this insistence on canary flexibility relied on a rejection of the animal’s agency,

individuality, and sentience, as those characteristics resisted narratives of human

dominance and control. The ideal canary was an objectified and endlessly flexible figure,

satisfying the varied demands of its human owners.

Victorians most often enforced these notions of extreme physical and conceptual

malleability through practices of domestication. In order to contort the canary into a

useful object, bird owners enacted multiple forms of domination that resulted in a total

disregard for the animals’ sentience. Domestication encompassed a variety of actions,

including the exportation of canaries from their islands of origin, deliberate attempts to

tame and train the birds to be affectionate household pets, breeding practices that

physically altered the species in dramatic and often damaging ways, and even less

tangible actions such as efforts to endow the bird with therapeutic powers.

The parallels to contemporary processes of colonization were obvious: just as

British and American governments intently expanded their rule over far-flung

countries—assuming control by force, subjecting natives to subservience and cruelty, and

justifying their actions by claiming victims of these processes were morally, emotionally,

and physically inferior—so too were British and American subjects forcibly capturing

canaries and justifying their subsequent use of the birds by claiming dominance and

superiority over creatures supposedly unable to “properly” care for themselves. This

15
discourse of domestication was a constant amongst the many texts and contexts featuring

canaries: authors and bird owners of all sorts claimed that the canary was an animal

uniquely suited to the processes that transformed the species from wild and untamed to

civilized and trained. In Cage and Singing Birds (1854), Henry Gardiner Adams, citing

an unnamed source, points out that the canary excels where other birds fail. In situations

of domestication, he observes, “most foreign birds, introduced into this country,

degenerate and lose their spirits; but the canary finch rises in colour [sic], feathers, and

song” (101). George Henry Holden, another bird manual author, builds on this claim,

explaining to readers of Canaries and Cage-Birds (1888) that the canary’s popularity is a

direct result of its effortless transformation: “Easily domesticated and bred, he became at

once the cage-bird to which the most care was given, and upon which the greatest

attention was lavished” (11). According to sources such as these, the responsiveness of

the canary’s body and disposition to human efforts at domestication won the bird favor.

Pet owners clamored for an easily-mastered animal such as the canary, as its

submissiveness reassured anxious human owners that they were in fact the superior

species, intellectually and physically. At a cultural moment in which notions of inherent

human difference and natural superiority were being challenged through theories of

evolution and animal rights, canaries soothed humans’ ruffled feathers and appeared to

reinforce traditional humanistic beliefs.

Conceptual as well as physical efforts at domestication were seen as all the more

important because the bird was a fixture of the domestic sphere. A wild, or “uncivilized,”

canary would disrupt the idealized calm and order of the home, and so the birds had to be

thoroughly tamed. Thus, in 1842 Peter Boswell christened the canary “the pet of the

16
parlour” (139): a name that would follow the bird throughout the century, appearing

frequently in care manuals and newspaper and periodical articles. The title firmly

cemented the bird’s place in the home, and in particular tied it to the room which most

commonly came to represent middle- to upper-class status and values.7 The bird became

an emblem of all things domestic and sacred: happiness, security, constancy, affection,

and even morality. In this capacity, the canary was also believed to transmit, inspire, or

reveal such values in its human owners. Such a conviction can only testify to the

extraordinary cultural power of the processes of domestication (or colonization), when a

wild bird could be believed to be so thoroughly transformed that it was not only a

suitable, but ideal, example of the most sacred form of national identity.

Although various media documented this phenomenon of the canary, none were

as exhaustive or enthusiastic as the numerous canary manuals published on both sides of

the Atlantic Ocean. Care manuals provide explicit insight about the intentions and efforts

behind the modes of domination that supposedly only capitalized on—rather than

created—the canary’s extreme malleability. The manuals examined in this chapter were

written between the 1840s and 1890s in both England and America, and their subjects are

either exclusively or primarily canaries. They were ostensibly written to be informative

and factual, with an intended audience composed of pet owners as well as bird fanciers.

The layout and coverage of the manuals are generally quite similar, despite differences in

7
In its capacity as the “pet of the parlour,” the canary possessed striking similarities to another
(supposedly) willing domestic prisoner of the middle class: the angel in the house. This version of idealized
womanhood depicted a solidly middle-class wife and mother dedicated to serving her husband and
children, even at the expense of her own comfort. Many of the qualities valued in both canary and angel,
such as beauty, musical accomplishment, and selflessness, were identical. And just as the angel in the
house figured as the moral cornerstone of her family—and even society as a whole—so too did the canary
become endowed with certain healing and improving powers. See Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion of
this relationship.
17
publication year, nationality, and authorial voice. Most include sections dedicated to

cages, basic care, breeding, diseases and their treatments, and descriptions of canary

varieties; some contain extra sections on canary societies, exhibitions, or trade. Though

much of the information between manuals overlaps—or, in some cases, even is

“borrowed” directly from earlier manuals—each text has its own unique perspective

about the canary, based primarily on the author’s own relationship to the birds.8

The discourse of the canary extends far beyond the admittedly insular and limited

practices of care-taking and breeding on which many of the manuals focus. In fact, these

conversations about canaries—their delightfulness, their dispositions, their needs, their

usefulness—speak to larger nineteenth-century discussions of the values and roles of

animals (including the human animal) within a humanist and increasingly transatlantic

society. Through their efforts to create canary identities, authors revealed the ways in

which they sought to create themselves. Manuals also provide crucial context for

understanding the implications of canaries in the numerous literary texts of the period

that chose to feature the domesticated bird. Most frequently appearing as domestic

companions, these fictitious birds created additional layers of meaning in the texts they

inhabited: meaning that relied on shared cultural knowledge. The critical readings that

succeed this chapter, then, depend on that knowledge—articulated below—in order to

develop more nuanced interpretations of canaries’ literary depictions.

8
For example, some authors identified as pet owners, while others described themselves as fanciers or
breeders. The former typically were less concerned with providing extensive breeding details and more
interested in describing methods of training and “befriending” the birds. The latter were just the opposite:
engaged in the intricacies of breeding combinations and strategies, these authors were not interested in
explaining how to care for “companions.”
18
 This chapter is divided into sections based on the most prominent canary-focused

discourses during the period—trade, aesthetics, healing, and mining—but each of those

sections also engages with the processes of domestication that inevitably shaped such

conceptions. In the first section, I sketch out the complicated networks of trade that

facilitated the nineteenth-century surge in canary-owning, and in the following sections I

characterize the ways in which non-fiction authors conceptualized those transplanted

canaries. Contemporary bird manuals demonstrate that two discourses dominated English

and American cultural conceptions of the canary: that of the canary as an objet d’art and

that of the canary as healer. Though at times these roles emphasized and praised

contradictory qualities of the singing birds, in general they were united in their belief that

the canary was useful, a tool created to help humans achieve their goals.

The final section highlights an unusual development in the reception of the birds’

identities. Canaries also figured prominently in an industry quite different from and

entirely ignored by the mainstream, middle-class industry of canary-fancying: coal

mining. Miners regularly relied on canaries to more accurately detect the presence of

harmful underground gases, and yet such practices are absent from canary manuals and

natural histories. Turning, then, to newspaper articles and government documents, I piece

together the suppressed presence of the pit canary that has, ironically, surpassed the pet

canary to become the most lasting legacy of the species in Western culture.

From Wild Animal to Domestic Canary: The Consequences of Transatlantic Trade

One of the best measures of canaries’ widespread popularity was the hugely

lucrative business of their trade. Aided by advances in nautical technologies, the

19
nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of transatlantic economies, including the

global network of transportation and communication dedicated to the circulation of

canaries. This network regulated the most common cultural conceptions of the canary, as

human participants deliberately recast the foreign birds as domestic animals, providing

the foundation for canaries’ most enduring identity. Canaries were popular with a diverse

array of buyers: whether interested in obtaining exhibition or companion animals, men,

women, and children of all classes clamored to own the birds. The millions of canaries

that ultimately ended up in British and American households were in part sourced from

their wild state in the Canary Islands. However, more frequently, they were purchased

from individual sellers in the Harz Mountains region in central Germany—and especially

from the city of St. Andreasberg, where locals had been breeding domesticated varieties

of the birds for hundreds of years.9 “Pickers”—men employed by the bird-importing

houses generally located in England and America—would travel to these remote

locations in order to trap or bargain for the best-looking and/or most vocally-

accomplished specimens.

Whether caught or purchased, the canaries were then packed away in the cargo

holds of large ships for their weeks-long ocean voyages.10 (Figure 1) Pickers housed well

over two hundred birds in enormous crates divided into tiny compartments, and they

would travel alongside these cages during the ocean voyage, providing the cramped

canaries daily allotments of food and water. In this way, shipments of hundreds of birds

9
An 1895 article in The Globe-Republican (Kansas) identifies importers’ more frequent trade of
domesticated canaries: “Now and then the birds are taken in a wild state in these [Canary] islands and sold
for good prices in Europe or America. But the ordinary canary of commerce is the offspring of captive
stock and has been greatly modified by breeding.” (“Origin of Canaries.”)
10
Some canaries made the trip to their final destinations by rail, cart, or mail: for instance, German canaries
headed to other European countries typically were bundled in similar way to those headed across the ocean.
Conversely, transport by mail was only used for individual, specially requested birds (Holden 250).
20
at a time would then make the transatlantic journey to destinations on almost every

continent. An article in an 1887 volume of All the Year Round gives a global perspective

of the incredible volume of canaries shipped during this period. The anonymous author

focuses on St.

Andreasberg’s

exportation,

claiming that

“in 1882,

singing canary

cocks were

imported from

Germany to

New York, one

hundred and

twenty

thousand; to

Figure 2. "Watering Birds." From George H. Holden's Canaries and Cage Birds (1888,
South America,
2nd ed.). Hathi Trust Digital Library. Public Domain in the United States,
Google-digitalized. ten thousand

five hundred; to Australia, five thousand six hundred; to South Africa, three thousand; to

France, thirty thousand; to Belgium, thirty thousand; to England, thirty thousand; to

Russia, thirty thousand; to Austria, thirty thousand. America, which has not yet shown

any tact for training or love for it, is by far the largest customer” (“How Canaries Came

21
to Saint Andreasberg.”).11,12 Canaries were shipped to neighboring and far-flung countries

at an astounding rate, and yet traders could barely keep up with demand, which steadily

increased for much of the century, skyrocketed around the 1870s, and peaked in the last

few decades before the Great War.

Businessmen and large-scale merchants orchestrated this transatlantic trade,

establishing importing houses in cities such as Boston, New York, London, and

Manchester. Self-described bird importer George H. Holden describes the business as a

sort of international web of moving (animal and human) bodies: “each importing-house

employs from thirty to forty travellers [sic], men who travel back and forth, principally

between Europe and America . . . Germany and England furnish all but a small part of the

Canaries raised in the world, and the great exporting-houses are all situated in Germany,

with distributing branches in the different cities, New York being the distributing depot

for the United States” (Holden 247). Henry Gardiner Adams, an Englishman involved in

the trade, locates the primary English depot in the neighborhood of Holborn, the “great

canary quarter of London . . . in or about St. Andrew’s Street every third or fourth house

is occupied by a dealer” (Adams 86). The revenue from this trade was more than enough

to sustain hundreds of workers, from canary “pickers” to the local merchants in major

cities who eagerly clamored for the imported birds. According to Holden’s 1888 price

11
These figures do not include canaries exported from the Canary Islands, nor do they account for the
presumably comparable amount of hens that were transported alongside the “singing canary cocks”
measured here. Actual numbers might have been nearer to double the amounts described here.
12
Notwithstanding the dig at their nations’ training talents, American newspaper articles from 1871 and
1883 reinforce the claim that America was by far the largest importer of the birds, claiming annual totals of
50,000 and 90,000 canaries, respectively. Also, discrepancies in exact figures between the American and
British sources, like those seen here, are common, although generally the numbers for different decades
remain somewhat consistent. Articles cited include “Fifty Thousand Canaries Imported this Year” from The
Cleveland Morning Herald (1871) and “Canaries. Their Origin and History—Raising and Caring for the
Birds” from the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier (1883).
22
list, meticulously pedigreed, perfectly formed, and highly trained songsters—like, for

instance, the Campanum “extra grade singer,” which was imported from Germany only

upon request—could go for as much as fifty dollars (today roughly equivalent to just over

a thousand dollars). On the other end of the scale, a young female stock canary with little

singing ability could cost as little as one dollar. An average cost in the United States

during mid- to late-century was usually somewhere between four and eight dollars

(Holden 283).

The transatlantic trade was crucial not just for the lucrative circulation of a supply

of bird bodies, however, but also through the circulation of ideas and information that

spread through the men participating in the business. Pickers, in particular, who travelled

from house to house in widely-scattered villages, are described in Holden’s manual as

accumulators and disseminators of conceptual as well as physical merchandise.

According to Holden, when a picker arrives in a canary-breeding town, “[h]is arrival is

warmly greeted, as he bears interesting news from the outside world to the secluded

hamlet, and gives information as to the ruling prices in the bird-market” (248). These

men generated and sustained the discourses of canary trading by connecting linguistically

the various breeders, importers, sellers, and buyers in countries otherwise separated by

hundreds of miles of land and ocean. Everyone involved in the trade relied on a common

specialized language of the canary that was not limited by national borders, but those

discourses were also intermingled with—and inevitably influenced by—“news from the

outside world”: presumably, general political and social updates that would have been

23
only indirectly, if at all, related to the happenings of the canary-keeping world. Thus the

canary was the center of a practice that facilitated an international exchange of ideas. 13

Within the trade, the canary was synonymous with “the outside world”: its own

extensive physical travel, as well the international communication that attended its

movement, placed it firmly in the category of the public sphere. Once these birds reached

their destinations, however, that meaning was quickly abandoned, as authors attempted to

stifle—to tame—the implications of the complicated transatlantic journeys and

discourses that brought the birds to England and America. Fanciers went to great lengths

to demonstrate that the canary’s wildness and foreignness had been almost entirely

eradicated. The exotic origins of the birds—including their adventures crossing the

Atlantic Ocean—were largely ignored and instead replaced with authors’ insistence on

the canary’s domestic and domesticated behaviors, as well as the birds’ preference for the

calm and stable comforts of the cage. The canary, in other words, represented to many

(whether implicitly or explicitly) an ideal example of Empire.

This representation, much like the bird’s symbolization of ideal domesticity, was

crucial to adding security to an already-fragile (if not illusory) concept. England’s

determined effort to expand its power during the nineteenth century was often

characterized by struggle and bloodshed; colonized subjects typically did not accept

British rule without resistance. Even after colonial rule was established, native

populations rarely integrated—or, were rarely encouraged to integrate—into British

culture. Political leaders attempted to describe what the colonized subject should do, but

these expectations were often cruel and impossible. The canary, however, in its

13
This linguistic circulation is demonstrated in British and American canary manuals, where discussions of
the bird and its management are conceived of and depicted in almost identical terms.
24
seemingly infinite malleability and docility, was quickly adopted as the model of such

practices of colonization and domestication. Many descriptions of the canary depict it as

a living bridge between the exotic and the familiar, the foreign and the domestic. For

instance, in Cage and Singing Birds (1854), Adams claims that the canary “occupies, as it

were, an intermediate position between [imported song birds] and the native finches; for

although originally a foreign bird, and still, to a great extent, an imported one, it is so

widely diffused through, and so constantly bred in this country, that is can scarcely be

considered an alien” (82). Adams acknowledges the bird’s foreign origins, but insists that

a combination of the birds’ ubiquity and subsequent breeding within England essentially

transform it into a thoroughly British variety. In other words, though the bird may have

had a past characterized by foreignness, the actual birds inhabiting cages in domestic

spaces have been thoroughly Anglicized. Canaries, once foreign, now no longer were.

Implicit in these standards for earning native status was the bird’s extreme

popularity among pet-owners and breeders, whose enthusiasm for the canary seems to

insist that such a beloved animal must be a fellow national. Examples of authors’

attempts to emphasize the canary’s naturalization abound, especially in natural histories

and bird manuals. In the fourth volume of the Comte de Buffon’s The Natural History of

Birds (1793), an extensive chapter on “Canary Finches” is followed by a chapter titled,

“Foreign Birds, that are Related to the Canaries” (43); later sections on other English

birds are also followed by sections describing their foreign relations. The implication of

this organization and classification is that canaries, like the linnets, bullfinches, and other

British birds described in that volume, are a native species. Several decades later,

renowned bird expert and prolific writer William Kidd wrote in Kidd’s Popular Treatises

25
on Song-Birds (1854) that “Although originally a native of the Canary Islands, the canary

has been so long naturalised [sic] in this country, that he may truly be pronounced an

English bird” (50). Here, the transformation is made explicit; presumably, the forces

involved in the canary’s naturalization process were primarily the pet owners and fanciers

who devoted themselves to the domestication of that once-wild species. In 1888, George

Henry Holden explains that “Canaries have at the present time a nationality . . . The main

classes may be enumerated as follows: the German, the English, the Belgian, the French,

and Hybrids” (9-10).14,15 Holden also reveals fanciers’ practice of referring to canaries by

varietal name (or, “nationality”) alone: for example, the Belgian, rather than the Belgian

canary. By relocating the canary’s origins in Europe (and most frequently England) rather

than off the coast of Africa, these authors contributed to the cultural push to strip the

birds of any contemporary identity as foreign. In all of these accounts, the canary’s

history as a wild bird and foreign import is important only in that it is so easily replaced

by the more civilized identity of Western domestication.

The bird’s transformation into the emblem of Empire and its progression from

foreign bird to domestic product is made even clearer when read alongside the trade with

and colonization of the Canary Islands. These islands—like their native songbirds—were

considered one of the more successful instances of Western colonization. They had been

14
Varietal names often became even more specific than this. Most manuals describe and differentiate
between at least eight different varieties, including the St. Andreasburg, the Norwich, the London Fancy,
the Scotch Fancy, the Yorkshire, the Manchester Coppy, and the Lancashire, in addition to the varieties
Holden lists here.
15
American canaries were another recognized variety, although they were considered subpar and unworthy
of serious breeders’ attention. America was believed to be home to the least proficient breeders, and as a
result American canaries were deemed the least desirable and least refined of all possible varieties. Despite
the negative connotations of the American variety for breeders and exhibitors, though, canaries were as
popular and cherished in American households as they were in British homes. Their trade flourished in
cities such as New York, Boston, and Milwaukee, and canaries were common pets throughout the country.
26
colonized by Spain since the 1400s, and as such represented a geographical and cultural

intermediary between the familiarity of Europe and the foreignness of Africa and the

Americas. The Canary Islands had long been a major stopping point on trade routes,

especially by Europeans travelers headed to or from Africa or the Americas. Tenerife, in

particular, as the largest island in the archipelago, was a frequent port for those sailing

across the Atlantic Ocean. The Islands produced their own crops—primarily sugarcane,

wine, and dyes—that were widely traded with Europeans and Americans, and they were

also the subject of multiple scientific explorations in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, including, most notably, the first (failed) stop on Darwin’s voyage of the

Beagle in 1832.

The canary’s popular and often-repeated origin myth mirrored the political and

economic history of the Canary Islands, further emphasizing the birds’ place as a

figurative bridge between the foreign and the domestic. Acting as perhaps the most

insistent and consistent conception of the canary, the story of the canary’s origins

appeared in everything from canary manuals to natural histories to dozens of periodical

and newspaper articles, where it succinctly described the birds’ fortuitous transportation

out of the wilds and subsequent distribution throughout Europe. According to almost

every account, canaries were first brought to Europe from the Canary Islands in 1478 or

thereabouts, when Henry the Navigator brought them back to Spain. The origin story then

goes on to describe the bird’s eventual dispersion throughout the rest of Europe in the

seventeenth century, when a shipment of canaries wrecked off the coast of Italy and were

subsequently caught and sold to a variety of European countries. Similarly, the Canary

Islands themselves were officially colonized by Spain (or, more accurately, Castile) in

27
1495, after several decades of tenuous control and struggle with both the native Islanders

and the Portuguese. Their own exposure to the rest of the Western world also increased

exponentially in the seventeenth century, when trade with various European nations and

the Americas became the Islands’ primary source of income. These linked progressions

between country and canary demonstrate how canary owners deliberately cultivated an

origin story—repeated every

chance available—to

implicitly equate the successes

of large-scale colonization to

the domestication of the

canary.

The canary’s cultural

legacy as a thoroughly

domesticated animal with

exotic origins would follow

the bird well into the twentieth

century. Trade of the birds

continued at a feverish pace

until the Great War made such

Figure 3. The Washington Herald. (Washington, D.C.) November 08, non-vital transportation
1914, Feature Section, Image 29. Image provided by Library of
Congress, Washington, DC.
impossible. A full-page

illustration in the November 8th 1914 edition of The Washington Herald depicts in image

and word the dramatic impact that the resultant shortage of canary-birds had on their

28
adoring public. (Figure 2) On the front page of the Feature Section, rendered in a

combination of Art Nouveau and Art Deco style, a thin woman dressed in a tight-fitting

kimono-like dress with a long string of pearls hanging from her neck kneels on the floor

of a lavishly-fabricked room, draperies and pillows covering almost every surface.16 Her

upturned and heavily mascaraed face looks adoringly into a wicker birdcage as she offers

the tiny canary inside a single, delicate, and wilted flower. The title of the piece, hanging

just over the canary’s cage, ruefully exclaims, “No more, alas! the Little Saffron

Immigrant.” Underneath the young woman’s feet, a caption explains that the cause for

such sadness is that “the sweet singing canary is war-bound in Europe.”17 In this

illustration, the canary is the centerpiece of a domestic tableau that is particularly

concerned with status: the abundance of fabric, the long string of pearls, and the

architectural birdcage all contribute to a very specific impression of wealth, beauty, and

leisure. According to the text, the canary’s absence troubles such a tranquil middle- to

upper-class setting.18 Though the author of this page remains hopeful that the canary will

soon make a triumphant return across the ocean, in reality s/he identifies the beginning of

the end of the canary’s reign supreme.

16
The obvious Asian influence of the popular decorative and clothing choices presented here is another
reminder of Western culture’s fascination with exotic cultures at the turn of the century—in this sense, the
canary was one of many such products of transatlantic trade and foreign origin.
17
The page also includes a short origin story, entitled “The Legend of the Canary,” which retells the Greek
myth of Ceyx and Halcyone, lovers who were reunited after Ceyx’s death at sea by being both turned into
birds by Zeus. Strangely, the account on this page claims that Ceyx was turned into a canary; however, the
widely-accepted translation explains that both lovers were turned into halcyon birds, or kingfishers. This
account of the canary’s legend does not appear in any other sources dealing with canaries: The Washington
Herald author apparently took some interpretive liberties in order to provide a more romantic background
for the domesticated canary bird. Such a story also neatly circumvents any discussion of the canary’s
original capture and domestication by Westerners.
18
Despite the fact that clearly, in the opening months of the First World War, there were much more
serious and dangerous concerns to life and liberty at stake, the primary concern here is the continuation of
status and its attendant luxuries.
29
 Though the canary trade would eventually start up again after the war, it never

regained the intensity of earlier decades, and the popularity of the canary gradually faded.

By the mid-twentieth century, canaries were simply one of many other domestic pet

options, no longer holding the cultural cache and emblematic status of ideal domesticity

that characterized its place in the previous century.

For Art’s Sake: Admiration and Mutilation of the Aesthetic Canary

In the birds’ heyday of the mid- and late nineteenth century, the primary market

for the huge numbers of canaries entering England and the United States were the

thousands of men who identified as bird fanciers.19 Their demands and preferences

determined the market, and first and foremost on most fanciers’ lists was a desire for

specific aesthetic qualities. Cheerfulness, melodious song, companionship—all these

were acknowledged to be positive canary attributes, but for the majority of fanciers, and

even for many casual pet owners, the birds were most valued for their physical beauty. In

both England and America, dozens of canary societies held annual exhibitions at venues

such as the Crystal Palace. Much like dog shows of the twenty-first century, in these

serious competitions birds were separated into categories based on variety and then

judged by elaborate rating systems of physical characteristics. Points were earned or lost

based on the bird’s poise, vibrancy and consistency of color, and shape of body, head,

feathers, and crest, among other things (Wallace 216 ff.). Fanciers considered themselves

to be discerning art critics, dismissing the plain multitudes of average canaries and

instantly spotting the aesthetic perfection of an admirable specimen.

19
Almost all accounts of bird fanciers in the many manuals and articles examined for this study describe
these enthusiasts as male.
30
 Problematically, however, these men also believed in their ability to create canary

“art.” Malleability was a crucial component of this pursuit of aesthetic accomplishment,

since the birds had to undergo drastic transformations from their wild state in order to

meet exhibition standards. Disturbingly, fanciers presented their intent to physically (and

sometimes painfully) manipulate the birds quite matter-of-factly, without any sense of

guilt or shame.20 Inevitably, in writings about canary breeding and exhibition, the canary

was constantly depicted as an object: a non-sentient pet or product that could be

manipulated in such ways as to ensure the happiness and gratification of its owners. The

movement from critic to creator resulted in fanciers’ blatant disregard for canaries’

physical integrity, and many canaries suffered and even died at the hands of men whose

aggressive breeding techniques distorted birds’ bodies in an attempt to achieve the ideal

look. As such, these same breeding and exhibition discussions also reveal the very real

limits of the canary’s supposedly limitless flexibility, as manuals casually describe the

deaths of dozens of overbred birds due to sickness and physical disability.

Far removed from this macabre reality, however, most assessments of the

canary’s aesthetic accomplishment focused on the beauty that the birds could bring to

their domestic environments. Although some bird owners described the bird as a

household decoration, to many devotees of canary-keeping, the birds were not simply
20
Some more specific examples of the methods of domestication—especially by fanciers—will be
described below. Bird-owners who kept canaries as pets had similar means of domesticating, although they
often described methods as “training.” They were also particularly intent on creating tame and friendly
birds: for example, in Mary S. Wood’s Canary Birds, she relates a “new and approved method of taming
birds” (19). Without any sense of how this method might be unwelcome to the canaries themselves, Wood
explains that in order to convince a canary to sit tamely in its owner’s hand, “A portion, larger or smaller, is
cut off from the inner plume of the pen-feathers, so that the bird cannot hurt itself if it attempts to leave the
hand. The nostrils of the bird are then touched with bergamot, or any other odorous oil, by which it is for a
time so stupefied as to perch quietly on the finger” (19-20). Author Mrs. M.E.C. Farwell seconds this
notion: “Clip the wings to a thinness that will make flying impossible; then teach him not to fear you, by
conducting in so gentle and affectionate a style as to win confidence. Being incompetent to fly, the matter
of handling him is simplified, and you can teach him any trick, habit, pantomime you please” (50).
31
parlor knickknacks; they were frequently conceived as a more elevated form of

decoration—as a form of art. In The Canary Book (1893), Wallace succinctly explains

this valuation of the bird as an objet d’art: “I consider a good bird worthy of a good cage,

upon the same principle as I contend that a good picture is deserving of a good frame”

(2). The comparison illustrates how the author/fancier determines the bird’s worth—and

its deservingness of an attractive cage—based on aesthetic qualities.21 The Rev. Francis

Smith, an Englishman whose popular text The Canary was released in its third edition in

1872, provides a more detailed version of the comparison. He cautions against the

dangers of an overly-decorative cage, and in doing so equates the bird to a piece of

jewelry: “if a cage be too elaborate and ornamental in its design and workmanship, the

effect will be to fasten the attention rather on the casket than on the jewel it is meant to

enshrine” (138). As if the canary were a lifeless relic, the goal of the cage is to enshrine,

to preserve and protect a beauty that must remain observed but untouched. Smith then

goes on—less ambiguously but still metaphorically—to describe the canary as art(ificial),

insisting that, when truly dedicated fanciers see canaries in elaborate cages, “we always

feel very much what an artist in some picture exhibition, standing near his own

production to hear the criticisms of the public, may be supposed to feel, as he hears some

unsophisticated party exclaim, ‘Oh my! what a beautiful frame!’” (139). Here, the canary

is stripped of sentience and independence: according to Smith, the bird is a product, made

and owned by humans, just as a piece of artwork is the product of its artist. Certain

21
Farwell, perhaps the only manual author to oppose the sentiment of canary-as-art, angrily proclaims, “No
one should keep a bird, or any pet, merely for ornament. It is an inhuman practice, and yields no real
satisfaction to the ungenerous owner . . . hang your bird in a gilded cage, notice him only sufficiently to
keep him in singing ability—that is, treat him as you do your furniture—and you have merely a singing
machine, combining only intelligence enough to evince great fright when approached, to eat, sing his one
tune over and over, and go to sleep at sundown . . . ah, no, poor little heart! he has learned to feel himself a
nonentity, and heeds nothing that occurs, unless his cage, or self, be interfered with.” (Farwell 4)
32
varieties of canaries were even deliberately dyed, as if they were a canvas on which

fanciers’ might enact their creativity. The Cayenne was fed cayenne pepper on a regular

basis as a way to turn the bird’s feathers a brilliant red. Holden describes these birds as

“the last products of scientific attention and feeding” (28), narrating the extensive history

of experimentation that led to fanciers’ discovery that certain foods could dye canaries’

feathers.

The belief that fanciers “created” different varieties of canaries was quite

common, and manual authors—intent on describing the domesticating possibilities

available to eager fanciers—often appear unconcerned with, or perhaps oblivious to, the

potential cruelty and limitations of their breeding advice. In fact, many of the most

popular and professionally-admired varieties of canaries were those that had undergone

dramatic physical transformations from their wild state, transformations that made them

prone to injury or illness. One of the most extreme examples is the Belgian canary, touted

by those in the know as the “nobility of the canary race” (Wallace 212). The Belgian,

according to authors such as Holden and Wallace, was prized for its extreme angularity:

the ideal body shape of this canary was one in which head and shoulders were almost

completely level with each other, the head jutting out from the body at a right angle. Such

construction made regular movement incredibly difficult for the bird, as it was unable to

walk steadily with its head so far bowed down in front of it. Both Holden and Wallace

detail the dramatically unnatural distortion of this variety of bird, as well as offer

illustrations to demonstrate the Belgian’s unusual shape. (Figure 3)

33
 However, their descriptions are not at all attuned to the bird’s probable suffering.

Instead, they express admiration for the variety’s extreme shaping, with an occasional

chuckle at the birds’ distorted bodies and attempts at normal movement. Holden

cheerfully describes how “the

full-blooded Belgian, when

viewed in any position except

when on his perch, is an

awkward-looking fellow at the

best. When hopping along the

bottom of the cage pecking at his

seeds his movements are such as

might be made by a two-legged

camel moving rapidly if such an

animal can be imagined” (19). His

whimsical comparison of the

“awkward-looking fellow”

lightheartedly dismisses any

notion of breeders’ deliberate

Figure 4. “The Belgian Canary.” From R. L. Wallace, The Canary
Book (3rd ed., 1893). Hathi Trust Digital Library. Public Domain in
the United States, Google-digitalized. cruelty in achieving this shape,

even while it acknowledges the unnaturalness and physiological inefficiency of the body

type. Holden also avers that such a creature as the Belgian is unimaginable, even

unnatural: in fact, the bird’s unnaturalness is apparently what contributes most to

Holden’s (as well as other breeders’) glee. In many ways, these fanciers view themselves

34
not only as artists but also as God-like, taking satisfaction in the power that comes from

creation, regardless of—or perhaps dependent on—the monstrosities and suffering that

result.

In The Canary Book, Wallace emphasizes the Belgian’s extreme shape even more

explicitly, and uses the bird’s apparent malformation in order to demonstrate the

ignorance of people outside of the canary-breeding profession, as well as to reinforce the

refined sensibilities of those, including himself, who work with the birds. He relates his

experience at a bird-seller’s shop, where an unenlightened seller and patrons express

dismay and disgust over what Wallace quickly perceives to be a particularly fine

specimen of Belgian canary: “One said it was a ‘young camel,’ another that it was a

‘Richard the Third,’ but all appeared agreed that it was naturally deformed . . . [the seller]

said he was sure there was ‘something wrong with its back’” (Wallace 214-15). The

various comparisons in this anecdote conceptualize the bird’s aesthetic appearance as a

hideous—but natural—malformation: though certainly the onlookers believe the bird to

be quite ugly, that ugliness is not an unimaginable natural aberration, like the two-legged

camel of Holden’s anecdote. Wallace, however, reacts strongly against the men’s

classification, and instead depicts the bird as a purposely unnatural figure; he highlights

the processes of domestication—deliberate human interference and influence—that have

created such a strange-looking bird. The distinction between natural and deliberate

deformation, according to Wallace, makes all the difference when deciding the bird’s

worth: the Belgian should be lauded, rather than pitied, for its intentionally malformed

physique. Wallace explains that upon seeing the bird’s unique shape, he immediately

“had a fancy for it” and was quite satisfied to confirm that it was “the ‘Simon Pure’ of a

35
Belgian canary” (215). Because that particular Belgian was not appreciated by all who

viewed it, Wallace refers to the canary as “the poor unoffending object” (214). Like

Holden, he demonstrates slightly amused sympathy for the bird, but that sympathy is for

an object whose aesthetic worth is misjudged rather than a living creature whose physical

features cause it to suffer.

Intense breeding practices such as those evidenced by Holden and Wallace

inevitably produced weak canaries. Manual authors readily acknowledge this

consequence, but they also express no concern over the resultant enfeebled birds. In fact,

many fanciers adopt the attitude that such practices are their right as dedicated, even

scientific, men experimenting and achieving successes in their chosen profession: any

casualties along the way are collateral damage.22 For instance, the Scotch Fancy variety

of canary (Figure 4) was bred to mimic the shape of a “half circle,” a contortion which

often made movement difficult and seriously inhibited balance. Holden, while describing

the extremes to which breeders of the Scotch Fancy variety go to achieve that dramatic

shape, quickly assures his reader that his identification of those extremes does not also

mean he disapproves: “We mean no disrespect to the rugged Highland breeders. This

variety is their choice and fancy, and they should be allowed their indulgence” (25).

Holden’s language strips sentience from the canaries upon which these breeding

techniques are utilized. He refers to the living birds as the property—the “choice” and

“fancy”—of men who exercise complete control over them. The cruelties of extreme

breeding and its resultant distortions are recast as human “indulgences,” a term that

22
In one of the only examples of manual author outrage over such practices, Farwell demands, “No fancier
has a right to injure a bird’s health experimenting with it. Why do not the humane societies look to this?”
(54)
36
 emphasizes the

domesticating—or

colonizing—rights of a an

unquestionably superior

species.

In a clear echo of

contemporary justifications of

colonization, some fanciers

defend themselves against

imagined charges of cruelty

by depicting their human care

and domesticated conditions

as more beneficial to the birds’

Figure 4. "Scotch Fancy Canaries." From R. L. Wallace, The Canary
Book (3rd ed., 1893). Hathi Trust Digital Library. Public Domain in health. Boswell explains that
the United States, Google-digitalized.
“In a state of nature [canaries]

are liable to many misfortunes . . . In a state of domestication their health can be better

observed, and more carefully attended to” (150), while Kidd insists that domestication

made a previously “tender, delicate, and difficult” bird into a “robust” species of bird,

“among the heartiest of the feathered tribe” (50-51). Here, as in typical examples of

colonization, the human owner is a beneficent presence who is better able to care for the

bird than it could care for itself in the wild. Such characterizations dominated nineteenth-

century conceptions of the canary. This clear-cut power differential of altruistic human

37
and reliant animal, however, became inverted in another contemporary conception of the

canary as a moral compass.

“A Refining Nature”: The Canary’s Elevating Effects

In addition to the overwhelming emphasis on aesthetics found in most manuals,

canaries were highly valued throughout the period for their perceived ability to deeply

and importantly influence the lives of the humans with which they lived. Often, they were

identified as healers; men, women, and children suffering from mental and bodily

ailments could find solace and even curative treatment by watching and engaging with

canaries. Their healing qualities also just as frequently extended beyond the physical and

into the civic realm, as the bird’s embodiment of the domestic ideal—based firmly in

bourgeois values—allowed it to elevate and maintain its owners’ status as members of

the middle class. Manual authors were some of the most ardent proponents of the

canary’s role as a source of emotional, intellectual, and moral improvement for the

humans who cared for them—“healthful to our souls as well as our bodies” (Wood v),

according to one author.23 Their presence in the home, characterized by physical beauty

and song, conveyed not only a sense of happiness and enjoyment for their owners, but

also, according to many, the ability to make those owners better, healthier people.

An early and highly influential example of this conception appears in Buffon’s

description of canaries in The Natural History of Birds (1793). Buffon’s impressive work

23
In some respects, the canary was part of a larger late-eighteenth and nineteenth century animal rights
movement in which literary animals became models of wisdom and moral improvement for human readers
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass” or Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, for instance). However, the
canary differs in that the biological bird itself—not merely a representation of that animal in a text—was
believed to hold the power of moral improvement. Also, discourses of the canary explicitly rejected many
of the tenets of the animal rights movement: among those writing about canaries, the most common
response to claims of unfair imprisonment was to justify the bird’s love of and ability to thrive in the cage.
38
as a natural historian in the late eighteenth century influenced generations of scientists,

and he was a frequently cited source in many nineteenth-century canary manuals. His

chapter on canaries demonstrates his fondness for the species, and it also establishes

several of the birds’ key characteristics, including cheerfulness and domestic suitability.

He insists that the canary “sings at all times, recreates our spirits in the gloomiest

weather, and even adds to our happiness; it amuses all young people, and is the delight of

the recluse; it relieves the langours of the cloister, and infuses cheerfulness into innocent

and captive minds . . . It is as useful, as the Vulture is pernicious” (Buffon 3). According

to Buffon, the great charm of the canary is its usefulness in elevating the emotional and

even physical states of its human companions. The valuation of this quality exploded in

the nineteenth century, when almost every canary-related text inevitably included an

explanation of how the songsters improve the lives of their owners.

One of the most common examples of the canary’s capacity for effecting

improvement was the claim that canaries provided enrichment for the sick and the very

young. In Buffon’s description, such uplift is described solely as emotional: canaries raise

the spirits. But manual owners typically went beyond the realm of the emotions. For

example, the Rev. Francis Smith was one of the most ardent believers in the uplifting

power of the canary. Whereas many manual authors assumed a (supposedly) objective

and often vaguely scientific tone for most of their texts, Smith structures his entire

manual in narrative form, relating to his readers the story of his years of canary

ownership, imparting care-taking information casually and anecdotally. In this

distinctively-voiced text, Smith implores his readers to understand the importance of

bringing canaries into their homes. The opening chapter, titled “A Plea for the Canary,”

39
attempts to convince his audience that the canary is uniquely suited to bring joy,

satisfaction, and—especially—personal improvement to its owners. He begins with a

litany of familiar canary conventions: “the beauty of its plumage, the elegance of its

figure, the docility of its disposition, the charming familiarity which induces it to nestle

without fear or reserve beside us, to say nothing of its melodious song which has of late

years been well nigh cultivated to perfection, are as striking and prominent as ever”

(Smith 4). These canary compliments are typical, and they reflect the general emphasis

on domesticated behaviors—aesthetic beauty, tameness, “cultivated” song—for which

the canary was so well-known.

The majority of Smith’s chapter, however, is devoted to describing the ways in

which canaries transform vulnerable human lives for the better. To the sick and invalid,

he can barely estimate “how many an otherwise gloomy hour would [canaries’] presence

lighten, how much interesting occupation and unfatiguing labour would they afford and

call into exertion?” (5). His insistence on the benefits such birds would afford children,

however, is the most detailed:

How attractive and useful, too, wherever there are children, would such an

aviary be in a nursery, especially in large towns, where little or no

opportunity for studying the habits of birds is presented! To watch them

build their nest, patiently brood over their eggs, and hatch and feed their

callow young, are operations which are not only intensely interesting to

every child, but may be turned with manifest advantage to great practical

account. Here they may silently learn those invaluable lessons of kindness,

and love, and patience, which shall fit them for the trials of after life, and,

40
 it may be, be imprinted on their hearts for ever! Who can tell what

consideration for the wants and forbearance with the faults of others

these little songsters may be the means of instilling into the youthful mind

thus privileged to watch them in their daily course? Who can say what

stimulus and encouragement such an aviary might not often afford to the

study of every department of natural history, which but for it might never

be undertaken! Seeing and knowing little, many a child, we feel assured,

would naturally be led to desire to know more. Books thereon, as a natural

consequence, would be sought after with avidity, and read with profit and

delight, which but for the canaries might probably lie idle and unlooked

into on the shelf. (Smith 5-6)

Rev. Smith exuberantly praises the gifts of the canary, passionately preaching to his

congregation of fellow bird devotees about the ways in which turning to the birds can

literally and figuratively save lives. According to Smith, without the healing cheerfulness

of the canary, invalids are doomed to monotonous, stifling, lonely hours inside, while

children’s moral development will be neglected, their curiosity will remain dormant, and

their education (and books) will be thoroughly neglected. What doting parent could

possibly deny their children such improvement, in the form of a small yellow songbird?

Smith was far from alone in his belief that the canary had palliative and

improving abilities, especially for “vulnerable” populations such as the physically infirm

or the very young. Other manuals frequently describe the ways in which the birds can

help. In Common Sense in the Care of the Canary (1886), an American manual written

41
by Mrs. M.E.C. Farwell, the description of the physical effects of the canary’s presence

on a sick person is simultaneously spiritual and medical. Farwell exclaims,

Is there an invalid in the family? Then place her—or him—before the

screen door of your little aviary. How soon pleasant emotions arise, and

the mind is drawn from the self! Aches, pains, are forgotten! Presently a

healthful action surprises the long-sluggish blood, and a cheery laugh

ripples across the pale lips. The invalid shows symptoms of returning

health. The active magnetic current thrilling those tiny beings has struck

away the steely bolts of that morbid mind and infused the whole system—

earthy and spiritual—with a fresh and healthful tone. (36)

Notwithstanding the somewhat questionable biological effects described here, Farwell’s

imagined example is a testament to the ways in which the canary was believed to act as a

kind of medicine, a physical stimulant, as well as an almost spiritual effusion of energy.

The physical uplift Farwell depicts is closely tied to emotional uplift: she explains that

the “pleasant emotions” that are generated by the cheerful bird immediately alleviate the

physical sufferings of the body. The “active magnetic current” that, according to Farwell,

enervates the canary also pours from its body into the human bodies around it.24

In their capacity for moral and intellectual uplift, canaries were also frequently

depicted as antidotes to humans’ violent tendencies. In Smith’s manual, he specifically

targets the supposed degeneracy of the lower classes, emphasizing the possibilities for

improvement available if only these men and women could pursue the canary fancy:

24
Her description is strikingly similar to Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” (closely related to
hypnosis, often defined as an invisible life force that intimately affected and connected living creatures),
which had a devoted following well into the nineteenth century.
42
 The exhibition and breeding of these beautiful birds is certainly a pursuit

to be encouraged; and I believe that if the religious portion of the

community would only encourage these and such like innocent and

rational modes of amusement among the working classes, the latter would

not be long insensible to the kindness and sympathy shown in their behalf.

By degrees they would be reclaimed from the haunts of vice and crime; by

degrees they would imitate the example of those above them; by degrees

they would be found filling our churches and keeping the Sabbath, as it

should be kept by every man professing to be a Christian. (Smith 5)

According to Smith, the moral “insensibility” that occurs so frequently in the working

classes, exemplified by apparent habits of “vice and crime,” could be completely

eradicated if the men and women so implicated could only amuse themselves with

“innocent and rational” pursuits. The processes of domesticating, breeding, and caring for

canaries figures here as a curative: to “save” such canaries from a life of wildness is also

to “save” oneself from sin. Additionally, the canary is credited with helping those of the

working classes more properly heed the admonishments and habits of their social

superiors; Smith’s claims that such previously degenerate men and women would quickly

“imitate the example of those above them” and “be found filling our churches and

keeping the Sabbath” also testifies to the canary’s power as an emblem of the middle

class. Not only is the canary credited with rescuing social and moral miscreants from a

life of vice, but it also is believed to specifically help turn those men and women into

“proper” middle-class citizens.

43
 Smith’s dramatic account of how the canary’s innate morality might raise up

degenerate individuals had echoes even outside of canary manuals. In an 1895 article in

The Norfolk Virginian titled “Canaries for Convicts,” readers are told how prisoners in

the Michigan state prison share their cells and common spaces with approximately six

hundred canaries. The men “keep them for comfort and raise them for profit,” and the

article explains that “it is the belief of the management of the institution that for this

reason there are fewer outbreaks of lawlessness than are found elsewhere.” Canaries are

explicitly and wholly credited with decreasing the levels of violence in the prison more

generally, while soothing the savage spirits of each individual prisoner. In fact, according

to officials, “Many of the most hardened criminals, who from their general appearance

and history would not be expected to care for anything of a refining nature, tenderly care

for and caress their little pets.” The canary is a moral compass, directing even the worst

prisoners to a less violent and more empathetic and caring life. Of particular note is the

term “refining,” which signifies not only a moral but also a class concern. Just as Smith

praises the canary for its ability to inspire refinement in its owners, so too do the officials

of the Michigan prison believe their birds represent the mores and expectations of the

middle class: social manners, education, morality, taste.

The canary’s role as an emblem of the domestic sphere allowed authors to invoke

the animal not simply for its health benefits, but even more significantly as a tool for

signifying and elevating its owners’ class status. Henry Beck Hirst, whose American

manual The Book of Cage Birds first appeared in 1843, affirms a connection between

canary-keeping and a reduction in violence due to social refinement. However, in Hirst’s

examples, the canary not only actively improves the morality of its human owners but

44
also acts as a kind of litmus test: an indicator whose presence and/or response to certain

individuals delineates their moral character. To justify his extensive treatment of

canaries, in the opening pages of his text Hirst vehemently declares, “So far as my own

observation has been extended, it has satisfied me that he who listens not with delight to

the melody of the feathered race, has either been rendered a misanthrope by the villainy

of others, or is at heart, himself, a villain” (13-14). By Hirst’s equation, a person’s failure

to appreciate the canary’s melodious song immediately reveals weakness and/or

immorality within his/her uncultured soul.

The author contrasts this with a positive example of the canary’s refining powers,

by showing how the presence of such a bird elevates a working class man in the eyes of

his social superiors. “[W]hat man lives,” Hirst declares, “who, as he passes by the cottage

of the humble labourer [sic], and observes the wicker habitation of the well tended

Canary suspended at the door, does not form a favourable [sic] idea of the taste of those

who dwell within its walls” (14). The canary, according to Hirst, is the ultimate status

symbol for those interested in advertising their aspiring middle-class sensibilities. Not

only can the bird be a tool for members of the working class—who can blatantly

announce their refinement from their doorstep and remove the risk of being thought

degenerate—but the bird can also be used by those already firmly cemented in the middle

and upper classes. Its presence in a “humble” cottage signals to the passing gentleman or

gentlewoman that the tenets of that dismal home may in fact be trusted, rather than feared

or scorned.

In a variation on the theme, Farwell’s Common Sense manual focuses on the

canary’s ability to detect fraud among supposed card-carrying members of the middle and

45
upper classes. At the beginning of her text, Farwell condemns the mistreatment of

canaries by irresponsible owners and then goes on to explain that the observation of such

cruelty can actually reveal immorality and a failure to meet middle-class standards of

domesticity. She states that neglect, “when practised [sic] on a poor little bird, helpless in

a cage-prison, it is simply—well, it is a revelation of character not to be mistaken.

Beware, young man, if you seek a wife, of the lady who forgets to cherish her pets: she

will be sure to scoff at the duties—those many loving attentions—that constitute a

husband’s happy comfort in his home!” (5). Like the dignified passers-by in Hirst’s

hypothetical example, Farwell’s well-intentioned young man can benefit from the

presence of a canary, as the bird will definitively identify the specifically middle-class

moral quality—or lack thereof—in a potential companion: the canary acts as a marriage

guide. Later, Farwell insists that canaries’ “instincts are never incorrect. Let a strange

person approach their cage, and their conduct will give you a clue to that person’s

character, or rather, disposition, such as your dull faculties would be months in

ascertaining” (51). In these situations depicted by Hirst and Farwell, the canary begins to

take on the identity of a hypersensitive being: either a tool or a sentient and individually-

determining creature. This conception would increase in popularity almost exponentially

by the end of the century, when the mining industry’s use of canaries to detect dangerous

mining gases became more widely reported and examined.

The Covert Canary in the Coal Mine

Domestic canaries—those found in the homes of pet-owners and professional

breeders—were by far the birds’ dominant identity. It was to residential birds that dozens

46
of poets and manual authors dedicated their words,25 and for whom complicated systems

of breeding, judging, and exhibiting were created. These were the canaries who

motivated countless numbers of hazardous transatlantic journeys and who had elaborate

cages and aviaries painstakingly erected in their honor. The cultural conceptions of

canaries in the period, along with the various ways in which their meaning was

determined and dispersed, were almost entirely based upon these pretty songsters of the

parlor. And certainly, the “protected” and “comfortable” space of the home was the usual

residence for hundreds of thousands of canaries.

However, typical depictions of the birds ignored the significant roles that canaries

played in the public sphere. One way, as discussed above, was through the deliberate

refashioning of the canary to suppress and even erase its exotic origins and transatlantic

experiences. The other significant area of exclusion was the use of canaries in coal mines

throughout England and America. One of the most serious threats to miners’ safety was

the build-up of carbon monoxide, often accompanied by a lack of oxygen, in

subterranean tunnels. Nineteenth-century miners relied on rudimentary sensors such as

lamps to alert them to possible threats,26 but continued accidents proved that such

indicators were not signaling danger in time to save lives. They then turned to other

oxygen-dependent living creatures to help them: primarily, canaries and mice. These

highly-sensitive animals acted as living carbon monoxide detectors: canaries, in

particular, were affected by much lower levels of the gas than the humans working

alongside them in the mines, and so if the birds exhibited signs of distress, miners would

25
See Chapter 2.
26
The most frequently-used device was a lamp that would flicker or go out in spaces devoid of oxygen.
These lamps, however, carried the added danger of potentially exploding if put in contact with other gases.
47
be alerted to the danger and could then evacuate before being overcome themselves.27

The authors of an early twentieth-century American study explain the benefits of the

canary: “The experiments indicate that of the animals tested canaries are the most

sensitive to carbon monoxide in small quantities. They sway on their perch and then fall,

the symptoms being unmistakable . . . distress was easily seen” (Burrell et al 14, 18). The

industry employed birds most frequently in rescue missions, when miners trapped or

injured underground would require assistance from crews on the surface. These rescuers

would then descend with several canaries in small cages, pausing occasionally to check

the birds’ activity levels, to make sure that they could reach prostrated miners without

threat to their own lives (Burrell et al 5).

The role of these birds, especially in the last decade of the nineteenth century, was

not a secretive or unknown practice in the period more generally, but pit canaries, as they

were called, were valued for qualities oppositional to, if not antagonistic of, the aesthetic

and class status characteristics of parlor and exhibition canaries. As a result, their

existence was entirely ignored by authors who were committed to establishing and

reinforcing certain domestic norms about the birds: this included not only manual authors

but also natural historians, poets, and novelists. Mining companies, governmental

agencies, and newspapers provided almost exclusive documentation of pit canaries.

These sources reveal an entirely different characterization and valuation of the canary,

one that rejected notions of artificiality and instead relied on the bird’s biological

similarities with, if not sensory acuity over, humans. Of course, much like fanciers’ and

pet owners’ more popular depictions of the bird, the discourse of the canary in the coal

A 1914 Salt Lake Tribune article claims that “Canaries save about 800 human lives a year” (“Canaries to
27

Curb”).
48
mine was first and foremost conceptualized as a tool—a safety device, a detector—

manipulated in specific ways in order to assist humans. In the studies mentioned above,

Burrell advocates “using” the birds repeatedly, as their effectiveness will not decrease

over time. Various newspaper descriptions of the practice herald the birds as “gas alarms”

or “apparatuses”: objects rather than subjects (“Canaries to Curb”).

But in mining discourses, the canary is also alive: a biological, sentient creature

whose physiological responses are intimately linked to human lives. The dissonance

between this characterization and the role of the canary among fanciers is striking: in the

former, sentience is the

most crucial feature of

the bird, while in the

latter, the bird is

objectified and

deliberately stripped of

sentience. Both miners

and fanciers valued the

responsiveness of the

canary, but for miners

that desired response

Figure 5. “Two miners underground with canary cage. Circa 1900.” MSHA Digital Library.
United States, Bureau of Mines.
was biological,

independently engaged with the world, and incredibly similar to human responsiveness.

Fanciers, meanwhile, desired a canary who would respond to human attempts to

49
domesticate and reshape: the bird need only be pliable, and it should never assert its own

agency.

These lively birds became a crucial component of the mining industry’s efforts to

make significant improvements in safety. Major disasters in both England and America,

in which hundreds of miners (including children) were killed due to cave-ins, fires,

and/or toxic gas exposure, spurred various organizations to mobilize their best resources

and create new technologies to curb the loss of life. Collaborations between national

governments, scientists, and mining companies produced innovations in safety, and it was

in this context that the use of canaries to detect dangerous levels of carbon monoxide

became more widely and officially recognized and recommended. According to David

Kuchta, a former miner and current president of the No. 9 Coal Mine in Lansdale,

Pennsylvania, stories about mine canaries passed down through generations indicate that

the birds were used even in the first decades of the nineteenth century.28 However,

although canary “lore” describes the usage of canaries in mines throughout the century,

most of the earliest official documentation does not appear until the last years of the

century, when renowned Scottish scientist J.S. Haldane began publishing studies

advocating the use of the birds in mining rescue operations.

28
One of the most interesting oral traditions maintains that only “reject” canaries were purchased by miners
because they were sold for much less than canaries accomplished in looks or song. As a result, most mining
canaries were unremarkable physically, and sometimes even malformed. They were also usually female:
nineteenth-century fanciers and pet-owners believed that only males could sing or develop more brilliant
coloring, and thus females, only considered “worthy” for their function as breeders, were significantly less
in demand. For example, in his manual William Kidd says with all seriousness that “As for hen birds,
unless you retain a few of the strongest for the purpose of breeding from them at a future time, they should
be got rid of with all convenient haste. They are perfectly useless” (124). Holden’s 1888 price list affirms
this distinction, as male canaries typically cost at least twice as much as females of the same variety. No
documented discussions of coal mine canaries include this claim, but it is so frequently mentioned by
retired miners and mining historians that it deserves note here.
50
 According to biographer Martin Goodman, Haldane, who was known for his

extreme methods of experimentation and impressive results,29 published the first official

recommendation for the use of canaries in rescue efforts in an 1894 report on the

Tylorstown, Wales mining disaster of the same year (Goodman 33). Subsequently, an

1895 accident report for death of a London miner contains the first public record of the

use of “Haldane’s canaries” (95). It is likely that Haldane’s rigorous experimentation

served to make official a practice of relying on the birds that had long been used in a

sporadic and informal manner. It also emphasized canaries’ suitability for the role as

expressive and similarly-responsive living creatures.

Several years later, scientist George A. Burrell conducted several experiments for

the American Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Mines. Engaging directly with

Haldane’s findings, Burrell’s conclusions reiterate how the alertness and vivacity of the

canary makes it an ideal safety device. Remarks on oxygen-deprivation experiments

describe canary test subjects sensitive living creatures whose biological responses mimic

those of the men used in Haldane’s earlier experiments: “The canary, B, showed

immediate distress, as evinced by rapid breathing, open bill, and unsteadiness . . . The

canary, C, collapsed as soon as it was placed in the atmosphere. It breathed very slowly

with eyes and bill closed” (Burrell and Oberfell 6). In a subsequent study Burrell

explains, “The results of the tests show that small animals may be repeatedly used in

mines to show the presence of carbon monoxide, without danger of their losing their

susceptibility to that gas, and that of the animals tested canaries are the most suitable. An

29
He often tested the effects of exposure, or lack of exposure, to certain gases on the human body by
subjecting himself and his children to various closed-chamber experiments. Haldane made huge strides in
safety and the understanding of gases on the body, making significant changes in the ways that miners and
divers conducted their work (See Goodman).
51
additional reason for using canaries is that they are as a rule easily obtainable. They are

clean and become pets of the men who have care of them. If handled intelligently they

seldom die as a result of exposure to atmospheres containing carbon monoxide” (Burrell

et al 5). The report brings together the more popular discourse of the pet canary with less

familiar notions of the pit canary: a biological organism, rather than a parlor decoration

or an objectified product of extreme domestication. Future American newspaper articles

covering the practice made this expressiveness explicit as well. The New York Daily

Tribune, for example, explained that the coal mine canary is “all the time hopping about

or preening itself cheerfully under ordinary circumstances, and if affected by gas

suffocation it makes the fact immediately manifest” (“Sparrows” 4).

Those in the nineteenth century did have exposure to and awareness of the

sentient possibilities of the canary; the discourse of the coal mine canary—frequently

featured in public and widely disseminated texts—is infused with language

acknowledging these possibilities. Such awareness undeniably fueled the overwhelming

insistence of the canary’s domestication at the hands of powerful Western bird owners; in

an attempt to assert control and dominance over another living being, fanciers and pet

owners needed to convince themselves and others that the canary’s agency could be

restrained, reshaped, even removed. Strangely, however, despite the fact that most people

in the nineteenth century were unable to reconcile the canary’s underground occupation,

the most enduring legacy of the canary beyond that era has been its connection to the

mining industry. The colloquial phrase “canary in the coal mine” has been widely used

well into the twenty-first century as a way to express an indicator, or a predictor, of future

occurrences. Such an association is typically positive: financial investors and

52
environmentalists, for example, appreciate and often rely on instances of the “canary in

the coal mine” to prepare themselves for incoming change or disasters. And yet, in the

nineteenth century, those who expressed the most admiration for the canary

simultaneously refused to acknowledge its role as a predictor, a life-saver. Instead of

admitting reliance on animals’ modes of perception and awareness, many British and

American bird owners preferred to dismiss or ignore the possibility of such nonhuman

sentience: the very concept of “the canary in the coal mine” was a dirty metaphor,

implying more continuity between humans and animals than was widely accepted.

53
 Chapter 2

Poeticizing the “Pet of the Parlor”: Canary Elegies, Victorian Periodicals, and

Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias”

Though manual authors, journalists, and scientists eagerly contributed texts to the

Victorian era’s on-going conversations about canaries, they operated under the

assumption that they dealt in facts and figures. In retrospect, of course, their nonfiction

materials offer up to the critical eye of a literary scholar innumerable instances of

provocative interpretation. But there are significant ethical choices that surround the

practices of fictional authorship, where writers more deliberately and expressly engage in

meditated acts of creation. Here, I grapple with those politics of interpretation. As a

literary scholar approaching the task of interpreting canaries ethically, I am faced with the

same choices that nineteenth-century authors faced as they committed canaries to text.

(How) shall I construct my animal subjects? What effects will my words have on the

biological and representational functions of canaries? How do I reveal myself through my

portrayal of animals? With these questions in mind, my work in analyzing the texts that

follow here is twofold: to articulate the complex and often contradictory discourse of

canaries as it appeared in Victorian periodical poetry; and to use that discourse to identify

the potential dangers and possible rewards of representing animals, in the Victorian era

and now.

In this chapter I first describe the various ways that canaries were stripped of their

subjectivity and denied sentience in Victorian periodical poetry. From the late 1830s to

the 1890s, dozens of canary poems written by anonymous or unknown poets appeared in

54
literary periodicals. The poems varied in tenor and intent, just as likely to attempt to

evoke serious contemplation or grief as they were laughter. Despite this variation,

however, most worked with a limited and consistent series of tropes about the specific

characteristics and functions of canaries as pets. Above all, authors claimed canaries were

willing captives, excellent singers, and cheerful companions. This restrictive construction

objectified the birds: canaries in such poems were closer to inanimate playthings than

they were living beings. Through these means, authors worked to perpetuate the myths of

benevolent domestication and ideal domesticity, using the canary as a non-sentient,

predictably-fixed symbol of the private sphere to refute real-life examples of home life

that stubbornly resisted prevailing norms.

After establishing this context, I turn to a poem that dared to disrupt this

conventional status quo: Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias,” a little-known canary elegy

written by the canonical author in the last years of his life. Although it too appeared in a

periodical—the December 1882 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine—this poem was an

exception to the unspoken rules that seemed to govern other similarly-conceptualized

canary poems. Whereas most canary poets depict the birds as non-sentient, Arnold

bravely acknowledges and accepts the consequences of his pet’s intellectual and

emotional capacity. “Poor Matthias” is, quite simply, a stunningly self-conscious

reassessment of the cultural and literary conventions surrounding the canary. Fueled in

part by the scientific and philosophical advances made by theories of evolution, Arnold

articulates a perspective that values his pet canary’s cultural and biological importance.

In doing so, he establishes a new politics of interpretation of the animal based on ethical

concerns. In his poem, the canary is sentient: a thinking, suffering creature whose

55
existence is made all the more painful by his owners’ careless ignorance. Arnold’s ability

to see the bird as an organic being, rather than as a parlor knickknack or a piece of art,

demolishes idealized conceptions of domestication and domesticity. Instead, through

Arnold’s reading, humans, rather than animals, are revealed to be the unfeeling brutes,

and violence is revealed to be an integral part of the process of domesticating.

I close this chapter by considering how Arnold’s revolutionary perspective in

“Poor Matthias” might provide a blueprint for modern literary interpretive practices. The

poet’s call for a more ethical and less selfish valuation of animals highlights the

importance of unselfish, or disinterested, interrogation of the literary subject. In many

ways, Arnold, despite being known as a prominent humanist, models a practice of

posthumanism in his elegy to a canary that alters how we might understand animals and

their representations. By forcing the reader to attend to Matthias’s life and graphic death,

Arnold frustrates our attempt to read animal representation as only metaphoric—a mere

gloss for the human experience. Instead, we must grapple with the often uncomfortable

realities of the mutually-constitutive nature the human/nonhuman relationship.

I. Romantic Poetry: The Making of an Icon

The Victorian elegiac tradition of denying canary agency has its roots in the late

eighteenth century, when the Romantics were setting precedents of avian symbolism and

objectification in their own poetry. Many of the most canonical and celebrated poems

from writers such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats used birds as metaphors. Inevitably,

these representations refused to acknowledge the birds’ sentience: instead, the featured

bird was a tool for the author’s purposes. In Romanticism and Animal Rights (2003),

56
David Perkins explains that the generic bird, which he describes as an “object” in the

context of these poems, “offers itself to the poet as a nexus of expressive possibilities and

limitations, and a poet chooses his image for the sake of what can be said with it. Of all

animals a wild bird especially could represent nature as poets dearly wished nature to

be—inviolable—and this is one reason why birds were the central image in so many

poems” (Perkins 141). The poetic process of objectifying a wild bird such as a cuckoo,

skylark, or nightingale was a process of domestication: the animal was “captured” within

the limitations of specific linguistic choices and then manipulated in a way most useful

for its human captors.30

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) stands out as one of the worst offenders

and most brilliant renditions of such a practice, and its denial of the nightingale’s

subjectivity and individuality set the tone for future attempts at such symbolic

(mis)representation.31 Poets in the Romantic period and beyond frequently alluded to and

attempted to mimic Keats’s famous ode, expressing admiration for the poet’s soaring

imagery. The nightingale Keats describes is distant, mythical, and inspirational: he

addresses his stanzas to the unseen creature directly, but he is primarily concerned with

using the figure of the bird to imaginatively escape from mortality through art. The bird’s

song transports Keats into a kind of poetic ecstasy where, in a drug-like state induced by

30
Darwin describes this humanist mode of making animal meaning in The Origin of Species, where he
asserts that man “adapts animals and plants for his own benefit or pleasure” (162). He also identifies such
practices as decidedly inferior to those of natural selection, and in doing so draws the link between
biological and artistic domestication even closer: “Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power
incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of
Nature are to those of Art” (108).
31
Despite its renown and superior skill, Keats’s ode was not exceptional in its approach to birds. According
to Perkins, the poem “drew on common assumptions of Romantic intellectuals about animal subjectivity,
that . . . animals experience no self-division, are wholly present in each moment, do not live in time, have
no awareness of their own mortality, and are happy” (Perkins 143).
57
“being too happy in thine happiness” (Keats 6), he can more fully connect to art. Keats

envies the nightingale’s supposed blissful ignorance concerning “The weariness, the

fever, and the fret” (23) of the mortal human’s life, and wishes that he—like the bird—

could “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” (21). His very act of envy domesticates:

he denies the bird any experience of awareness, pain, mortality, or individuality. Like art,

the nightingale exists only as a disembodied happiness that has been eternally constant—

eternally fixed in place. The poet rapturously sings, “Thou wast not born for death,

immortal Bird!” (61), and in his adoration erases the bird’s subjectivity. Although Keats

admires the nightingale, esteem does not equate to acknowledging agency: as Perkins

explains, “Thus exalted, an animal cannot be viewed with fellow feeling, much less with

compassion . . . The animal is just a metaphor, with little character or life of its own that

the poet values” (Perkins 147). Any admiration Keats has is not the disinterested

appreciation of a natural and organic creature: it is self-centered admiration for a

domesticated and inorganic poetic creation.

Keats makes a direct link between a bird’s lack of subjectivity and its

embodiment as a static, visually-consumable signifier. Similarly, later nineteenth-century

canary poems described the birds as objects placed in the domestic sphere in order to

bring aesthetic and auditory appeal to that environment. The step from bird-as-art to bird-

as-artificial was easily made, especially for Victorians who could implicitly rely on

earlier poetic versions of avian non-sentience. In some ways, Victorian poetic depictions

of canaries were dramatically different than the birds of Keats and the Romantics.

Whereas birds featured in Romantic poetry were typified by their ethereality both

physically and conceptually, canaries were almost always described as solid objects.

58
While Keats’s nightingale was a “light-winged Dryad of the trees,/ In some melodious

plot/ Of beechen green” (Keats 7-9), the canaries were birds of a much more mundane

and domestic existence, thoroughly known and familiar.32 But at a fundamental level,

Keats and the Victorian periodical poets were approaching and producing their birds in

the same ways: as artificial, non-sentient symbols for human-motivated concerns. Even

though Keats’s nightingale was ethereal, it was still limited to a fixed meaning, made

artificial in order to represent the poet’s ideal art. The canary was much more quotidian,

certainly, but it too was made artificial in order to fulfill poets’ ideas of domesticity.

II. Periodical Poetry and the Inorganic Canary

The publishing context of the nineteenth-century periodical contributed

significantly to Victorian poets’ continuation of the Romantic era’s avian symbolism.

Victorian canary poems were mediated almost entirely through the pages of literary

periodicals. The standards of talent for poems accepted into such venues varied widely,

based primarily on the reputation of the periodical in which they appeared. Publications

that featured canary poetry were often geared toward a literate, middle-class (or aspiring

middle-class) reader, and they billed themselves as generalist literary magazines. Their

emphasis on miscellany, accessibility, and reader amusement distinguished them from

those publications interested in the promotion of so-called “serious” literature. These

popular periodicals—Chambers’s Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, and The London

Reader, among others—had huge audiences and played a dramatic role in shaping social

identities and cultural beliefs of the emerging middle class.

32
The Victorian poetic turn to avian physicality might have opened up space for radical thinkers such as
Matthew Arnold to question whether they might hold biological resonance.
59
 Many recent studies of the nineteenth-century periodical press approach this

notion of influence as a given. Early studies of periodicals, such as Richard D. Altick’s

seminal work The English Common Reader (1957)—still heavily referenced today—laid

the groundwork for ascertaining the role of such reading material for the emerging

middle class. Altick’s work historicizes the mutually-constitutive relationships between

periodicals and “the common reader,” defined as “the numerous portion of the English

people who became day-by-day readers for the first time in this period . . . a member of

the working class, or . . . the ever-expanding bourgeoisie” (Altick 7). He claims that the

periodical’s most notable feature was its ability to democratize society’s access to the

printed word, regardless of whether it was sought out for improvement or entertainment.

Much of Altick’s description of the cultural effects of periodicals focus on broad and

irresolvable tensions of influence: the tensions between reading for “diversion and

instruction,” and between social pessimism and hope—pessimism toward the seeming

inevitably of readers to seek out “bad” reading materials (i.e. sensational, trivial, and/or

“vacuous” texts) and the hope that periodicals could help improve the tastes, manners,

morality, and intellects of their Victorian readers.33 Specific studies of certain periodicals

and/or more narrowly defined audiences are plentiful, and those studies make more

nuanced claims for the kinds of influence produced by the texts. But the common thread

uniting these studies must necessarily be more generalized: that the contents of

periodicals had the power to dramatically shape and inform popular opinion. Thus, noted

periodical scholars such as J. Don Vann and Rosemary VanArsdel broadly proclaim that

the “ubiquitous nature” and “pervasiveness” of nineteenth-century periodicals put

33
See especially pp. 368-76.
60
audiences in touch with a variety of sources and endless information and opinions, and

thus “informed, instructed, and amused virtually all of the people in the many segments

of Victorian life” (Vann and VanArsdel 3).

Strangely, however, periodical poetry is rarely included in these claims of cultural

influence: while critics point to the importance of news, opinion pieces, serialized and

sensational novels, illustrations, and even advertisements, they almost universally

overlook the poetry featured so regularly in the pages of these publications. In light of

this omission, scholars such as Linda K. Hughes have worked to revise understandings of

the purpose of periodical poetry, which were previously dismissed as “trite or sentimental

‘filler’ worth no one’s time” (Hughes 91). Hughes argues for an appreciation of these

verses as more substantial and meaningful components of the publications. The inclusion

of poetry in periodicals, she claims, “could enhance the cultural value and prestige of the

periodical itself” (94) and the appeal of “pious, sentimental poetry” (such as the canary

poems) “could help mediate and rationalize . . . creating in the midst of cheap print a

form of sacred space in which death, love, God, family, nature, and, in more up-market

titles, art, philosophy, and metaphysics could be contemplated” (100).

The canary poems of these periodicals participated in this meaning-making. The

birds helped reify ideals of domesticity through their own domestication into non-

sentience. An example of this purposeful objectification can be seen in “To My Canary in

His Cage” (1851), featured in Chambers’s Journal. The speaker seems to recognize

his/her duty as poet after reflecting on his/her canary’s endless happiness. The bird’s

song, s/he claims, can be boiled down to one specific sentiment: “Howsoe’er thy lot’s

assigned, / Bear it with a cheerful mind” (41-42). The claim is reductive, to say the least:

61
couched in such glowing praise for the canary, the bird is violently rendered invariable. It

can only be cheerful (even if, the poet implies, it is captive), unable to be interpreted in

any other way. Domestication of the canary happened in much the same way: humans

determined that the canary had a certain profile to fit—that of the excellent singer with

specific physical colors and dimensions34—and then forcibly bred birds to fit this

profile.35 For both poets and breeders, canaries’ perceived non-sentience facilitated the

processes of domestication that could only be enacted on an inactive thing.

For many bird owners, the consistency of the canary was its chief attraction:

repeatedly, it was praised for its unfaltering cheerfulness, its ability to sing happily no

matter what was happening around it. In “The Green Canary” (The Mirror, April 1838)

the bird is “blithe and airy” (3), while the canary in “To My Canary in His Cage”

(Chambers’s Journal, November 1851) “sing[s] with merry heart” (21). The bird of “My

Canary” (The London Reader, May 1874) lives a “life so gay” (16), and in “The Canary”

(Chambers’s Journal, September 1867) we find that the good mood of the “charming

little household bird” (1) is contagious: “Where’er his pleasant voice is heard, / His

owner must feel cheery” (3-4). The canary’s deliberate crafting into a domestic pet that

was supposedly always happy made it the ultimate tool for both exemplifying and

spreading notions of domestic satisfaction. Victorians needed the canary in its capacity as

34
Within the canary family, there were several different variations of the bird, including the Belgian, the
Glasgow Don, the Manchester Coppy, the Cinnamon, the Lizard, and the London Fancy, among others.
Each of these variations called for painstakingly specific physical requirements.
35
Darwin expresses disdain for these unnatural practices of selection in The Origin of Species. He notes
that “One of the most remarkable features in our domesticated races is that we see in them adaptation, not
indeed to the animal’s or plant’s own good, but to man’s use or fancy” (103-04). In his sustained analysis
of man’s breeding practices of pigeons, Darwin claims that the birds, in their “immense amount of
variation,” have “a somewhat monstrous character” (103): according to his explanation, the extremes of
bird-breeding produce violently-rendered animals. Later in the text he reinforces this view in expressing his
agreement with an unnamed source who declares that “[bird] fanciers do not and will not admire a medium
standard, but like extremes” (124).
62
a parlor fixture; it represented the contentment one should find in the home, as well as

offered a sense of reassurance to those to whom it was represented. In this conservative

context of reassurance, many of these poems expressed a desire to extend the admirable

qualities of the canary to humans.36 The so-called virtues of the canary, and in particular

its relentless good nature, were traits that several poets speculated could work well for

humans, and more tellingly, perhaps, were qualities demanded by the ideal that humans

consistently failed to meet. At the beginning of the Victorian period, a poet identified

only as T. S. A. begs his/her audience to heed the canary’s message in “The Green

Canary”: “let us learn of him—may we / Be ever as sincere as he, / And love our homes

as dearly” (34-36). Thirty years later that sentiment held true, as shown in “The Canary”

(1867), where the poet declares,

like a true beloved friend,

His heart ne’er seems to vary—

Oh, many a one some lesson sweet

Might learn of my canary. (25-28)

These attempts at transferring canary qualities to their human owners, however,

ultimately reveal a pervasive anxiety about human satisfaction within the home.

They also reveal a lack of appreciation for the organic receptivity and perceptivity

of the bird as an animal. Implicit in the canary’s invariable happiness is the sense that the

canary was oblivious to its surroundings. Such a claim reinforces the bird’s

36
Surprisingly, this desire for humans to be like canaries does not frequently appear to be gendered. One
might assume that women would be the target of such attempts to re-inscribe the domestic ideal: certainly,
there was more than enough social anxiety about women's place in Victorian society. Additionally, the
caged bird/imprisoned woman comparison was a well-known trope (see Chapter 4). However, these poets
do not claim that any particular gender would benefit from being more satisfied, canary-like, with the
comforts and cheerfulness of the home.
63
characterization as fundamentally unnatural. A canary who could not perceive or react to

its environment was much closer to the artificial nightingale of Keats’s ode than it was to

the birds of Darwin’s Origin that must be always alert and adaptive in the “universal

struggle for life” (Darwin 108). Repeatedly, canary poets waxed rhapsodic over the bird’s

failure to be influenced by negativity. As shown above, the 1874 poem “My Canary”

constructs its avian subject as a consistently cheerful pet. However, the poet takes the

quality one step further and articulates the implications of what that designation might

mean. The canary’s cheer is a sign of ignorance that the poet goes on to wish for

him/herself. The author insists that the canary of his/her musing has neither a sense of

feeling nor futurity, evidenced by its willingness to “sing the livelong day” (3). Strangely,

however, the poet claims to be jealous of the bird’s carefree nature: “Would I could live

without forethought / And for to-morrow’s skies care naught” (17-18).37 Additionally, the

claim of canary obliviousness to physical, emotional, and natural threats in its vicinity

reveals that those threats were in fact present—even in the ostensibly inviolate domestic

sphere. When the poet expresses admiration for the canary’s failure to perceive danger,

s/he implicitly affirms that that danger does exist: the rueful wish to believe “all the

world a thing of beauty” (24) is heavy with the “dark and gloom” (4) that inevitably

haunts the human and escapes the canary.

According to these periodical poets, canaries’ obliviousness makes them

physically and emotionally insensitive to their human masters. Owners could exact

enjoyment from their canary/object but could not count on it to respond to their varying

This desire directly recalls Keats’s desperate yearning in “Ode to a Nightingale” to “quite forget/ . . . The
37

weariness, the fever, and the fret” (Keats 21, 23).

64
emotional cues. In “My Canary Who Cares for Nothing” (Bentley’s Miscellany, January

1859), Walter Thornbury38 bemoans his canary’s evident lack:

Little sister went to sleep

In the churchyard, dearest Clary!

Though we cry, he sings all day,

Carelessly—our pet canary. (9-12)

This charge of “carelessness” distinguishes the conception of the canary from other

conceptions of domestic companion animals popular at the time. The canary’s supposed

failure to perceive and respond sympathetically to its owners made it more objectified

than pets who were credited with affective abilities. Dogs, cats, and even horses were

frequently described as sensitive animals that were attuned to, and even assumed, the

melancholic or angry moods of their owners.39 Arnold himself, in “Poor Matthias,”

acknowledges that he and his fellow pet owners are more receptive to dogs and cats:

Other favourites, dwelling here,

Open lived to us, and near;

Well we knew when they were glad,

Plain we saw if they were sad . . .

Birds, companions more unknown,

Live beside us, but alone. (87-90, 95-96)

38
George Walter Thornbury (1828-1876) is one of the only canary poets who does not remain anonymous.
He was an English journalist who dabbled in a variety of literary genres, writing novels, verse, essays, and
more, and for many years wrote for the Athenaeum.
39
As Sherlock Holmes declares in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”
(1923), “A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a
happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing
moods may reflect the passing moods of others” (np).
65
The quality of sensitivity was highly valued by pet owners in large part because it

reinforced traditional notions of human superiority, validating the importance of the

human and the service of the animal.

When put in the context of more general conversations about the abilities of

animals, however, insensitive canaries fell squarely within accepted notions of the mental

inferiority of the nonhuman animal. The obliviousness of the canary translated into an

inability to conceptualize the future: a trait about animals that was widely accepted by

most Victorians. Contemporary scientific wisdom also subscribed to the idea that animals

were unable to process ideas in any other temporal realm besides the present. In Descent

of Man (1871), Darwin used forward-thinking-ness as one of the particular qualities

which separated (and elevated) humans from animals40: he claimed that morality was a

uniquely human trait, and his description of morality was based almost entirely on the

ability to reflect and project. He states,

Owing to this [moral] condition of mind, man cannot avoid looking

backwards and comparing the impressions of past events and actions. He

also continually looks forward. Hence after some temporary desire or

passion has mastered his social instincts, he will reflect and compare the

now weakened impression of such past impulses, with the ever present

social instinct, and he will then feel that sense of dissatisfaction which all

unsatisfied instincts leave behind them. Consequently he resolves to act

different for the future—and this is conscience. Any instinct which is

permanently stronger or more enduring than another, gives rise to a feeling

40
Victorians were much more comfortable accepting Darwin’s authority when he was demarcating
significant differences between humans and animals than when he was dismantling those differences.
66
 which we express by saying that it ought to be obeyed. A pointer dog, if

able to reflect on his past conduct, would say to himself, I ought (as indeed

we say of him) to have pointed at that hare and not have yielded to the

passing temptation of hunting it. (Darwin 392)

Darwin’s conclusions here imply that a pointer dog—or any other animal—is unable to

perceive a sense of self (and particularly a moral self) because it lacks the necessary

mental tools to situate its awareness within an ever-changing sense of temporality. His

parenthetical aside also illustrates the human impulse to identify, and even feel a sense of

superiority over, such a lack within the animal. Periodical poets’ depictions of canaries

do these same things as they fix—even, imprison—the birds in the present, removing the

opportunity for selfhood.41

Though particular qualities about the canary were firmly fixed in place, at times

the poetic response to such qualities was contradictory. This was especially true when the

matter of the bird’s imprisonment was addressed. The bird was often used as a stand-in

for other supposedly non- or less-sentient humans such as women and slaves. Though

periodical poems rarely used canaries to speak metonymically about the cruelties of

slavery—such representations were more often found in essays, short stories, and even

children’s literature—they regularly aligned the animal with suffering women. When the

women’s and animal rights movements intersected and began gaining widespread

attention mid-century, the canary was a logical nexus for authors to work through both

issues simultaneously. One of the most pressing concerns for members of both rights

41
Interestingly, the author of The Canary Book (1893), an extensive breeding and care-taking manual,
asserts that the canary’s “power of memory and imitation is perfectly wonderful” (Wallace 209). But rather
than claiming that the canary has the capacity to reflect on its present situation by referring to the past, this
kind of memory seems to be much closer to the automatic, even mechanical behavior of mimicry.
67
movements was the widespread practice of unnaturally and cruelly confining a living

being, be it a woman or a wild bird, who was desirous of freedom. In this reassessment of

domesticity, the home became a place of emotional and/or physical violence.42 Periodical

poets often “resolved” this issue, rather dubiously, in their assertion of the canary as an

essentially non-living being that was happier, in its limited state, in the comfort of the

home.43 In other words, their version of domestication attempted to elude claims of

injustice by vehemently denying its victims’ ability to suffer or make choices. Agency

was replaced with artificiality. Repeatedly, canary poets emphasize how happy and

satisfied canaries are despite their imprisonment:44 in “To My Canary in His Cage”

(1851), the poet marvels, “Yet my birdie, you’re content / In your tiny cage” (15-16), and

in the description of “The Green Canary” (1838) the poet insists, “So tame was he—so

much at home” (10). Even the gilded cages the birds so often inhabited were reimagined

as snug, comfortable homes that helpfully allowed canaries to focus on their favorite

pastimes of singing and pleasing their owners. A bird that was not credited with the

capacity to feel would certainly not suffer within such small living quarters: what more

could a non-sentient object need? Thus the lack of sentience associated with these birds

42
Perkins, citing Paula Feldman, articulates the connection between bird poetry and women’s rights: “in
such poems women explored their ‘conflicting desires for freedom and safety,’ debated ‘the virtues of
domesticity measure against the excitement of liberty and its attendant danger’” (Perkins 136).
43
Curiously, Perkins notes that in most Romantic poems about caged birds, the birds were “released to
liberty” (137). He links this trend specifically to the animal rights movement at the turn of the century and
the belief of many Romantic poets that captivity was cruel. However, the Romantics were also writing at a
time when the abolition of slavery in England was of crucial import (while the Victorians were more
removed from the immediacy of slavery), and the almost-always symbolic nature of birds in poetry seems
to imply that rather than actually advocating the release of birds, these poems were in fact advancing
concerns with human issues of freedom.
44
Canary guide books such as Robert L. Wallace’s The Canary Book (1893) reaffirmed the widespread
acceptance of this issue: the author claims that “there is no bird . . . more gay, happy, and cheerful in
confinement” (Wallace 209).
68
provided a way of rationalizing and maintaining the Victorian narrative of the domestic

ideal.

Dissatisfaction with the canary’s living arrangements, when it appeared at all,

appeared in the form of the author’s reactions to such confinements. Such concern

conveniently maintained the fixed notions of the canary as a bird well-suited to

domesticity: in these poems, the canaries often surprise or dismay the authors by insisting

on their happiness within the cage. But the strategy allowed poets who may have felt

slightly guilty about their role in objectifying the canary to air their concerns, without

ever truly subverting social norms. Particularly in the poems written in the first half of the

nineteenth century, writers insisted on the proper place of canaries within the safety of

the home. One of the most dramatic examples of this occurs in “The Canary that

Foresook its Home,” which appeared in a January 1836 issue of The Saturday Magazine.

The poet, identified only as M., constructs an elaborate narrative about a canary who

thinks he would be happier in the wild. The canary escapes in order to pursue “sport and

play” (16) only available outside of the home, but quickly regrets the move. The poet

rather mercilessly explains that canary is simply not suited to the outdoors and can only

find true happiness in its cage:

. . . evening came, and cold, and pain,

With hunger, in the dismal rain:

Then, lone and motionless he pined,

In want of all he’d left behind:

And when the midnight dews came on,

The little sufferer’s life was gone! (23-28)

69
The outside world is not welcoming and invigorating, as it might be for a “real” bird;

instead, it is cruel, even painful for a bird that is supposedly more suited to the regulated

interiors of the home. Speaking to the canary’s corpse, the poet chastises it for its

rashness:

Why burst the gentle, silken ties,

That bound thee to thy owner’s hand?

. . . And vain this wide expanse of sky,

For cold hath chained thee to the bough. (37-38, 47-48)

Of course, the bird’s death is semi-ironic, if it is already constructed in these poems as an

inorganic object. However, it also emphasizes how far removed that domesticated bird is

from wild birds: it is so altered as to be physically unable to survive without the

protections and provisions of a human-made environment. Additionally, the bird

demonstrates no ability to think in terms of the past—as doing so would have reminded it

of its happiness in the home—or the future—as doing so would have made it predict and

realize that it would be miserable without the home’s safety and warmth. The author

makes clear that this narrative is also meant as a warning to humans who, “Unmoved by

home-felt sympathies, / Unchecked by duty’s sterner ties, / Would rashly fly the

sheltering roof” (3-5). In this way, the poem rather ruthlessly reinforces the certainty that

the domestic sphere is a protective and nurturing space for canaries and humans alike.

Later poetry reflects more clearly the ways in which canary non-sentience worked

to support a notion of ideal domesticity under siege. In poems such as “To My Canary”

(Chambers’s Journal, April 1880), the poet F. F. expresses a desire to free his or her

canary, to return it to the freedom of its natural environment that it ostensibly misses.

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However, reluctantly, the poet comes to the conclusion that the bird can no longer

become wild again: its domestication has rendered it suitable (and happiest) only within

the home. Perkins notes this trend in the more literal bird poetry of writers such as

William Cowper, to whom “the world seemed so perilous that there could be no question

of releasing loved creatures into it . . . If a bird were exotic, injured, or otherwise unable

to survive in English countryside, to keep it in a cage might be the best one could do,

hence poetically acceptable as an act of pity” (Perkins 137). In “To My Canary,” this

process of justification begins with the poet’s sympathetic lamentation of the plight of the

captive bird:

The sun on thee, through cloudless sky,

Did never smile;

Dull bricks and mortar have been thy

Canary Isle. (17-20)

Initially, it seems, the bird’s voyage of domestication is presented as a negative one, with

the wilds of the canary’s place of origin in sharp contrast to the stifling limitations of the

home. This depiction is put in place, however, as a strategy for actually reaffirming both

the denial of sentience and the process of domestication. Responding to a perceived

injustice, the poet aligns him/herself as a friend to the bird, insisting that “if for freedom

thou dost sigh, / My captive pet, / I’ll loose thy wings, and help thee fly” (21-23).

Conveniently, it appears that the canary does not in fact want freedom: the speaker

watches sadly as the bird refuses to fly from the opened cage door, asking, “Why

hesitant? why so dismayed / To know you’re out?” (43-44). Instantly the answer is

71
discerned, as the speaker realizes that it is the absolute goodness of the home that keeps

the bird from leaving:

Thy years of caged ease have brought

Such days of dreams,

That liberty with labour fraught

Worse bondage seems. (49-52)

This reading erases any notion of domestication as a violent and dominating process, and

instead deflects that violence to the dangers of the outdoors. It also implicitly

acknowledges that the wild, or natural, features of the bird have been dulled at the same

time. By the end of the poem, the speaker has maintained his/her desire to do what is best

for the bird, and yet still manages to retain the canary as a pet without incurring blame.

S/he coos,

Then come, my sweet, and safe from harm

Securely rest,

And nestling in my bosom, calm

Thy fluttering breast.

And to this cage, with memories fond,

Thy voice recall,

And love shall knit its tenderest bond

In willing thrall. (57-64)

Whereas initially the speaker sang a rousing cry of “Emancipate!” (29), now s/he

rebrands him/herself as a conscientious pet-owner. But the impulse to calm the canary’s

“fluttering breast,” while ostensibly meant to help, reveals the master’s more devious

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domesticating instinct to render the bird inorganic. By stifling the canary with both “Dull

bricks and mortar” (19) and the smothering breast of the human master, the bird is

redefined and reduced from a wild and living bird to a thoroughly domesticated and non-

living canary. The poet opens the poem by describing the bird as “Half Nature and half

Art” (1),45 but spends the majority of the time convincing him/herself, as well as the

reader, that the canary is, in fact, entirely artificial.

Initially, poems like “To My Canary” might seem to contradict the accepted

cultural construction of the canary. To desire freedom for a caged bird should be a

revolutionary concept fueled by a sincere investment in the feelings and desires of a

living creature. But in reality, the poems remain deeply embroiled in the process of

stripping the canary of its agency and sentience. The poetic bird rejects the world outside

of its home, and the poet never really believes s/he is dealing with an individual with

desires of its own. The poet who lovingly accepts the bird’s wishes to remain in captivity

absolves him or herself of all blame—the effort was made, but the bird was simply not

suited to and not happy in the wild outdoors—but s/he cannot truly be removed from the

widespread, willful, and unethical practice of symbolic domestication.

III. Matthew Arnold and a “history unexpress’d”

Matthew Arnold distinguishes himself as one of the few—if not only—canonical

poets of the Victorian era to publish a poem about a canary.46 As such, he and “Poor

45
In clear indebtedness to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
46
Other well-known poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, George Meredith, Christina
Rossetti, and Thomas Hardy never published poems about canaries and, to the best of our critical
knowledge, never produced unpublished canary poems either. Elizabeth Barrett Browning did write such a
poem—“Epistle to a Canary” (1837?)—but it was not discovered until after her death, nor was it published
until later in the twentieth century. In an interesting explication of the cultural work a canary poem might
73
Matthias” prove to be a fascinating comparison to the popular periodical canary poets.

Certainly, the elegant structure and naturally-flowing rhyme scheme of “Poor Matthias”

provide a welcome respite from the often-forced and trite lyrics of the anonymous poems.

But the true distinguishing value of the poem is its radical content: conventional canary

depictions are abandoned for a recovery of the bird’s sentience. The narrative of the

poem begins when Arnold’s daughter finds her canary lying dead in his cage, and she

requests that her father commemorate the pet’s life in a poem. Arnold reminisces about

the canary’s interactions with various human and animal family members, but then finds

himself reluctantly admitting that he cannot write the elegy as well as he might want, for

his reflections make him realize that the bird had an entire “history unexpress’d” (Arnold,

“Poor Matthias” 102): for eight years he existed unknown and unappreciated by his

human owners. Such a realization sends Arnold’s thoughts spiraling as he confronts the

implications of that human insensitivity and animal sentience. After attempting to

articulate how humans have been egregiously selfish and how birds have long been

do, the nineteenth-century editor of this particular Barrett Browning poem, Edmund Gosse, contextualizes
“Epistle to a Canary” by claiming that “It is valuable from the information it gives about the household at
Gloucester Place, the birds, the dog Myrtle, William the butler, the shrouded and limited existence of the
poet, with its windows wide open to the horizons of the imagination” (Browning 3-4). For Gosse, and
presumably for many of the poem's readers, the canary provides a scintillating look into the private,
domestic lives of its owner/author . . . a look that is even more thrilling, perhaps, as well as slightly
macabre, because it comes after the author's death. Gosse’s perspective also hints at an understanding of the
mutually-constitutive nature of human and nonhuman literary figures.
Additionally, though Christina Rossetti published no canary poetry per se, there is a provocative
link between the poet and the birds. According to biographer Lona Mosk Packer, as a child Rossetti once
experienced a dream about canaries. In her 1963 biography of the author, Packer claims that the retelling of
the dream was passed down from Gabriel Rossetti to a friend, William Sharp. Rossetti “was walking in
Regent's Park at dawn, and, just as the sun rose, suddenly she saw a wave of yellow light sweep out from
the trees. She realized that ‘the wave’ was a multitude of canaries. They rose in their thousands, circled in a
gleaming mass, then scattered in every direction. In her dream she knew that all the canaries of London had
met in Regent's Park at dawn and were now returning to their cages” (Packer 15). Packer's analysis of this
dream draws a rather enigmatic connection between canaries and poetry: she claims that the dream “hints
in the canary symbolism at an awareness of her poetic vocation” (15). Though the meaning is unclear, this
might be an assertion that poetic talent is in part based in an ability to think (about birds) symbolically—an
assertion that seems to fit nicely with the earlier discussion of Romantic poetic traditions.
74
meaningful in human history, Arnold concludes by constructing Matthias’s story as best

he can: a final attempt to restore the dignity of life to his departed pet.

Despite its radical departure from typical canary depictions, however, the

contemporary impact of Arnold’s poem was not much different than the other periodical

canary poetry: that is, it was relatively unremarkable. The 1882 publication of “Poor

Matthias” in Macmillan’s Magazine represented a brief and publicly-welcome return to

poetry for Arnold, who had for some time been focused primarily on essays and

criticism.47 Macmillan’s was a well-respected monthly periodical that billed itself as a

publication dedicated to serious literature and commentary, and many well-known British

poems and novels were featured in its pages. According to George J. Worth, the

Macmillan brothers prided themselves on creating a literary magazine that preferenced

quality over quantity, and that ethos was diligently maintained throughout the

periodical’s forty-eight-year run (Worth 3). Macmillan’s also emphasized author

accountability rather than the more popular trend of authorial anonymity appearing in

most periodicals of the time, and it insisted on earnestness from its contributors; as stated

by Thomas Hughes, one of the magazine’s founders, “no flippancy or abuse allowed” (9).

Alexander Macmillan closely supervised the content of the magazine for many years

under the expressed desire that “everything we put into our Magazine be manly and

elevating” (as quoted in Worth 28). When compared to the multitude of canary poems

appearing anonymously in less prestigious or less literarily-rigorous periodicals such as

47
About twenty years before he wrote “Poor Matthias,” Arnold had announced his departure from poetry,
as well as his rationale for why poetry was no longer a suitable medium, in “The Function of Criticism at
the Present Time” (1865). This, too, was first published in a periodical: Arnold presented it as a speech as it
was concurrently featured in The National Review.
75
Chambers’s Journal and Bentley’s Miscellany, the context for “Poor Matthias” was

strikingly different.

Like those periodicals, however, Macmillan’s Magazine was also directed toward

a middle-class audience with interests firmly rooted in domestic concerns. Worth

explains that Macmillan’s became one of the first periodicals to cater to the

“middlebrow” audience who was interested in neither the “august and relatively

expensive quarterlies or by the modest penny weeklies addressed to a working-class

audience” (Worth 2). This was done through an editorial philosophy of respectability that

included careful selection of “first-class literary matter” (3) and adherence to certain

standards of topic decorum and decency (to the extent that Algernon Charles Swinburne

scornfully described Alexander Macmillan as “chaste”) (37). The combination of a

serious writer such as Arnold and a familiar and much-beloved topic made “Poor

Matthias” a mildly well-received contribution to the magazine.

But Arnold’s poetic return was never characterized as a reemergence of the power

of his earlier work. A review in The Academy—a monthly periodical devoted to

reviewing recent developments in various fields—published in the same month as “Poor

Matthias” testified that the poem “lets us into the secret of [Arnold’s] domestic pets even

further . . . It is simple with dignity, and intimate without affectation” (“Magazines and

Reviews” 416). This review reveals how the poem captivated in two ways: in part,

readers’ enjoyment came from an articulation of the special bonds between humans and

their animal companions, and in part, the thrill of reading came from the ability to delve

76
into the private domestic life of such a famous person.48 Ironically, the claims that Arnold

made about the dangers of pet-keeping and the realities of domesticity were not generally

recognized by even this intellectually-savvy audience of Macmillan’s: readers were more

willing to (mis)read the poem as another iteration of the more typical canary or pet poetry

at the time.

However, typical is exactly what this poem is not, in large part because of

Arnold’s substantial experience as both a professional critic and poet. Though there exists

a long-standing critical tradition of dismissing “Poor Matthias” as the sentimental

musings of an old man, Arnold’s ability to discern and deliver his powerful message of

canary sentience in “Poor Matthias” is clearly indebted to the writer’s long immersion in

practices of poetics and literary criticism. Recognizing these influences is crucial to re-

valuing the poem: “Poor Matthias” is not just a simple, sweet, facile verse—it is a

serious, intellectual contemplation of what it might mean to understand a pet canary from

a disinterested position.

Despite a difference in genres, in the canary elegy Arnold remains attentive to the

critical approaches that he outlines in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

(1865).49 As such, he works hard to maintain a disinterested position, to show the thing

48
This dual pleasure is exactly what Elizabeth Barrett Browning's editor was referring to in his posthumous
review of her unpublished “Epistle to a Canary,” described in n. 46 above.
49
This critical influence is also notable for the concerns that Arnold raises about Romantic poetry. In “The
Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” he explains that Romantic poetry suffered from a lack of
awareness about the truth of life, and thus their work:
every one can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before
dealing with them in poetry; and life and the world being in modern times very complex
things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort
behind it; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-lived affair . . . It has
long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first
quarter of this century, had about it in fact something premature; and that from this cause
its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which
accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the
77
(in this poem, the bird) as it really is.50 The writer explains that the “bane of criticism . . .

is that practical considerations cling to it and stifle it. It subserves interests not its own.

Our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve”

(Arnold, “Function”). In “Poor Matthias,” these practical considerations prevent the

canary’s suffering from being noticed: human needs and desires preoccupy the masters

and motivate them to perceive Matthias as an inanimate decoration. The solution that

Arnold articulates can be found in the concept of real criticism, which, conversely,

“obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the

world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value

knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other

considerations whatever” (Arnold, “Function”). True criticism must strive to interpret

based on an allegiance to the pursuit of modern and moral knowledge, and it must avoid

biases that serve, implicitly or explicitly, the desires of humans. Arnold’s own work as a

poet and an unusually aware human motivates this kind of critical perspective to be

adapted as a response to the inadequate perceptual—or critical—abilities of his peers.

productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having
proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to work with. In
other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy,
plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter,
Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in
completeness and variety. (Arnold, “Function”)
This prematurity has specific implications for the Romantics’ poetic non-sentient representations of birds,
especially in light of Arnold’s challenge to such representations. Where poets like Keats objectified their
birds, discerning poets like Arnold—who had the benefit of knowing much more about animality thanks to
Darwinian theories and the like—could reinvigorate their representations and restore life to previously
lifeless birds. Darwin's influential texts provided for Arnold the knowledge about animals and their
potential for suffering that the Romantics simply did not have. Keats's assessment of the nightingale as a
timeless symbol was “premature”; Arnold's representation of a suffering canary, informed by the latest
scientific discoveries about animality, reveals his “great critical effort.”
50
Even the phrase “the thing as it really is” perfectly suits Arnold’s work in “Poor Matthias”: the bird, most
often understood as a thing, must be known for what it really is: a living, organic being.
78
 This is not to say, of course, that Arnold’s impressive ability to accept Matthias’s

subjectivity is without flaws: at times, he turns from the bird’s suffering and becomes

preoccupied with personal and/or human concerns. But within the poem itself, he quickly

and honestly acknowledges those missteps, and his willingness to redirect himself when

he slips into selfishness draws attention to his commitment to an ethical representation of

an animal. His reminiscence about dogs Max and Kaiser cause Arnold to meditate on his

own impending death: turning from animals, the poet writes, “as age comes on, I know, /

Poet’s fire gets faint and low” (Arnold, “Poor Matthias” 77-78). But as if he was then

startled back into awareness, he quickly turns himself back to the bird, interrupting his

musings with yet another “Poor Matthias!” interjection. In part, the process of ethically

approaching an animal extends to a more ethical self-assessment for the poet: in

recuperating the bird’s sentience, Arnold must become more aware of his motivations

and their implications on others: i.e., his inherently humanist approach. This is the only

way to come close to disinterestedness. At its core, creating a new politics of

interpretation is a practice in engaging in an ethical participation of the world.

As much as Arnold appears to have been influenced by his critical perspective in

“Poor Matthias,” however, he is also clearly indebted to the intellectual interrogations of

his earlier poetic career. Many of Arnold’s “serious” poems grappled with the doubleness

of human existence, and in “Poor Matthias” it appears that he takes this idea to the next

step by considering the double lives of canaries (or more generally, birds). In particular,

the influence of “The Buried Life” (1852), published thirty years before “Poor Matthias”

and known as one of the author’s most striking and enduring poems, is palpable

throughout the canary elegy. The bleak monologue laments the deceptive facades that

79
keep individuals from ever fully knowing each other. Arnold clearly sees the ways in

which humans are shaped by cultural forces, and he is distressed over how these forces

deny the existence of some essential inner truth. In fact, the “buried life” that describes

“our true, original course” (Arnold, “The Buried Life” 50), is specifically set up in

opposition to cultural forces that bind and distort our appearance; he refers to these forces

as “disguises, alien to the rest / Of men, and alien to themselves” (21-22). In contrast, our

inner truth is mysterious and nameless, beating “so wild, so deep in us” (53). There is

something biological about this “buried life” that resonates with concurrent social and

scientific debates about the human-animal relationship and foreshadows Arnold’s more

explicit foray into this topic in “Poor Matthias.”51

Birds! we but repeat on you

What amongst ourselves we do

. . . Human suffering at our side,

Ah, like yours is undescried!

Human longings, human fears,

Miss our eyes and miss our ears. (157-58, 163-66)

This moment in “Poor Matthias” is often cited as the metonymic key to the poem: critics

assume that Arnold must have been using canaries to speak about humans. In this

context, though, it can be read as a direct link to his earlier claims in “The Buried Life.”

Arnold points to a similarity between humans and birds—that often their true nature is

51
At another level of connection between the two poems, this description of the true self in “The Buried
Life” resonates with bird imagery: when “A man becomes aware of his life’s flow” (TBL 88), he “sees/
The meadows where it glides” (89-90) and forever chases “That flying and elusive shadow” (93).
80
overlooked—that elevates52 rather than displaces the status of the bird. Canaries, like

other (human) animals, are wronged when they are misperceived. The tension between

exteriority and interiority that has such tragic consequences of interpersonal disconnect in

“The Buried Life” is the same tension that appears in “Poor Matthias.” The difference, of

course, is that Arnold extends his mourning of this tension beyond the human experience,

as here, like the humans in “The Buried Life,” he is able to approach the canary as a

being shaped by both cultural and biological forces. Since he is not taken in by the claim

of ideal domesticity, his analysis of Matthias quickly moves beyond the cultural

constructs imposed on the animal. Instead of remaining focused on the ways in which the

canary serves human needs, Arnold cuts through to the articulation of the canary’s

“buried life.” In “Poor Matthias,” this is described as “a history unexpressed” (102)—

Arnold even uses the same phrasing in “The Buried Life,” where “The nameless feelings

that course through our breast, / . . . course on for ever unexpress’d” (62-63). Whereas in

“The Buried Life” Arnold imagines how two lovers might discover truth through an

honest contemplation of each other, when “Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear, /

When our world-deafen’d ear / Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d” (81-83), in

“Poor Matthias” the truth is discerned through genuine reciprocal communication

between human and animal. Or, more tragically, the lack of such reciprocation—

described as the same combination of visual and auditory connection, when suffering is

found to “Miss our eyes and miss our ears” (“Arnold, “Poor Matthias” 166)—leads not

52
Importantly, this elevation is not similar to the kinds of reverential perception of birds in Romantic
poetry. Whereas in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” the bird is seen as spirit-like, in a higher and more pure
state than humans, in “Poor Matthias” the canary is elevated from an object to a sentient creature on par
with its fellow human animals.
81
only to a continuation of that “history unexpress’d,” but an unintentional cruelty directed

toward the birds who cannot be understood.

With the weight of his entire literary career behind him, then, in “Poor Matthias”

Arnold is nothing less than masterful. Arnold’s perception of canary sentience begins

when Matthias’s suffering disrupts the poet’s initial attempts at characterization. As the

poem opens, Arnold mourns the loss of his daughter’s recently deceased canary Matthias

with gentle playfulness, and considers the bird’s meaning as it is determined by its

usefulness to its human masters: for example, its ability to sing beautifully and delight his

daughter. The canary’s purpose was one of service—according to the poet, Matthias was

purchased in order to “pleas[e] our eyes and ears” (203) and was noted only for his happy

song and “golden livery” (118). The expectation was that Matthias would be

unwaveringly beautiful and cheerful, and, existing in this limited way, would bring

beauty and cheer to the people and home surrounding him. Of course, these

characteristics deny the bird any kind of agency because they shut down the possibility of

variation that inevitably and constantly occurs in a living being: conversely, the bird

seems inanimate, objectified. Matthias is also more easily dismissed in this limited state

of being. Arnold refers to the pet as a “foolish bird” (33), and he blames this original

conception for causing Matthias’s owners—including himself—to be so oblivious to the

canary’s interiority.

However, once Arnold notices Matthias’s suffering, the poem quickly evolves

into a much more nuanced and serious reflection on the possibilities of the canary that

exist beyond human apprehension or appreciation. Arnold acknowledges that something

about the bird’s sudden death “haunts [his] conscience” (85), and this intellectual pause

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marks a change in the tenor of the poem. Arnold loses his light tone; his verses become

more introspective, weighing more heavily on the ears and the mind. It is Matthias’s

painful illness, which Arnold sees in hindsight as an excruciating moment of

unacknowledged suffering, and his unexpected death that startle the poet into his new

consciousness: “Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse / Moves me, somehow, to remorse” (83-

84).53 Physical pain, it seems, disrupts traditional notions of animal representation. The

nightingale of Keats’s ode is a thing of unchanging beauty and an object of unparalleled

admiration precisely because it does not suffer or otherwise feel the effects of mortality.

But Matthias’s visible pain demands Arnold’s reassessment: a household decoration

cannot suffer, and so he must be something else—he must be alive.

Arnold is able to avoid the “prematurity” of Keats’s misguided avian

representation in large part through an acknowledgement of animal suffering that was

informed by some of the latest philosophical and scientific advancements of the century.

The claim of animal suffering would have been culturally available—though not widely

popular—in the discourse of Victorian animal rights activists.54 Many of these activists

advocated the point of animal suffering as a reason for better treatment, a claim

originating in the famous statements of Jeremy Bentham.55 Another even more

53
It might even be said that the death of the bird compels Arnold to end his poetic hiatus, to address in
poetic form the issues such unappreciated sentience creates.
54
Although Arnold was not officially involved in any capacity in the animal rights movement, he was an
ardent animal lover: his recent biographer Nicholas Murray claims that the poet “loved animals to a fault”
(300), and he also records that Arnold's niece, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, declared that he was “too fondly
devoted” to his dogs (271), making it difficult for her to “secure his attention from the dogs and cats who
took precedence over any human visitors (towards whom they were often hostile)” (323).
55
In a footnote to “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation” (1789, 1823), Jeremy Bentham
insists that humans must reframe the question they ask when considering whether or not to give animals
certain considerations or rights: “The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those
rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have
already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without
redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs, the
83
controversial source of the validation of animal suffering would have come from

Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871). There, Darwin went to great lengths to point out in

explicit detail the similarities between humans and animals, and many readers took

especial offense to the sections which described the emotional and intellectual proximity

of the two groups. Darwin insists that “The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel

pleasure and pain, happiness and misery” (Darwin 214): the simply-stated assertion belies

its enormous implications.56 Through this perspective, animals are granted mental as well

as physical perceptual abilities.

Arnold’s ability to incorporate these paradigm-shifting intellectual and physical

advances into his depiction of Matthias allows him to reframe conventional notions of

animal awareness. He does not avoid representing moments of disconcerting violence

throughout the poem in order to more vividly make his readers appreciate the canary’s

ordeal. The opening scene of the elegy, where the poet relates his daughter’s discovery of

Matthias’s dying body, depicts the gruesome result of Matthias’s secret suffering: “Found

him stiff, you say, though warm— / All convulsed his little form?” (Arnold “Poor

Matthias” 3-4). Several stanzas down, Arnold describes how the Arnold family missed

Matthias’s pain: Matthias silently suffers the “Ebb of life, and mortal pain” (124) until

finally he is “Fallen dying off thy perch!” (130). This is not the language of a light-

villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a
sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of
reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more
rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But
suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they
talk? but, Can they suffer?”
56
Later, he goes on to describe examples of canine love and devotion while under extreme physical duress
that clearly resonate in Arnold's depiction of the suffering-but-still-singing Matthias.
84
hearted and ironic poem; readers’ expectations for what a poem about a pet57 might look

like would not include such images. Indeed, throughout the poem, Arnold continually

attempts to evoke a sympathetic response to the bird’s legitimate feeling and suffering

from his readers: the refrain “Poor Matthias!” appears five times, insistently demanding

the reader subscribe to Arnold’s own attribution of pity. The poet’s willingness to subvert

the stubbornly insistent attempts to see household pets—and particularly canaries—as

trivial and cheerful does much to recuperate the canary’s position in the living world.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Arnold’s rejection of typical canary

conceptions is his acknowledgement of Matthias’s abilities of perception. Unfettered by

the need to reify animals’ objectification, Arnold depicts a canary—reclaims the

experience of the canary—as a being whose abilities of both feeling and thought (rather

than feeling alone) deserve to be respected. First, the poet speculates that Matthias

understands his owners’ perceptive failures. This is compounded by Arnold’s

identification of a larger, species-wide ability to see further than humans. Arnold urges

his reader to “Witness their unworldly song! / Proof they give, too, primal powers, / Of a

prescience more than ours” (136-38).

Implicit in both of these moments of insight is an even more revolutionary claim:

Arnold recognizes the birds’ ability to see the future.58 According to the poet, Matthias

knows that he will die, but also that his owners will fail to apprehend this and thus do

nothing to help him. Subject to the violence of a stifling enclosed environment and an

equally damaging reliance on humans who cannot sense his needs, Matthias sits on his

57
And even more specifically, readers would have had specific expectations for a poem about a canary—
see discussion of other periodical canary poetry above.
58
In this regard, Arnold goes even further than Darwin: as discussed above, the scientist—as well as most
Victorians—denied animals’ capacity for forward-thinking.
85
perch with a sense of resigned martyrdom and “mute regard” (121) while he slowly dies.

At a species-wide level, birds’ ability to chart the future has already been a feature

humans have relied on for generations, though perhaps never fully admitted. Birds,

Arnold explains,

Teach us, while they come and go,

When to sail, and when to sow . . .

Mark the seasons, map our year,

As they show and disappear. (139-40, 145-46)

Not only can birds assess situations based on an awareness of futurity, but their own

actions aid humans in our ability to understand future events.59 This, in juxtaposition to

humans’ innate inability to read clear signs of suffering or to predict when and how

suffering might occur, even when it is so clearly depicted in front of them. So not only do

pet owners fail to recognize a listless, dying canary, but they, along with all other short-

sighted—or perhaps selfishly near-sighted—humans, fail to recognize the suffering of

another human: “Brother man’s despairing sign / Who may trust us to divine?” (169-70).

Contemporary responses to “Poor Matthias” reflected the difficulties that many

readers had when confronted with Arnold’s re-imagined animal sentience. Typical

critical assessments relied on traditional notions of the canary—as a pet, the canary is

something domestic, trivial, enjoyable—to justify a dismissal of the more serious themes

in the poem. This attitude toward pet-themed poems was quite common in the period. For

59
Although not considered by Arnold in this poem, the canary in the coal mine, who alerts miners to
harmful levels of carbon monoxide before those levels become dangerous to humans, would be the epitome
of such a claim.
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example, an article entitled “The Pets of the Poets” in a June 1908 issue of The Spectator

readily identifies the Victorian reluctance to attribute seriousness to such poems:

Pet animals play a very pretty part in modern poetry. Before the time of

Cowper they played none at all. Indeed, so far as English literature is

concerned, the personality of animals seems to have been a recent

discovery. We read of noble steeds and faithful hounds much as we read

of silly sheep and patient oxen; but individuals are not drawn for us

though they be named. The type is alluded to, and that is all. (“The Pets of

the Poets” 59).60

This author clearly links the objectification of pets to a symbolic usage, and s/he also

relies on perhaps the most common terminology to reference poems about pets: “pretty.”

Such designation hearkens back to the poetry of Keats, where conceptualizing the

nightingale as art—something aesthetically pleasing—denies it sentience. It also denies

the meaningfulness of Arnold’s poem, dismissing Arnold’s ability as a poet as well as the

content.

This kind of disregard, which implicitly revealed a reluctance to face the serious

ethical issues “Poor Matthias” described, was typical of Arnold’s contemporary literary

critics. Writers would instead take refuge in the safety of claims of sentimentality or

symbolism: either Arnold was being a bit too sappy about his beloved pet or he was using

60
The author concludes the article by pointing to an emerging trend in poetry that seems to find its origins
in recent scientific advancements and acknowledge animal meaning in the same way that Arnold does in
“Poor Matthias”: “the new interest in animals, marks a new conception of life . . . we are not so absolutely
certain as we were that animals were created for nothing but our service or pleasure,—for us to hunt, and
eat, and drive, and milk, and shear” (“The Pets of the Poets” 59).
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the canary to refer to some other issue.61 Herbert W. Paul, who was one of the first

writers to offer a respected biography of Arnold after the poet’s death, gave perhaps the

most encapsulating response to the poem: after discussing the high point of Arnold’s

poetic career as taking place in the 1850s and 60s, he says, “Here one might well take

leave of Matthew Arnold’s poems, and pass to those literary essays which he wrote in the

full maturity of his knowledge and power . . . But I cannot omit all the mention of the

pretty, facile lyrics in which he paid tribute to his beloved dogs and birds. I refer, of

course, to ‘Geist’s Grave,’ to ‘Poor Matthias,’ and to ‘Kaiser Dead’” (Paul 160-61,

emphasis my own). As if in response to the popular appeal of such pet poetry, Paul

includes a perfunctory mention of the texts, but relegates them to an entirely different

category of poetic achievement: they are pretty where the more canonical of Arnold’s

poems are powerful.62

G. W. E. Russell, whose biography of Arnold appeared immediately after Paul’s,

took a different approach, choosing to see “Poor Matthias” as metonymic rather than

pathetic. Russell describes the elegy as telling “in parable the cruelty, not less real

because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy” (Russell, Matthew Arnold 19). He later

contextualizes this remark by explaining that this parable was part of an effort to convey

that “the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love” (19). These

statements redirect Arnold’s focus away from the animal, and instead suggest that that

61
Significantly, almost all of the few poems Arnold wrote in the last years of his life have as their topic one
of Arnold's household pets: in addition to “Poor Matthias,” there was also “Geist's Grave” (1881) and
“Kaiser Dead” (1887).
62
Paul's comments are somewhat inconsistent. Presumably, if we are to follow the biographer's chronology
of Arnold's authorial abilities, Arnold was actually writing his “pet” poetry while still in the “full maturity
of his knowledge and power.” And yet somehow the biographer tries to claim that those poems are even
less significant than his pre-criticism poetry.
88
canary was only a vehicle through which Arnold could express more important human

concerns.

The brilliance of “Poor Matthias,” however, is that Arnold specifically resists and

regrets that humanist impulse to make the canary’s suffering about himself. Instead,

Arnold devotes his efforts to thinking about the bird as an active participant in its

environment. The result is an unnerving breakdown of both traditional notions of human

superiority and conventional components of the domestic ideal. When Arnold grants

sentience to the canary, humans become the brutes, enforcing a cruel domestication that

makes the home an inherently violent space. The violence of Matthias’s death disrupts

the peaceful order of the domestic sphere in ways that Arnold describes as discomfiting

and guilt-producing.

In light of this disruption, the bird and his human companions switch places in the

poem. Where once the bird’s meaning was determined by its usefulness to humans, a

form of entertainment among others, Matthias now becomes an individualized thinking

and feeling being; and where once the narrator’s mildly amused approach to the canary’s

death was an indicator of human superiority and detachment, it becomes a marker of a

less sensitive and emotionally deficient (human) species. Arnold describes a scene in

which Matthias’s health is deteriorating, and he is slowly dying in front of humans who

fail to notice his suffering. Instead of being described as a foolish parlor ornament, the

bird becomes an individual, a creature full of awareness and emotion. He “[g]ravely”

watches his owners “with a mute regard” (Arnold, “Poor Matthias” 121), sadly resigned

to the fact that they cannot understand his illness. In the meantime, as Matthias takes on

more traditionally “human” characteristics, the humans who foolishly cannot perceive his

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capacity for mental and physical pain become less and less human(e). Arnold describes

how he and his family were “unable to divine / Our companion’s dying sign” (125-26),

and thus their “chatter vain” (123) and “Stupid salutations gay” (112) serve to create an

immense—and unnecessary—gulf between human and animal, a “severing sea / Set

betwixt ourselves and thee” (127-28). The death of the canary, initially a trivial

household event, becomes for Arnold a cause for regret and embarrassment—

embarrassment for his own actions, as well as the actions of his entire human race. If the

poet and his family had taken on responsibility for the bird, then they were sorely in the

wrong for remaining impervious to the bird’s needs:

What they want, we cannot guess,

Fail to track their deep distress—

Dull look on when death is nigh,

Note no change, and let them die. (105-08)

The behavior exhibited by Matthias was noble, while the behavior exhibited by

Matthias’s owners was inexcusable.

What becomes clear for Arnold are the ways in which the processes of

domestication have brought out the worst in humankind. Motivations for producing

certain living “products” are selfish, rather than invested in the good of the domesticated

being, and these decisions have the devastating effect of stripping away animal sentience

and potentially irreparably ruining a healthy relationship between humans and animals.

Morally and physically, humans seem to degenerate when they deny the inherent and

living meaningfulness of animals. Darwin, one of the most prominent voices in the

nineteenth century to weigh in on the issue of domestication, provides compelling

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scientific evidence of the moral selfishness that Arnold notes in “Poor Matthias.” In The

Origin of Species, he at various points identifies that the decisions that influence humans’

domestication of animals are entirely self-serving. He explains, “One of the most

remarkable features in our domesticated races is that we see in them adaptation, not

indeed to the animal’s or plant’s own good, but to man’s use or fancy” (Darwin 103-04);

and again, “Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for

action, and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature

are to those of Art” (108); and then again, “Man selects only for his own good; Nature

only for that of the being which she tends” (113). Though he uses these observations in

order to shed light on the natural processes of selection found in the wild, they do not fail

to impress disapprobation for such unnaturally selfish practices. He ruefully muses,

“How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently

how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole

geological periods” (113). The discourse of damaging human selfishness is something to

be regretted in both Darwin and “Poor Matthias,” and whereas Darwin provides no sense

of how such methods might be altered in Origin, Arnold seeks some kind of resolution at

the close of his elegy.

IV. Matthias’s Lesson

At the end of “Poor Matthias,” Arnold credits his dead canary with providing

humans an important message: “Poor Matthias! See, thy end / What a lesson doth it

lend!” (173-74). Though it is not explicitly articulated, this lesson, we assume, is the need

for humans to be more sensitive to the sensitivities of their pets and to realize that

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humans and birds are not, as previously assumed, “so remote in kind” (156).63 Or, as

Derrida might say, it is a need for a “new experience of this compassion [for animal

suffering]” (395). In “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2002),

Derrida claims that “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from

poetry” (377), and, as if Arnold is already aware of this, the Victorian writer mediates his

attempt at making right so grievous a wrong through the power of poetry: what he gives

to the canary is a moment of mattering as a living being in a genre that has long denied

such a thing. In other words, Arnold attempts to write a wrong: he identifies writing as an

appropriate space for carrying out a newly imagined practice of ethicality. “Poor

Matthias” begins with Arnold’s daughter’s innocent plea for this very kind of linguistic

justice, as she insists that Arnold

. . . rehearse,

Tribute to thee, a verse,

Meed for daily song of yore

Silent now for evermore. (Arnold, “Poor Matthias” 17-20)

The poet answers this demand with his own question: “Poor Matthias! Wouldst thou have

/ More than pity? claim’st a stave?” (21-22). The entire poem, in fact, is based on

Arnold’s attempt to figure out if the bird is so worthy as to have an elegy written for

him—a poetic form almost universally saved for humans, and almost without fail written

ironically if for an animal. At the end of the poem, speaking to Matthias, Arnold

63
A dramatically different lesson that that advocated by most periodical canary poets, who sought to
convince readers to love and be content in the home like their canaries. The 1867 “My Canary” ends its
glorification of the unvarying happiness of the bird by insisting, “Oh, many a one some lesson sweet /
Might learn of my canary” (27-28).
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confesses that humans have “missed your mind” (155), and because of this Arnold

decides that Matthias does deserve his own elegy. The poet declares,

Poor Matthias! See, thy end

What a lesson doth it lend!

For that lesson thou shalt have,

Dead canary bird, a stave! (173-76)

In light of both the mundane Victorian characterization of the canary and the Romantic

traditions of memorializing only the most noble of birds in verse, Arnold’s statement is

even more radical. Not only does the poet elevate the canary, he does so in a way that

refuses to dismiss its importance: through symbolic representation.

As readers and literary scholars, it is our duty not only to take this lesson to heart,

but also to take it to our own writing. The problems of interpretation that Arnold

highlights in “Poor Matthias” have implications far beyond the Victorian context in

which he wrote.64 It is my contention that Arnold’s treatment of birds in “Poor Matthias”

is in fact an early posthumanist attempt to do the work that these scholars describe: to

decenter the human and revalue the animal. By acknowledging his work as such, we as

64
For instance, one of Arnold’s late-twentieth-century biographers digests “Poor Matthias” in a manner
that is startlingly similar to the ways in which the poem was received by Arnold’s contemporaries. Nicholas
Murray’s synopsis of the poem focuses on its superficiality: “The poor deceased canary . . . is celebrated in
rhyming tetrameter couplets whose lightness removes the risk of bathos that might have come had a
grander manner been attempted” (Murray 312). Murray also extends this critical disdain to one of Arnold’s
other pet poems—“Geist’s Grave” (1881), written in tribute to the poet’s dead dog—calling it “charmingly
innocuous” (300). Such a phrase instantly evokes the language that Arnold’s contemporaries used to
describe the canary elegy: such “pretty” lyrics in a poem about a pet certainly could not be taken or
reviewed seriously. Ironically, at several points through the biography, Murray identifies Arnold’s sincere
attachment to animals—only to dismiss it just as readily as he does the poet’s genuine engagement with
canary agency. He reveals Arnold’s distress over witnessing a cat being run over and killed by a carriage:
in a letter the poet wrote to his wife, Arnold sadly explains that “the sudden end of the poor little cat quite
afflicted me” (300). For Murray, however, this moment becomes an example of how the poet “loved
animals to a fault,” and the biographer even goes so far as to mock Arnold’s concern, claiming that such an
incident was in fact “trivial” and Arnold’s response far overblown.
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twenty-first century literary critics can appreciate and employ his strategies of recovery in

our own work. The ethical interpretation Arnold posits is based on awareness and the

sustained effort at unselfishness that he develops in “The Function of Criticism at the

Present Time.” Arnold argues that human self-importance and hierarchy must be

dismantled in real criticism: so long as humans (and particularly the English) identify

themselves as “‘The best breed in the whole world!’ . . . everything ideal and refining

will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will remain in a sphere, to

say the truth, perfectly unvital” (Arnold, “Function”). The language of “breeds” gestures

to Arnold’s turn to science as a way to bring new light to the importance of decentering

of the human; the claim that a lack of disinterestedness will result in a lack of vitality also

seems to speak directly to the periodical poets’ denial of canary organicism. Criticism’s

“best spiritual work,” he explains, is “to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is

retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell

upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things” (Arnold,

“Function”). Surely, the humanism of such a claim is evident here: Arnold is striving for

the perfection of the human mind. And yet, there is also something more: a striving away

from selfishness, or “self-satisfaction,” and toward a “fitness of things,” which echoes the

influence of Darwin’s science and a realm of knowledge that allows for the importance of

things nonhuman. In “Poor Matthias” Arnold develops a profound sense of the

importance of the inextricability of human and animal relations. What becomes

dramatically clear to the poet is how a failure to appreciate the sentience of a pet is not

just a missed opportunity for sympathetic connection: it is also a failure of humanity, as

rendered in language.

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 Chapter 3

Dangerous Men and Clairvoyant Canaries in Bleak House and The Woman in White

In The Animal that Therefore I Am (2008), Jacques Derrida describes how an

early-morning encounter with his pet cat radically reorients his understanding of the

traditional human-animal divide. The systematic “disavowal” of the enormous group of

living beings contained in the concept of “The Animal,” he explains, has long been used

as a tool for articulating the supposedly superior “properties” of humans (Derrida 5).65

Derrida explains that it is “this word animal, which men have given themselves as at the

origin of humanity, and which they have given themselves in order to be identified, in

order to be recognized, with a view to being what they say they are, namely, men,

capable of replying and responding in the name of men” (32). He insists that this

distinction allows us to assert claims of civilized and more sophisticated behaviors while

also attempting to conceal our likeness with animals. In the “relentless” gaze of his cat,

however, Derrida feels ashamed, forced to face the knowledge that animals cannot be so

easily conceptualized or contained by humans’ disavowal.66 In fact, he claims, animals—

each an “unsubstitutable singularity,” an “irreplaceable living being” (9)—continuously

reveal the ways in which humans are animalistic: “in one way or another, but

unimpeachably, near what they call the animal . . . After and near what they call the

65
According to Derrida, these include “Dressing oneself . . . speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing,
mourning, burial, the gift, and so on” (5).
66
This unmasking occurs because the supposedly clear division between humans and animals blurs in this
moment of mutual regard: “Before the cat that looks at me naked, would I be ashamed like an animal that
no longer has the sense of nudity? Or on the contrary, like a man who retains the sense of his nudity? Who
am I therefore? Who is it that I am (following)? Whom should this be asked of if not of the other? And
perhaps of the cat itself?” (5-6)
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animal and with it—whether we want it or not and whatever we do about it” (11).67 This

theoretical deconstruction of long-standing humanist assumptions has made Derrida’s

work a seminal text for many animal studies and posthumanist scholars.68

In this chapter, Derrida’s claims inform my analysis of two Victorian novels

whose authors provocatively explore notions of animality in their depictions of canary-

owning men. Long before the “extra-lucid” cat (4) of Derrida’s narrative revealed to the

scholar his own animality, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were similarly attuned to

the ways in which “astonishing” canaries (Dickens 117) could simultaneously shore up

and dismantle notions of human exceptionality. In Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and

Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), canaries are the beloved companions of prominent

male characters largely defined by their violence: Lawrence Boythorn and Count Fosco,

respectively. Both men are deeply invested in creating specific identities in order to

deceive those around them. Boythorn projects a violent bluster of aggressive manhood

that overshadows his caring nature, while Fosco carefully cultivates a cosmopolitan

veneer of civility in an attempt to mask his ruthlessness. The tame canaries of these

canonical novels simultaneously maintain and refute the men’s deceptions; the

“animality” of these characters is, in true Derridean fashion, both concealed and revealed

through the men’s interactions with their pet birds.

67
In particular, Derrida points to the act of relegating all animals to one category, “corral[ing] a large
number of living beings within a single concept: ‘The Animal’” (32), which exposes humans’ hypocrisy
and violence. Such a move, he avers, “confirm[s] not only the animality that [man] is disavowing but his
complicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species” (31).
68
Derrida’s attention to language’s role in human/animal relationships makes his work particularly useful
for literary scholars. He convincingly suggests that efforts to create more sustainable and less exploitative
relationships between all species must begin with our linguistic choices: “We have to envisage the
existence of ‘living creatures,’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality
that is simply opposed to humanity” (47).
96
 Such complex interspecies relations occur at the service of the novels’

examinations of Victorians’ growing realization that domestic spaces were not immune to

violence. In Bleak House and The Woman in White, Boythorn and Fosco have access to

the most intimate proceedings of the homes they visit, and therefore their affectations of

civility, domination, and rage figure heavily into the novels’ claims about their

contributions to the overall viability of the domestic ideal. Whereas earlier chapters

demonstrate the ways in which canaries were utilized and invoked to bring tranquility to

the home, this chapter examines how those processes were complicated by the birds’

alternate conception as persistently animal(istic). It is my contention that Dickens and

Collins use canaries in their culturally-familiar capacity as markers of both placidity and

wildness to articulate a similar dialectic of civility and animality for men in the sacred

space of the home. The canaries of Bleak House and The Woman in White make visible

the violence that permeates the supposed sanctity of the home; the instability of their own

ideal image allows us to understand the instability of the domestic ideal as well. Through

their ability to conceal and reveal, canaries demonstrate how the novels carefully

consider the home as both a refuge from and site of (particularly male) brutality, tapping

into contentious Victorian debates that implicitly considered where lines might be

drawn—if at all—between humanity and animality.

In yet another testament to canaries’ extreme malleability in the nineteenth

century, Dickens and Collins produce significantly different effects through their

deployment of the birds’ relationships with humans. In Bleak House, Boythorn is intent

on proving his manhood through aggressive overtures and physical force; rather than

maintaining a cool demeanor of gentlemanly assurance, Boythorn instead tries to muscle

97
his way to respect. Especially in his interactions with other men—Dedlock, various

coachmen, and even, to some degree, Jarndyce—Boythorn refuses to back down or be

pushed around.69 But in the context of Victorians’ heightened attention to the prevalence

of domestic violence—itself a facet of cultural conversations about the increasingly

unclear line between civilized and animalistic behavior—Boythorn’s behaviors signal

that he is a risk to the order and safety of the home. To convince others that he belongs

and believes in conventional domesticity, then, he uses his highly tamed bird as a

domestic icon and tool to mitigate the socially damaging effects of his outbursts. The

songbird defuses concerns about Boythorn’s angry diatribes and hides his owner’s

animality by exhibiting an utter lack of fear in Boythorn’s boisterous presence. The

canary’s species-specific history of domestication and wildness provides an

unacknowledged subtext to this process of concealment; Boythorn's constant association

with the animal helps to subtly articulate his own animality. But more often Dickens

emphasizes the canary’s domestic affiliation, thus creating in the depiction of Boythorn

and his “most astonishing bird” (Dickens 117) a relationship characterized primarily by

the canary’s ability to conceal—or at least temper—his owner’s violence. Such a move

reinforces the novel’s attempt to, for the most part, sustain conventional norms about

domesticity, as Dickens ultimately depicts an idealized middle-class home that is free

from violence.

The opposite emphasis holds true in Collins's sensation novel, a text deeply

invested in questioning and even subverting those norms. In The Woman in White,

69
Boythorn’s reaction likely results from watching Chancery Court manipulate and make symbolically
impotent so many other men, including his good friend Jarndyce. His response, though excessive, is in
large part an effort to resist these attempts that render others powerless.
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Fosco’s pet canaries—figured as animals who appear to live effortlessly in a civilized

domesticated world yet still retain ties to “nature red in tooth and claw”—both mirror and

expose Fosco’s meticulously controlled but ultimately irrepressible viciousness. The

villain seeks to establish a masculine identity based on class, holding power over others

through genteel, aristocratic superiority rather than resorting to implicitly lower-class

brute force. Fosco also uses his birds as tools, in their capacity as symbols of the

domestic, to signal this attempted domesticity and civility. Although in Bleak House

Boythorn enjoys great success with this strategy, for Fosco it ultimately fails. Instead,

Collins draws attention to the canaries’ ability to signal and reveal Fosco’s animality

through their own lingering connections to a wild and untamed past. The birds

demonstrate that they are simultaneously fearful of and similar to Fosco, and in doing so

dismantle the villain's efforts to hide his violent nature under a guise of ultra-cultivated

civility. Fosco's dangerous mix of suavity and brutality, as revealed through this

relationship with his canaries, brings to the forefront Victorian concerns about the often

masculinized dangers lurking in domestic spaces.70

70
My readings complicate the ways in which canaries have been superficially treated in modern critical
assessments of Dickens’s and Collins’s novels. Direct discussions of the birds are few and far between, and
those that exist resolutely depict the animals as only reiterations of a tried and true symbolic avian trope.
The canary of Bleak House tends to get lumped together and lost amidst a larger discourse of purely
representative birds. Neil Powell, for example, claims that Boythorn’s canary, alongside the crow circling
over Tulkingham’s house and Miss Flite’s menagerie of song birds, is simply “part of a symbolic structure”
of birds in the novel (5). Brief references to canaries in other Dickens novels have also motivated scholars
to conceptualize the birds as purely symbolic. Daniel L. Plung, for example, claims that the canaries owned
by Dora’s aunts in David Copperfield are one of the groups of animals that “represent the complex and
hierarchical moral universe of David Copperfield”; more specifically, he insists, canaries and other song
birds are entirely “associated with the good and innocent” (216) and again, “like the Copperfields,
symbolize basic goodness and innate moral integrity” (217). In much the same way, the canaries of The
Woman in White seem to be only ever mentioned as a series of objects in lists describing Count Fosco.
Karen C. Gindele uses Fosco’s trained birds, as well as his tender nature and predilection for sweets, as
signs indicating his ability to “subver[t] gender differences in his own person” (71): in this reading,
canaries, like candy, are simply objects meant to represent femininity. Certainly, my readings acknowledge
that Dickens and Collins rely on some symbolic meanings for the birds, but those meanings are highly
specific cultural conceptualizations, rather than meanings based on any universal figurations of “the bird,”
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I. Bloodthirsty Canaries?

As illustrated in earlier chapters, in the nineteenth century canaries were literally

and figuratively shaped to be iconic representations of the home through intense human

efforts of domestication; their primary identity was that of the pet of the parlor. The

majority of canary invocations focused their attention solely on this symbolic meaning. In

bird care manuals and other textual celebrations of canaries, however, the birds were

occasionally depicted as animals who remained intimately connected to their wild

origins, subverting humans’ best attempts at domestication. This insuppressible

connection manifested itself in two ways: at times canaries were reluctantly believed to

display violent tendencies, and, as a corollary of this innate aggression, the birds were

also believed to have heightened senses of perception and intuition.

Descriptions of canaries’ violent behaviors were usually depicted as regrettable

instances of the birds’ un-erasable history of wildness. Throughout the period, the birds’

supposedly uncontrollable animality was aggressively targeted for removal by canaries’

human domesticators, but it was found to persistently linger in the birds’ “perfectly”

tamed state. This understanding of the species interrupted human narratives of

domestication and control, complicating human attempts at coherent and sharply-defined

distinctions between humans and animals, those who are civilized and those who are not.

as scholars such as Powell and Gindele have averred. Additionally, the depictions of canaries in Bleak
House and The Woman in White frequently challenge and even reject symbolization. Canaries in the
nineteenth century held a variety of meanings among the humans who cared for and cultivated them; they
were never relegated to an entirely representative capacity, never understood to be merely part of the
"symbolic structure" of daily life. Derrida’s articulation of the insistent and uncontrollable nature of
animals opens up avenues for understanding these complexities; ultimately, these “irreplaceable living
being[s]” (9) confound our best attempts to assign fixed meanings to animals as well as humans, and novels
such as Bleak House and The Woman in White encourage readers to recognize this.
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Breeders and pet owners demonstrated uneasiness about the ways in which the canary’s

wild past—whether in the immediate history of an individual bird or the more general

history of the entire species—could contradict the prevailing belief that the canary was

the tamest, the most cheerful, and the happiest prisoner amongst all of the domesticated

songbirds.71 As discussed in detail in Chapter One, this was most frequently

demonstrated through authors’ efforts to relegate the birds’ wildness to a long-ago and

far-removed past, creating and maintaining a story of the canary origin myth that was

constantly repeated. Implicit in this unease was the realization that canaries’ aggression

only added to the growing evidence against the stability—or even existence altogether—

of ideal domesticity.

Certain canary manuals of the period made some of the most direct—albeit

unwilling—admissions of the ways in which canaries defied their ostensibly civilized

classification. Henry Beck Hirst, writing in 1843, devotes a special section of his manual

to educating his readers about canaries’ potential for violence, as evidenced by “Sect. IX:

On the necessary treatment for sullen and savage male birds” (Hirst 53). Here he counsels

owners who find themselves tasked with the misfortune of dealing with birds who fight

with other birds, “destroy” their own offspring, and are generally unfriendly; his solution

is simply to cage them with more agreeable birds in the hopes that such cheer will rub off

on the less agreeable ones. Robert Wallace, writing in 1893, concurs with the inevitability

that canaries can be prone to aggression not typically acknowledged by most owners. In

his manual, he states of canaries that

many [of the] birds are of a quarrelsome and mischievous disposition, and

71
Or even amongst all domesticated animals.
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 appear to delight in plucking the others. More particularly this is the case

with cock canaries, and if they should happen to take a dislike to one of

their number, which I have known them to do, they chase and peck the

unfortunate wretch most unmercifully; and if it is not speedily removed

they will probably torment it until they kill it. (Wallace 170)

Hen canaries also come under their share of condemnation for behavior unbecoming a

supposedly gentle and domesticated species; most frequently, according to manual

authors, their “wildness” manifests itself in violent behavior toward their offspring,

causing many authors, as in the case here of Wallace, to refer to certain hens who “almost

invariably proceed to destroy their eggs or progeny” as “unnatural mothers” (81). These

depictions of behaviors alternately classified as wild, uncivilized, unnatural, and/or

violent are buried in texts that do their best to overwhelm their readers with descriptions

of canaries as peaceable, domesticated animals; authors seem to feel duty-bound but

reluctant to include information that might complicate the manners of such perfect pets,

and the resultant contradictions that emerge are never openly addressed.

In an attempt to manage the knowledge of the species’ wildness, Victorians

integrated that quality into other, “safer” cultural conceptions of the bird: primarily, by

making it serve the domestic sanctuary. Channeling canaries’ alleged ability to see

through carefully-crafted facades and accurately interpret the moral integrity of the

humans with whom they interacted, Victorians claimed that the birds were particularly

apt at perceiving violence in other (especially human) animals. This meaning often was

invoked by owners anxiously attempting to maintain standards of decency within the

domestic sphere, as the birds could alert humans to potential threats against the idealized

102
home’s morality. As tame-yet-wild animals, canaries acted as mediators, “translating”

instances of danger that supposedly-civilized humans could no longer detect. In a treatise

on canaries, for instance, famed bird fancier William Kidd allows that “Instinct, on some

occasions very closely bordering on reason, unerringly teaches the lower of animals to

discriminate who are their friends, and who are their enemies” (35). Manual author Mary

S. Wood is even more explicit, claiming in Canary Birds (1869) that “Canaries are often

wild and show fear whenever approached by those who have never shown them kindness.

This arises from a natural, and a very proper, suspicion of mankind. Their instinct tells

them that the human race are inherently savage; and till they have some convincing proof

to the contrary, they never change this, their very correct opinion” (xv). In this way,

canary owners satisfied their dissatisfaction with the animality of their domestic pets by

redirecting it to reify the bounds of civility. As will be discussed below, both Dickens and

Collins engage with this impulse of redirection, using the canaries of Bleak House and

The Woman in White to varying degrees of success to represent conventional domesticity.

These concerns about the role of the canary—in manuals as well as novels—

demonstrate how, especially around mid-century, Victorians were struggling to digest the

concept that all animals naturally exist in systems of violence. Modern scholar Martin A.

Danahay reinforces the presence of this vague uneasiness with his examination of the

animals featured in pre-Raphaelite paintings. In “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw,” he

claims that Victorians had strict delineations about which animals were considered

peaceful or violent, and notably, he points out that, along with cats and dogs, “birds in

cages are of course the epitome of ‘peaceful domestic’ animals” (105). But Danahay

quickly moves on to challenge this delineation by examining so-called peaceful domestic

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animals in period artwork that actually disrupt this acknowledged order, and in doing so,

“radically reorien[t] the apparent moral of the painting” (109). His identification of this

shift in perspective (which deals only superficially, but nonetheless provocatively, with

birds in cages) relies in part on the ways in which Darwin undermined Victorians’ neat

categories of violent and non-violent animals in order to articulate his theory of

competition in The Origin of Species. Danahay cites in particular the moment when

Darwin startlingly insists that “‘the face of nature bright with gladness’ was an illusion

and that the apparently idle songbirds trilling in the thickets of England were actually

‘constantly destroying life’ and are themselves ‘destroyed by birds and beasts of prey’

(Origin 40)” (105). Part of the potential terror of this claim, of course, was that

evolutionary theory also always implicated humans, and Victorians—devotees of the

shelter of the domestic sphere—found it difficult to imagine that their own idyllic spaces

could in fact be suffused with violence as well.

Shockwaves from this revolution in scientific thought were felt everywhere, and

many of the most prominent mid-century cultural debates were also implicitly informed

by and struggling to deal with Darwin and his predecessors. In particular, although many

people appeared to vehemently reject the idea that humans could be included in such

claims about animals and animality, concurrent anxieties about masculine aggression and

violence in the home demonstrate how widely these questions of humanity were being

considered. Concerns about appropriate levels of masculine aggression often appeared in

larger discussions about the qualities of the ideal British man, as Victorians alternately

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claimed that British men were either too effeminate or increasingly brutish.72 One of the

most well-known reactions to claims of England’s perceived collective loss of manhood

was the formation of the Muscular Christian movement in the 1850s.73 Adherents of this

religious, social, and literary undertaking, led in large part by Charles Kingsley,

bemoaned what they perceived as men’s increasing physical weakness and diminished

virility. Kingsley, for instance, worried that men especially of the middle classes were no

longer “fighting and working like a man” (Kingsley, “Plays and Puritans” 96), and later

complained to a friend about “[t]he effeminacy of the middle class . . . I find that even in

the prime of youth they shrink from (and are often unable to bear, from physical neglect

of training) fatigue, danger, pain” (Kingsley, Letters II 242). Instead, he and others

advocated a kind of brawny masculinity, seeking to establish what Donald E. Hall

describes as “an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability

to shape and control the world around oneself” (Hall 7).

Kingsley’s personal beliefs became foundational for the movement’s doctrine;

according to David Rosen, Kingsley sought to justify his animalistic urges—especially

his sexual desire—by redeeming the “bestial” aspect of manhood. Rather than

establishing a masculinity “linked to quelling those beasts” (Rosen 25), claims Rosen,

Kingsley celebrated man for being what he described as “the spirit-animal; a spirit

manifesting itself in an animal form” (Kingsley, Letters I 161-64). This perspective

influenced his formulation of a masculinity in which man has “divinity conferred on his

72
See, for instance, Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit; Donald E. Hall, “On the Making and
Unmaking of Monsters”; David Rosen, “The Volcano and the Cathedral”; and Clive Emsley, Hard Men.
73
Strikingly, two of the most recent critical texts about Muscular Christianity seek to show the movement’s
influence in novels by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. See Lara Karpenko, “Muscularity, Masculinity,
and Physical Reading in The Moonstone” and Nicholas Shrimpton, “Great Expectations: Dickens’s
muscular novel.”
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bestiality” (Rosen 24); Kingsley explained in correspondence with a young follower that

“we are of ourselves, and in ourselves . . . a sort of magnified beast of prey, all the more

terrible for its wondrous faculties; that . . . may be just as powerful for evil as for good”

(Kingsley, Letters I 285). Thus, in the muscular movement and elsewhere, men were

encouraged to control others through physical force: a force that was identified in

explicitly animalistic terms and, importantly, had the potential for both help and harm.

Though efforts to make British men more “manly” received widespread support,

not all Victorians were comforted by a masculine ideal based in aggressive physicality,

especially due to the ideal’s implied potential for “evil.”74 Henry R. Harrington explains

that the term “Muscular Christianity” carried a particular anxiety for some who were

wary of the movement’s connections to ideas of animality and brutality: “The debate over

‘muscular Christianity’s’ value turned largely on the question of whether or not . . . it also

promoted ‘animality’” (Harrington 26). John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman, a leader of

the Oxford movement and prominent Catholic figurehead, insisted that the proper

gentleman should abhor violence. In an 1852 lecture at Catholic University that was later

published as part of his influential The Idea of a University, Newman claims that “it is

almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain” (Newman

208). He later describes that ideal man as “tender,” “gentle,” and “merciful” (209).75

Perhaps nowhere was the glorification of masculine aggression perceived with

more trepidation than in the home. At the same time that Muscular Christianity was

74
Wilkie Collins was one such doubter, averring in Man and Wife that Muscular Christianity’s glorification
of the brawny athlete was directly responsible for the “recent spread of grossness and brutality among
certain classes of the English population” (Collins, Man and Wife, London: F.S. Ellis, 1870, vii.)
75
In the early 1860s, Newman and Kingsley began a public and contentious debate over religion, which
culminated in Newman’s triumphant Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) and Kingsley’s fall from popularity.
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soaring in popularity, depictions of ideal domesticity were increasingly problematized by

worries that men were going too far—becoming too aggressive—and thus destroying the

sanctity of the home. In her compelling legal and literary study Bleak Houses (2005),

Lisa Surridge traces the arc of Victorian concerns about domestic violence,

demonstrating in particular the “growing trend in the 1840s and 1850s for Victorians to

see domestic assault as a man’s issue” (Surridge 45). She claims that British manliness

was equated with “self-control over both sexual and violent urges,”76 and thus violence in

the home “destroyed the two central facets of Victorian manliness: it shattered the

connection between manliness and domesticity and it showed a man unable to exercise

self-control” (46). Importantly, this masculine aggression was also linked to a discourse

of animality. Surridge points to an 185377 debate in Parliament over the passage of a bill

meant to protect women and children from domestic violence; according to Surridge,

members “contrasted manliness, courage, and humanity with the brutal, cowardly, and

inhuman qualities of the wife beater” (48). Mr. Fitzroy, the Undersecretary of the Home

Department, for instance, described batterers as “brutes who called themselves men”

(ibid.). Outside of the justice system, J.S. Mill vehemently declared that male abusers

were “bipedal monsters” and “brute beasts” (Sunday Times, 24 August 1851), and an

anonymous contributor to the Saturday Review declared that punishment must be found

to “appea[l] to the brute in his brutishness” (“Wife-Beating”). Such distinctions sought to

impose clear boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors by linking

them to a discourse of the civilized and uncivilized. The disruptive power of male

76
Surridge credits well-known work by historians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall for providing the
backbone for her assertions in this section.
77
Again, the year in which Dickens published Bleak House.
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violence in the ostensibly safe home was thus excised through its comparison with the

animal world. This is an explicit example of what Derrida describes as a move of

disavowal, where “the animal” becomes a site of Otherness, a repository for qualities and

behaviors antithetical to those which humanity believes are “proper” to it (Derrida 5).

In all of these debates, Victorians were witnessing their closely guarded lines of

distinction crumble in the face of new cultural perspectives that refused to honor essential

differences between humans and animals or civilized and wild spaces. Violence appeared

to exist everywhere, and the domestic ideal was clearly under siege.78 Dickens’s and

Collins’s pairings of violent men and pet canaries, then, is not as improbable or comically

mismatched as it might first seem. Both men and birds were under scrutiny as they

navigated the confused and inconsistent limits of their cultural behaviors. The canaries’

ability to conceal and reveal this dialectic within their human owners, rather than only in

those classified under the term “the Animal,” allows Dickens and Collins to create more

nuanced and complicated depictions of their characters, Boythorn and Fosco. In concert

with allusions to popular cultural trends toward brawny masculinity and against domestic

violence, the canaries point strongly to the ways in which lines of distinction between

humans and animals were aggressively challenged and blurred throughout the period.

II. The “astonishing bird” of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853)

Bleak House, Dickens's scathing mid-century critique of "home-grown" decay and

corruption in both English courts and domestic spaces, has long been heralded as one of

78
Surridge depicts the manifestation of this shift as almost involuntary, insisting that “narratives of
violence permeated Victorian middle-class culture, even as these very narratives threatened to undermine
its central tenets of domesticity, marriage, and protective masculinity” (13).
108
the author’s most impressive and expansive novels. Amidst his emphasis on both public

and private corruption and chaos, the narrative of Boythorn and his canary serves to forge

links between several of the storylines most invested in articulating and preserving

conventional values of happy homes. In doing so, it also parodies yet eventually redeems

the cultural push for virile, rather than effete, British men. In Bleak Houses, Lisa Surridge

claims that in an 1836 sketch entitled “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” as well as in

novels such as Dombey and Son (1848), Dickens “deploys family violence as a key sign

of lost manliness” (Surridge 44). In doing so, she surmises, Dickens “joined in a growing

tendency to scrutinize men’s marital behavior and to connect manhood with the cherished

Victorian ideal of domesticity” (46). Aggressive masculinity—similar to that advocated

by the muscular Christianity movement—did not fit domestic ideals, and thus men

epitomizing such behaviors became unfit for, and even a threat to, the home. As Surridge

makes clear in her study, the Victorian movement against domestic violence took as one

of its tasks to revise notions of manhood to better suit the idealized home.

Ironically, despite the allusion of her text’s title, Surridge does not spend

significant time linking her claims to Dickens’s Bleak House. Surridge explains this

absence by noting that although Bleak House was quite clearly “perceived as an

intervention in the wife-assault debates of the early 1850s” (53), the novel’s insistence on

placing such violence within lower or lower-middle class homes makes it a less

compelling choice for her focus on middle-class understandings of domestic violence.

Boythorn is, I believe, one of the ways in which Dickens attempts to excise such violence

from the ideality of the middle-class home. Bleak House is ultimately a novel invested in

the maintenance of conventional domesticity, and Boythorn’s canary-influenced narrative

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allows Dickens to consider, but then soundly reject, the presence of male brutality within

that space. Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce, the characters most invested in

establishing a domestic sanctuary safe from the corruption of outside forces (largely

represented in the novel by the malignant Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case), must actively

evaluate who is allowed to enter and influence their home.79 Boythorn’s moral integrity is

a point of concern for the two, as his anger seems to make him unfit for the sacred space

of Bleak House. Boythorn’s pet canary, however, relieves their concerns; Dickens uses

the bird’s cultural cache as an intuitive creature, allowing it to conceal the threatening,

violent aspects of Boythorn’s temperament. According to Robert L. Patten, Bleak House

is a novel which “conceives personal identity in social terms: who one is is ratified—in

some senses determined—by how one is understood by others” (94). In Boythorn’s

instance, his identity is dramatically shaped by how his pet—clearly depicted as a

member of the characters’ society—reinforces and defines his characteristics. In essence,

Boythorn can use his “astonishing” canary to demonstrate his own domestication; the

canary’s role as a symbol and reader of domesticity reassures Esther and Jarndyce that

Boythorn is not a threat, reaffirming their ardent belief in the security of home.80

79
Think, for example, of wayward Richard Carstone, perpetual child Harold Skimpole, and infected Jo, all
of whom present some kind of physical or moral risk for the sanctity of Bleak House. Esther and Jarndyce
hold ongoing conversations about all three men, carefully considering their influences within the home and
attempting to make judicious decisions about who can be admitted to their home. Richard, so persistent in
his own moral decline, must ultimately must be provided with his own apartment; Skimpole splits Esther’s
and Jarndyce’s opinions initially, but finally is identified as a selfish and therefore dangerous leech; and
Jo’s brief convalescence in Bleak House becomes an example of the consequences of class- and health-
based contagions.
80
Boythorn’s canary is not the only bird in Bleak House. Miss Flite, a sweet and slightly deranged victim
of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce and a daily fixture in Chancery Court, stuns Esther, Richard and Ada when she
welcomes them into her run-down apartment, which is dominated by several bird cages filled with an
assortment of “larks, linnets, and goldfinches” (55). (Significantly, none of Miss Flite’s birds are canaries,
even though canaries would have been a logical and likely choice to populate a Victorian aviary featuring
an assortment of singing house birds such as Miss Flite’s.) This aviary has garnered much more attention
from both scholarly- and entertainment-based treatments of the novel. For instance, the cover of the 2008
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 *****

Lawrence Boythorn, a longtime friend of John Jarndyce and the contentious

neighbor of Sir Leicester Dedlock, distinguishes himself from the large cast of characters

in Bleak House by his distinctive and often comical tendency toward violent hyperbole.

Throughout the novel, Boythorn threatens to carry out acts of physical punishment on any

person who—intentionally or, more often than not, unintentionally—causes him any

amount of frustration, inconvenience, or insult. From the Master in Chancery who

Boythorn offers to “seize . . . by the throat” and “shake . . . until his money rolled out of

his pockets and his bones rattled in his skin” (Dickens 118) to the coachman driving “the

most flagrant example of an abominable public vehicle that ever encumbered the face of

the earth” who Boythorn suggests “ought to be put to death” for arriving twenty-five

minutes late (244), very few people are exempt from the man's blustering verbal

violence.81 By his own account, Boythorn constructs himself as an uncontrollable, even

Vintage edition of Bleak House—used throughout this analysis—features a photograph of a bird cage filled
with domestic song birds, clearly an attempt to depict the famed Flite menagerie. Ironically, and
mistakenly, all of the birds appear to be canaries. However, Dickens treats Miss Flite’s birds in a
distinctively different, and much more traditional, way than he does Boythorn’s canary, as the former are
explicitly and solely depicted as symbols. This differentiation is made particularly clear through Miss
Flite’s process of naming the birds. Mr. Krook, Miss Flite’s creepy and combustible landlord, gleefully
reveals to Mr. Jarndyce, Esther, and Ada that the shaky old woman has christened her birds “Hope, Joy,
Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon,
Gammon, and Spinach” (200). Later, Miss Flite—whose allusive name also obviously links her to her pets
and her madness—reveals that she has added two more birds to the collection, named “the Wards in
Jarndyce” (819). These revelations illustrate Miss Flite’s litigation-induced madness, while also providing
an instant synopsis of the themes of Bleak House. Additionally, the birds are not individuated (as opposed
to the “astonishing bird” of Boythorn’s esteem), but rather only identified as a collective group, gesturing
to the larger tragedy of the Jarndyce case and deferring meaning from the birds themselves; they are
imprisoned, according to Miss Flite, as a group as long as the case is open, and when finally Jarndyce v.
Jarndyce ends, the old woman releases all of the birds into the wild, where they, like Miss Flite, will
presumably die quite quickly without their accustomed shelter. From Hope to Spinach, the birds are defined
only by their reference to and representation of other things.
81
Boythorn also has one of the most satisfying critiques of the corrupt court system, insisting to Jarndyce
that “There never was such an infernal cauldron as that Chancery, on the face of the earth! . . . Nothing but
a mine below it on a busy day in term time, with all its records, rules, and precedents collected in it, and
every functionary belonging to it also, high and low, upward and downward, from its son the Accountant-
111
animalistic, man who has no regard for common convention or the expectations of polite,

civilized society. This self-depiction is readily accepted and reinforced by those with

whom Boythorn—and, as will be explicated below, his canary—has little to no direct

interaction. For instance, Sir Leicester Dedlock, with whom Boythorn is locked in a

never-ending turf war over property lines, conducts all his business with the man through

servants and lawyers; thus, he feels quite confident in asserting that Boythorn is “A man

of a very ill-regulated mind . . . An extremely dangerous person in any community”

(163). Boythorn’s version of physical and highly aggressive manhood is—especially to a

physically unfit member of the aristocracy—a threat to social order, especially in its

resemblance to contemporary depictions of the male abuser. Many Victorian reports of

marital abuse, for instance, described violence provoked by insignificant events: in 1857

a Mr. George Young was arrested for beating his wife, and in his defense offered no other

reason for the attack than that “he had been in the cellar, drinking champagne” (“Ill

Usage of Wives”); in the 1830s, unnamed victims alleged their husband had beaten them

for such small things as spilling tea or taking the bed covers (as cited in Surridge 22-23).

Such excess is also resonant in many ways with Kingsley’s descriptions of man’s innate

aggression, which he characterizes as volcanic (“manly thumos” [Letters II 60]), in need

of control; Rosen claims Kingsley imagined this manly force as “spiritual, primal,

animal, potent, and potentially destructive” (Rosen 31). Cast in these terms, Boythorn

sets off warning bells for members of the middle and upper classes who pride themselves

on their distance from such behavior.

General to its father the Devil, and the whole blown to atoms with ten thousand hundred-weight of
gunpowder, would reform it in the least!” (118).
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 Despite his personal grudge against Boythorn, Dedlock’s assessment of the man

may be one of the most clear-sighted in the novel. Even though the majority of

Boythorn’s aggression is verbal, there are also examples of the man’s anger in action. In

a lengthy and unsettling diatribe, Boythorn himself gleefully admits that he “continue[s]

to assault and batter” (119) the men sent out to protect Sir Dedlock’s property lines.

According to Boythorn, Sir Dedlock

sends a most abandoned villain with one eye, to construct a gateway. I

play upon that execrable scoundrel with a fire-engine, until the breath is

nearly driven out of his body. The fellow erects a gate in the night. I chop

it down and burn it in the morning. He sends his myrmidons to come over

the fence, and pass and repass. I catch them in humane man traps, fire split

peas at their legs, play upon them with the engine—resolve to free

mankind from the insupportable burden of the existence of those lurking

ruffians. (119)

Ruthless attacks and torture, all apparently with an intent to kill: this is not merely

Boythorn’s description of an exchange of words, but rather an admission of his cruel,

seemingly disproportionate, and likely unjustified physical altercations. Such excess was

frequently described in other mid-century cultural documents preoccupied with the

intrusion of violence into the domestic. Surridge, for instance, cites an 1853 article in

Punch about “Tyrant Man’s” legal leeway in abusing “Victim Woman” with an endless

supply of violence: the author bemoans “that the Brute, like a chartered ruffian, should

have been empowered to beat, kick, and trample upon her with indefinite, short of fatal,

violence” (Punch, 16 April 1853, 158). Likewise, an 1853 article in the Examiner titled

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“Humanity to Brutes” points to the “unrelenting” nature of men who repeatedly batter

their wives (Examiner, 27 August 1853, 546). Even Darwin’s theory of sexual

selection—appearing first in Origin (1859) and then more explicitly in The Descent of

Man (1871)—posited a system of human relations in which men were constantly

employing violent means to ensure the survival of the fittest species. Dickens’s portrayal

of Boythorn, then, in all his violent glory, is clearly a product—if not a parody—of the

times.

Though the man’s explosive personality is far from discreet, Boythorn’s constant

close proximity to a certain loyal pet canary—an animal himself, but an animal of the

utmost domestication—serves to put such behaviors in high relief. Primarily, this is

accomplished through the unlikely pairing of the large, loud man and his small, soft-

spoken bird: when Esther first meets the two, she describes Boythorn as a “tremendous

man” (115), and then expresses amusement at the sight of the “fragile mite of a creature

perched on his head” (117). Boythorn looks and sounds even more outrageous when

juxtaposed with diminutive pet, and his love and affection for the canary is jarring when

compared to his typical temper. When Dickens first introduces Boythorn and his canary

to the wards in Jarndyce, the small yellow bird receives an exuberant introduction the

likes of which only Boythorn is capable. In response to Jarndyce’s inquiry about the

canary, Boythorn exclaims that “By Heaven, he is the most astonishing bird in Europe! . .

. He is the most wonderful creature! I wouldn’t take ten thousand guineas for that bird. I

have left an annuity for his sole support, in case he should outlive me. He is, in sense and

attachment, a phenomenon. And his father before him was one of the most astonishing

birds that ever lived!” (117). Boythorn’s rapturous presentation of his pet is at once

114
indicative of the importance of that bird to Boythorn’s life and consistent with his

tendency toward hyperbole. It is also Dickens’s version of a gentle satire of canary

culture in the period; as demonstrated in Chapter One, canary breeders and pet owners

often recorded their intense enthusiasm for the birds in a variety of laudatory texts.

Remember, for instance, Robert L. Wallace’s insistence that the canary is “one of the

most charming pets that can possibly be possessed” (Wallace 209), or the Rev. Francis

Smith’s declaration of devotion that begins by sincerely claiming that “the beauty of [the

canary’s] plumage, the elegance of its figure, the docility of its disposition, the charming

familiarity which induces it to nestle without fear or reserve beside us, to say nothing of

its melodious song which has of late years been well nigh cultivated to perfection, are as

striking and prominent as ever” (Smith 4). In these moments of praise, canary enthusiasts

happily presented themselves as gentle and emotive men who happily consorted with

even the smallest of animals: a far cry from the Boythorn who so happily “play[s] upon

[Dedlock’s] execrable scoundrel with a fire-engine, until the breath is nearly driven out of

his body” (Dickens 119).

Of course, the bird’s potential for violence—as articulated in the previous

section—was also a constant subtext for any canary representation in the period.

Dickens’s characterization of Boythorn and his implicitly once-wild canary as two of a

kind, similar in more ways than would be expected, further articulate Boythorn’s

violence. The canary, according to Esther, interacts with Boythorn “as if [Boythorn] were

no more than another bird” (118); though this conveys a sense of closeness between the

two, it also draws attention to Boythorn’s animality. Physically, the two are rarely

separated; most often, the canary can be found perched on Boythorn’s expansive head.

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They are even linked in kind through the ways that others refer to them. The canary is

repeatedly called “the astonishing bird,” and in an alliterative move, Esther takes to

calling the bird’s owner “the audacious Boythorn” (872). At other times, Dickens depicts

the bird as a replacement for Boythorn’s lost love. Jarndyce solemnly explains to Esther

that instead of spending his years with the woman he once loved, Boythorn instead is

accompanied by “his little yellow friend” (121); compared so directly to a romantic

relationship between humans, this coupling between man and bird blurs the line between

human and pet, articulating a more intimate companionship that pays little notice to

species. In fact, Boythorn’s canary is very rarely referred to as a pet. Instead of a

language of ownership and equality, both Boythorn and other characters use language of

companionship and reciprocity.82

More often than not, however, the canary’s role is one of concealment. He deftly

draws attention away from Boythorn’s violence, concealing the man’s aggression and

convincing others that the man is actually well-suited to the harmony of the home. Thus,

despite Boythorn's continual threats of all manner of assaults, Dickens also depicts him as

a surprisingly caring, thoughtful, and sentimental friend. Jarndyce’s introduction of

Boythorn sets the stage for the appearance of a man defined by the tension between his

anger and morality. Before Boythorn arrives at Bleak House, Cousin Jarndyce solemnly

82
Canary manuals in the period also flirted with various ways of depicting the closeness between canaries
and humans. For instance, in an attempt to defend the practice of bird-keeping, George Henry Holden
claims in his late-century manual that “It has been often said, that it is cruel to cage and confine Canaries.
With the class of people who argue in this way, I do not agree. The Canary bears to the race of birds about
the same relation as man to the animal family. For generations back the Canary has known no habituation
but that of the cage; his domestication has been made almost complete: and in most cases, when he escapes,
or is turned loose on the wicked world, he is most anxious to return to his home again; missing the care and
attention which any bird-keeper would naturally bestow on him” (10-11). This connection often appeared
in context with a discussion of the importance of human loyalty to the home, where the potential sting of
confinement and restrictions of the domestic space present a better alternative to the unsure and dangerous
“wicked world” beyond the cage. See Chapter Two for a discussion of this theme in periodical poetry.
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relates to his wards a description of his friend that is tempered by what Esther notices as

“the favourable omen that there was not the least indication of any change in the wind”

(i.e., Jarndyce's continued happiness): “His language is as sounding as his voice. He is

always in extremes; perpetually in the superlative degree. In his condemnation he is all

ferocity. You might suppose him to be an Ogre, from what he says; and I believe he has

the reputation of one with some people” (115). In Jarndyce's fond and familiar

description of his friend, Boythorn's curious blend of violence and sweetness is

anticipated. Thus, despite his aggression, Boythorn’s continued efforts to protect his

friends make him one of the novel’s strongest proponents for the maintenance of an

idealized domestic space.

The canary is a domestic talisman for Boythorn; as long as he keeps the bird by

his side, he is able to mitigate the potentially negative effects of his anger and convince

others that he is the “right” kind of man to fit into the sanctity of the ideal home.

Dickens’s complex portrayal of Boythorn’s masculinity relies on the canary’s symbolic

and sentient abilities to shore up idealized notions of the home. In both of these registers,

the bird signals that Boythorn is not a threat to the stability of Jarndyce and Esther’s

domestic spaces. Throughout, Dickens demonstrates how the bird’s symbolic resonance

transfers to Boythorn: man and bird’s close association results in Boythorn being credited

with properties intrinsic to his pet. For instance, when Boythorn offers up his residence as

a refuge for Esther as she recovers from her traumatic illness, he also provides the

company of his beloved bird. Esther83 describes the home as the epitome of the domestic

83
Esther, whom Dickens insistently depicts as the perfect housekeeper, provides a crucial interpretive gaze
and narrative ability to articulate the canary’s various cultural resonances. As a character who readily
admits that her individual identity is subsumed by generalized domestic nicknames such as Old Woman,
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ideal,84 where “So many preparations were made for me, and such an endearing

remembrance was shown of all my little tastes and likings, that I could have sat down,

overcome, a dozen times, before I had revisited half the rooms” (503). Amongst all of

these thoughtful touches, Esther lingers on the canary, who reinforces the home’s overall

comfort and perfection. Boythorn, she explains,

had left a note of welcome for me, as sunny as his own face, and had

confided his bird to my care, which I knew to be his highest mark of

confidence. Accordingly I wrote a little note to him in London, telling him

. . . how the most astonishing of birds had chirped the honours of the

house to me in the most hospitable manner, and how, after singing on my

shoulder, to the inconceivable rapture of my little maid, he was then at

roost in the usual corner of his cage. (503-04)

Here the canary plays the role of the gracious host, and Esther’s description of his charms

dutifully recounts many of the ways in which the canary was reputed in the period to

embody ideal domesticity: his “hospitable manner,” cheerful song, and routine place in

his snug cage. The bird, as an extension of Boythorn’s hospitality and acting as a

symbolic replacement for the man, thus demonstrates Boythorn’s own domestic skill and

thoughtfulness.

Little Old Woman, Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden (she somewhat happily confesses, “my own name
soon became quite lost amongst them” [98]) given to her by her housemates, Esther is uniquely qualified to
identify the canary’s symbolic meaning. Her insistent (if complicated) characterization throughout the
novel as an idealized angel in the house makes her expert at ascertaining other examples of iconic
domesticity. She instantly understands that the canary signals this ideal, as demonstrated by her decision, in
preparation for Ada’s arrival to Boythorn’s residence, to have “the bird out ready as an important part of
the establishment” (516), as well as her attempt to convince herself that “Once you are mistress of Bleak
House, you are to be as cheerful as a bird” (612). She also knows that the canary provides important
context for Boythorn’s personality through its ability to “read” his master’s “true” nature.
84
This ideal is almost literal, as Esther equates the house to a fairy tale with herself as its reigning domestic
goddess: “If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of her wand, and I had been a princess and
her favoured godchild, I could not have been more considered in it” (503).
118
 The most obvious evidence of Boythorn’s canary’s concealment of his master’s

violence, however, centers on the species’ supposed ability to instantly divine a human’s

true nature. Esther’s assessment of the bird, occurring immediately after Boythorn’s

presentation of the pet, identifies the bird’s impressiveness as located in his ability to

interpret and engage with his owner. She explains to the reader that “The subject of

[Boythorn’s] laudation was a very little canary, who was so tame that he was brought

down by Mr. Boythorn’s man, on his forefinger, and, after taking a gentle flight round the

room, alighted on his master’s head” (117). Clearly, the canary is intimately familiar with

Boythorn, choosing that man’s head as a perch over any other spot available to him in the

room. His extreme tameness, which Esther determines based on his lack of cage, also

helps to establish his relationship with Boythorn. Such good behavior, paired with the

canary’s gravitation toward Boythorn, seems indicative of their mutual rapport. Then,

Esther exclaims in amazement, “To hear Mr. Boythorn presently expressing the most

implacable and passionate sentiments, with this fragile mite of a creature perched on his

forehead, was to have a good illustration of his character, I thought” (117-18). Esther

describes the bird as a sort of mind reader; the canary sits “perched on [Boythorn’s]

forehead” in the style of a psychic’s probing hand, and in his quietness, conveys to

surrounding observers that Boythorn is not to be feared. Here, Esther demonstrates her

awareness of the canary’s popular conception as an animal able to accurately perceive the

true nature of a human being, even in situations that were not easily discernible.

Throughout Boythorn’s stay, the canary conceals his master’s animality by

deploying and extending his own resonance as a domestic and intuitive bird. According

to Esther, even Boythorn’s most passionate antics “had not the least effect in disturbing

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the bird, whose sense of security was complete; and who hopped about the table with its

quick head now on this side and now on that, turning its bright sudden eye on its master,

as if he were no more than another bird” (118). In this passage Esther repeatedly

emphasizes the bird’s acuity, referring to his “quick head” and “bright sudden eye” as the

canary seems to assess and then dismiss Boythorn’s volatile façade. This moment

between man and bird carries with it all the weight of interspecies recognition that

Derrida proposes in The Animal That Therefore I Am. Like the cat of Derrida’s encounter,

Boythorn’s canary’s gaze demonstrates this specific animal’s sentience by asserting his

presence through a direct confrontation with his owner. Under the canary’s watchful eye,

Boythorn’s identity is shaped and communicated. Thus, Boythorn relies on—and

presumably has cultivated—the canary’s absolute “sense of security” in order to obscure

his constant threats of violence (only intensified by his intimidating physical stature). The

tiny and supposedly perceptive creature intuits no cause for alarm, and so Boythorn does

not make his fellow dinner guests fearful.

This point is made clear repeatedly throughout Esther’s interactions with

Boythorn; later in the evening, for instance, she once again points to what she believes to

be the canary’s helpful divination of his owner’s true nature. Boythorn dominates the

after-dinner polite conversation by vehemently describing his war tactics in dealing with

the perpetual annoyance of Sir Leicester Dedlock, explaining how he “continue[s] to

assault and batter” Dedlock’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of “myrmidons . . . lurking

ruffians” (119). Astonished, amused, and endeared, Esther recounts to her readers: “To

hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have thought him the angriest

of mankind. To see him at the very same time, looking at the bird now perched upon his

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thumb, and softly smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought him

the gentlest” (120). She is clearly convinced by the bird’s interpretation/dissimulation,

later confiding to Jarndyce that she finds Boythorn to be “so tender . . . so very courtly

and gentle” (121): this for the man who offered to shoot a late coachman “without the

least remorse!” (116). Esther’s language points to the processes of interpretation and

misinterpretation that are possible in this moment; only listening to Boythorn produces a

certain understanding of his character, which is quickly complicated by a mode of both

listening and watching (and especially watching the actions of the canary). Additionally,

Esther’s observation of Boythorn’s reciprocating affection for the canary—“softly

smoothing its feathers”—not only reinforces the canary’s apparent judgment, but also

draws on a long-standing belief that men’s treatment of animals signals how they most

likely treat other innocents, like women and children.85 This is one of the surest ways that

Boythorn, with the help of his canary, cultivates his domestically-appropriate

masculinity. Though he is a potentially alarming presence in Jarndyce’s home, his

relationship with his pet indicates to vulnerable human members of that home (like

Esther) that he will similarly take good care of them.

Boythorn appears to be happily and appreciatively aware of his canary’s role in

defusing his violent bluster. His manner of referring to the bird signals an importance

culled from the animal’s active participation in his life. Boythorn calls his pet as a

“creature” (117), rather than describing the canary as a “thing” or an “object,” two terms

that were frequently utilized in discussions of canaries in Victorian care manuals,

85
As will be discussed below, this discourse is picked up again in The Woman in White, although with
dramatically different results. Fosco’s relationship of mastery and threatening domination with a variety of
animals indicates his potential for domestic abuse, and thus his unsuitability for the safe haven of the home.
121
newspaper articles, and elsewhere. Similarly, while Esther and others refer to the bird as

“it,” Boythorn always grants his pet the more distinguished pronoun of “he” or “him.”86

Boythorn also makes the claim that his canary deserves, and has in fact received, a place

of honor in his will, and credits the canary with a genealogy—referring to the bird’s

equally impressive “father before him” (117). The bird’s guaranteed annuity and lineage

are no small matters in a novel obsessed with the analysis of a juridical institution that

systematically and cruelly denies innocent humans money that is rightly their own. In

fact, the astonishing bird receives more consideration as a living being with real needs

and dependent on a source of income than many of the human victims of Chancery

Court’s interminable proceedings. Richard, Ada, Miss Flite, and so many other human

characters in the novel suffer real deprivations without access to funds that should be

theirs. Meanwhile, Boythorn’s affection for and appreciation of his bird means that the

bird will never suffer those same deprivations. Boythorn’s move, executed through legal

means, has the effect of transforming the canary from an objectified parlor decoration to

a living creature with more guaranteed rights than many of the human characters in the

text. He declares that his “phenomenal” bird is worthy of his respect, admiration, and a

lifetime annuity, and yet it is never made explicit why the bird is phenomenal, or what he

does to earn such acclaim from Boythorn. It is my contention that Boythorn’s feelings of

indebtedness result from the cover of domesticity the bird provides.

The canary of Bleak House, by simultaneously inhabiting his symbolic role as an

icon of ideal domesticity and his dynamic role as a sentient being, challenges but

ultimately reinforces the strength and sanctity of the Victorian home. By emphasizing

86
I take my cues from Boythorn; much to the frustration of my spellchecker, all references to the canary in
this chapter use “who,” “he,” and “him,” rather than “that” and “it.”
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Boythorn’s violence, the bird has the potential to expose his master’s unsuitability for

home life. Instead, however, Dickens underscores how the canary helps Boythorn conceal

that violence, stifling its explosive nature under soothing platitudes of non-threatening

masculinity and domestic happiness. Under his canary’s watchful gaze, Boythorn

navigates competing notions of “appropriate” masculinity and ultimately demonstrates

one version of how a man might be masterful and protective without resorting to abuse.

III. Count Fosco's "Pret-pret-pretties" in Collins's The Woman in White (1860)

In Bleak House, a pet canary ultimately allows characters and readers to sustain a

belief in the existence of an ideal domestic space. In The Woman in White, published

seven years later, the canaries do not provide such reassurance, instead emphasizing the

possibility that the home is as much the site of potential violence as any other location—

and perhaps is even more dangerous because that violence is persistently and deliberately

ignored and/or unrecognized. Such an emphasis should come as no surprise from a text

that has long been considered to be, at its core, focused on a disruption of conventional

domesticity. Collins’s novel was one of the founding texts of the genre of sensation

fiction, and it received almost unprecedented levels of critical and especially popular

attention in the years following its publication. Several scholars have focused on

Collins’s interventions into mid-century conversations about masculinity, claiming that

the author was wholly invested in replacing the popular ideal of male

muscularity/morality with a definition of manhood based in logic, reason, and even

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sensitivity.87 John Kucich describes how Collins believed that there was “an identity

crisis plaguing mid-Victorian men” (125), who—in the face of movements such as “the

cult of the ‘stiff upper lip’” and muscular Christianity—were increasingly criticized for

being overly effeminate and instead instructed to avoid emotional displays of any kind

(127). According to Kucich, The Woman in White is Collins’s attempt at a “renovation of

masculine ideals” (133), where Fosco is “a virile match for [leading male protagonist]

Hartright” (134) but is eventually found to be unfit: the villain’s brutality is ultimately no

match for Hartright’s sensitive, persistent, and insistently logic-based mind. Collins’s

most popular novel also debuted to Victorian audiences at the same time as Darwin’s

paradigm-shifting Origin of Species,88 thus placing it squarely within the heated debate

over the human/animal divide. When read in this context, Fosco’s canaries demonstrate

how Collins utilizes the dissolution of clear boundaries between humans and animals to

support his insistence on the dangers of strong-arm masculinity and domestic disruption.

At a basic level, the canaries in both novels are deployed similarly, using their

cultural cache as both domestic icons and perceptive beings to reveal the true moral fiber

of their owners. However, Collins depicts subtle differences in the ways in which the

canaries respond to Fosco—especially their unusually docile behavior and willingness to

do anything at their owner's request—which distinguish their depiction from that of

Dickens’s canary. The “astonishing bird” of Bleak House happily and casually consorts

with his owner, concealing the threat of Boythorn’s overt fury. In contrast, the birds of

87
See, for instance, Lara Karpenko’s “‘A Nasty Thumping at the Top of Your Head’: Muscularity,
Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone.”
88
Both Collins and Darwin saw their works published for the first time in November of 1859. Collins’s text
began its serialization in All the Year Round that month, while Darwin’s first edition of Origin was
published just days before Collins’s first installment.
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The Woman in White are characterized as highly trained and, above all, mastered animals

whose behaviors around their owner are carefully measured: this as a result of their sense

of Fosco’s inherent violence. Though the canaries in both novels have moments of

intimate engagement with their respective owners, the freedom that Boythorn’s canary

takes as his due is noticeably absent for Fosco’s birds. Whereas Boythorn's anger is

mitigated by his bird’s relaxed demeanor and almost dismissive reaction to the man’s

threats, Count Fosco’s suppressed violence is revealed through his birds’ constant

vigilance and urgent responsiveness to his supposedly affectionate and benign

commands.89

*****

Due to their involvement in Victorian discourses of domestication, throughout the

novel Fosco’s pet canaries provide the key for understanding the villain and his

controlling impulses as violent and animalistic, rather than “refined and educated” (321).

Fosco employs his so-called “quiet resolution” (321) with the birds, mastering them and

subsequently using them to signal the civilized veneer he works diligently to exude. But

against his intentions, Fosco's highly-trained canaries also signal his inherent savageness,

revealing his civilized demeanor to be the same sort of unnatural cover story as that of the

domesticated bird. Similarly, they challenge the larger cultural insistence on the reality of

the domestic ideal, pointing to the ways that wildness permeates the home, the ways that

animalistic behavior is not relegated solely to animals.

89
According to an August 1860 article in Once a Week, Count Fosco is not the only villain to be charmed
by pet canaries. The anonymous author of “Last Week” presents for the amusement of his/her readers a list
of the seemingly harmless, peaceable past times of notorious murderers. Among the examples is “Fouquier
Tinville,” who “used to amuse his leisure by the training of canaries” (n.p.). Tinville, Paris’s public
prosecutor during France’s late eighteenth-century Reign of Terror, was reputed to be one of the regime’s
most ruthless and immoral figures.
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 The various narrators of The Woman in White—including Fosco himself—depict

Count Fosco as an infinitely seductive man, controlling all those around him with a

combination of irresistible charm and unflinching power. He also exudes a sense of

inconsistency; Joyce L. Huff maintains that Victorian readers of The Woman in White as

well as that novel’s characters frequently insist that Fosco has “tensions and

contradictions in his character” (94) and is “conflicted in his identity” (95). Like

Boythorn, Fosco is described as a man of extremes, but unlike Dickens’s character, Fosco

attempts—ultimately unsuccessfully—to hide his aggression. In fact, that concealment is

what makes Fosco such a threatening presence to those in the Fairlie household. When

Marian Holcombe first meets Fosco, she is simultaneously attracted to and alarmed by

the obese Italian; although the allure of Fosco’s polished exterior is palpable, Marian

seems to know intuitively that he is not who he seems. But Fosco is also aware of his

potential for transparency, and so repeatedly throughout the novel he professes his love of

all things cultured and his absolute abhorrence of all things violent, as if to convince

himself as well as everyone else. Thus Marian incredulously details Fosco’s various

civilized pursuits: he has a “daring independence of thought, a knowledge of books in

every language, and an experience of society in half the capitals in Europe . . . This

trainer of canary-birds . . . [is] one of the first experimental chemists living . . . [and] he is

as fond of fine clothes as the veriest fool in existence” (Collins 220-21). His range is

astounding. Noting these characteristics, scholar Vicky Greenaway describes Fosco as an

“overdeveloped aesthete” whose “tastes are superficial and aesthetic: [he] connects

[himself] to high Society, and [has] a taste for luxury sweetmeats and the decadent

pastime of cigarette smoking” (Greenaway 48). Fosco himself cultivates this sense of

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extreme culture by demonstrating his squeamishness around acts or evidence of physical

violence, as if they deeply offend his civilized sensibilities. Marian insists that he “winces

when he sees a house-spaniel get a whipping” (Collins 220), and when he sees blood

under a bench in the boat-house,90 his hands shake and his face turns “a faint livid yellow

hue all over” (237). As much as possible, Fosco distances himself from violence,

showing those around him that both emotionally and physically he distains such

animalism.

This carefully cultivated façade of delicacy and refinement, however, suffers

frequent disruption as Fosco’s aggression bubbles to the surface.91 Marian declares that

Fosco “looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of

a woman, he would have tamed the tigress” (192). Later, Fosco insists on his ability to

control without resorting to physical violence as a way to stave off suspicions about his

inherently uncivilized penchant for cruelty. In a moment that clearly identifies him as a

threat to the sanctity of the domestic sphere, he explains to Sir Percival Glyde that there

are only two ways a man can manage a woman:

One way is to knock her down—a method largely adopted by the brutal

lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and

educated classes above them. The other way (much longer, much more

difficult, but, in the end, not less certain) is never to accept a provocation

at a woman’s hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it

holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet

90
The blood is left by Anne Catherick’s dying dog, a moment of foreshadowing for the violence yet to
befall Catherick herself.
91
For instance, later in the novel Fosco seems utterly unaffected by the drugging and bodily removal of
Laura and Anne, and he gladly offers to duel Walter after his hand is forced.
127
 resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all

fail in. if they can once shake this superior quality in their master, they get

the better of him. If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets the

better of them. (321)

This speech closely mirrors the position of many who spoke out against domestic

violence mid-century.92 Lisa Surridge explains that one of the most prominent ideological

positions of Victorians who sought to “solve the problem of wife assault” was defined by

its assumption that men were “women’s natural protectors” (48). Advocates, she claims,

“embraced a manly ideal combining authority with self-control, and sought greater

punishments for men who violated standards of masculinity by using violence against the

‘weaker sex’” (48). By so clearly aligning himself with such a perspective, Fosco aims to

distinguish his techniques as more civilized. But his controlling behaviors—his desire to

tame the humans and animals around him—are in actuality suffused with unspoken

violence. In fact, it is especially in the moments when he attempts to tame others that his

dangerous domination becomes clear; in Fosco’s hands (and more generally, we might

infer), domestication is a violent act.

As in Bleak House, the responsibility of narrating as well as interpreting the ways

in which canaries interact with their male owner is that of an intelligent, independent, and
92
It is also startlingly similar to a claim by William Kidd in Kidd’s Treatises on Song-Birds (1854), where
the author solemnly declares,
We do not pretend, like Bechstein and other modern writers on Birds, to show how our
poor, confined little prisoners can be starved and tortured into tameness. Neither do we
(like them) particularise with savage delight how they may be snared, trapped, and
inveigled into prisons of iron and wood; there to pine in misery, and reflect (for birds
have very retentive memories) on the happiness of earlier days. Far other is our object;
we would rule by love only. Fear is a tyrannical oppressor. (xiv-xv)
And like Fosco, who, as will be shown, cannot help but contradict his own position, Kidd—only a few
pages later in the canary manual—explains that “We would not, were it in our power to prevent it, have any
bird (excepting the Canary which is a lawful and happy captive) deprived of its liberty” (20, italics my
own).
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unmarried young woman.93 Marian Holcombe, like Esther, can speak authoritatively

about the cultural implications of canaries’ behavior because of her role as this paragon

of domestic stability. Whereas Dickens’s Esther is overwhelmingly figured as an angel in

the house, however, with only occasional behavioral traits that subtly complicate notions

of that ideal, Collins’s Marian distinguishes herself by frequently and aggressively

challenging the notion that a woman’s place is in the home. Ultimately, however, despite

lingering unconventional characteristics, Marian (like Esther) becomes locked into her

role as the consistent provider of all things domestic—a moral center who can be relied

upon to provide emotional and physical comfort for her family. Regardless of her

sometimes unconventional behaviors, Walter and Laura rely heavily on Marian as their

moral and domestic guide, and so these characters confidently accept her interpretations

of Fosco’s latent violence. Thus, her assessment of the man—triggered in large part by

her observation of his canaries—becomes the backbone of the novel’s characterization of

Fosco’s villainy.

Fosco considers his menagerie of pets as an important component of his civilized

façade: a group consisting of canaries, mice, and a cockatoo which acts as yet another

symbol of the “proper” way of living. Marian declares that his “extraordinary fondness

for pet animals” is one of his “most curious peculiarities” (219), and yet she admits that

his predilection also has the effect of making him seem as gentle and non-threatening as

an old maid or an organ-boy (220). Fosco himself, Marian imagines, would consider

others who do not share his love of pets “barbarians” (220). Such cultural awareness of

93
The following chapter, which explores the relationships between women and their pet canaries in several
American texts, will deal much more extensively with the implications of the woman/canary
communications identified in passing here.
129
pets’ civilizing properties would have been common knowledge for most Victorians; in

Domesticated Animals: Their Relation to Man and to His Advancement in Civilization

(1895), for instance, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler matter-of-factly states that “the most

important product of humans’ custodial relationships with animals was the development

of the psychological qualities essential to civilization” (as paraphrased in Mason 18).

Marian, however, finds there to be something incongruous about Fosco’s relationship

with canaries and all these civilized characteristics. He appears uncannily aware of when

he is being observed and works to make the most of such observations, turning his

interactions with the birds into strategic performances.94 Fosco self-consciously uses

these shows to demonstrate his iron will, which is supposedly all that entices the canaries

to sing and hop.

Marian writes an account of Fosco’s seemingly innocuous pastime of playing

with his canaries, explaining in her journal, “He has only to set the doors of the canaries’

cages open, and call them; and the pretty little cleverly trained creatures perch fearlessly

on his hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one, when he tells them to ‘go up-

stairs’, and sing together as if they would burst their throats with delight, when they get to

the top finger” (220). Here, as in Bleak House, the birds are referred to as creatures,

signaling that they are meant to be understood as living beings rather than symbols. For

some reason that Marian cannot fully express, the corpulent aesthete’s gentle interactions

with the tiny yellow birds overwhelm any appreciation of his finer social talents, and

94
For instance, when Marian is discovered on the road by Fosco only moments after she attempts to send a
letter of appeal to the Fairlie family lawyer, she exclaims, “I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in
the breakfast-room” (292). Fosco replies that she is correct, but that he had been unable to resist joining her
for a walk and had had his wife re-cage them while he hurried out after her. Immediately, Marian
recognizes that Fosco’s show was orchestrated in order to lull her into a sense of security that he might not
discover her efforts.
130
instead lead her to feel threatened. Of course, the scene could be depicted as something

comical, but instead the room is filled with tension. Though the behaviors described are

charming, even some of the language Marian uses to describe the event signals violence;

at his command, the birds sing to “burst their throats,” ascribing to Fosco a willingness to

order such destruction. Marian picks up on the underlying discourse of barely-restrained

wildness and animality that particularly characterizes the domesticated canary in the

nineteenth century. These canaries, though seemingly mastered by their doting Fosco, are

prisoners, under the guise of euphemistic domesticity. Canaries left to their own devices

are the “destroyers of life” depicted by Darwin and manual authors: in Marian’s account,

potentially even turning that violence on themselves. Thus also, Victorians like Newman

and Dickens would argue, is the danger of masculine aggression in the home: a constant

potential for disruption of the ideal.

The plight of these birds transfers directly to Fosco, who is revealed, in their

presence, to be a man barely in control of his instinctual desire for violence. Much as

Boythorn and his canary are figured as parallel, often deeply similar creatures in a

complicated process of relationality, so too are Fosco and his canaries understood to be

animals cut from the same inherently violent cloth. The canaries are caged throughout the

novel, whether literally or conceptually, as they are let out of those cages to perform the

precise tricks and songs that their master demands. In fact, when the birds are let out of

their cages their domesticity is asserted even more strongly, as they still behave according

to Fosco’s strict rules of tameness without any physical bars of the cage to guide or force

them. Their bodies and their actions are constantly governed by human-imposed rules of

domesticity. Similarly, Fosco must remain trapped in his own symbolic “cage”; as Walter

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discovers at the end of the novel, in order to hide from his violent past Fosco constructs a

prison out of his corpulent body, gilding the bars with bon bons and fancy clothes. Walter

surmises that Fosco took pains to orchestrate a dramatic “change in his appearance” in

order to escape detection from the Brotherhood, altering his face, hair, and body weight

(579). Similarly, Joyce L. Huff speculates that Fosco “exploits fat stereotypes as part of

his disguise” (Huff 99), using his body as a “form of costume that he has donned in order

to evade discovery by his political enemies” (94). This physical manipulation vividly

calls to mind the breeding techniques described in contemporary canary manuals, where

fanciers demonstrated their “skill” by mating canaries with the explicit purpose of

creating extreme physiques. Robert Wallace, for instance, claims that the “beau ideal” of

a Belgian canary was one that is “so exceedingly slender, that it gave anyone the idea that

it could be passed through a lady’s gold ring” (Wallace 213). The canaries were

disfigured in violently extreme ways in order to emphasize more clearly their ultra-

civilized nature—Wallace describes it as a “decided appearance of hauteur in . . . manner

and bearing” (226)—removing any traces of wildness and replacing them with hopelessly

ornamental feathered tufts and angled necks. Similarly, Fosco’s fatness and fashion are

his desperate attempts to quite literally conceal his identity as a traitor and dangerous

man: an identity that would guarantee his immediate death. This cage is dictated by

cultural demands, fashioned with all the elements of conventional civilized society in an

attempt to allow Fosco to survive.

Ironically, the canaries that he thinks he uses are in fact exposing his own

violence through their complicated relationship with domestication. In light of his

supposedly tame pets’ natural inclination toward violence, Fosco’s own claims to

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civilized behavior and abhorrence of violence become suspect as well. Nowhere are the

villain’s and birds’ narratives placed more in tandem than in the moments when Marian

surreptitiously observes Fosco’s private amusements with his canaries. Sequestered

within the library, Fosco’s gentle admonishments filter out through the open door and

provide Marian with a new appreciation of his character. She reports in her diary that “I

heard him, through the door, as I ran up-stairs, ten minutes since, exercising his canary-

birds at their tricks:—‘Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties! Come out, and

hop up-stairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and down! One, two, three—

twit-twit-twit-tweet!’ The birds burst into the usual return, as if he was a bird himself”

(Collins 267, italics my own).95 This last statement, in which Marian effectively, albeit

momentarily, erases the species distinction between man and birds, demonstrates how the

canaries help Marian understand Fosco as an animal who, like the canaries he tames, is

mastered by expectations of civilized existence, but just barely. These parallels illustrate

the ways in which Fosco’s captive canaries help to articulate how the villain

simultaneously conveys and rejects civilized existence.

There is a subtle yet palpable threat of aggression in Fosco’s mastery that does

more to convince his targets, be they animal or human, that obedience is crucial. Canaries

continue to expose this characteristic for Fosco in a variety of situations, following (along

with) him literally—perched on his fingers—and figuratively—as Marian frequently

describes Fosco in relation to the birds. For instance, an encounter between the villain

95
Here Collins engages in some gentle satire of bird-owners in the nineteenth century. Fosco coos at his
canaries and makes himself sound otherwise ridiculous while playing with the birds, inevitably calling to
mind men like care manual author Rev. Francis Smith, whose text opens with a “Plea for the Canary,”
essentially an overly earnest love letter to the songbirds. Dickens also participates in this satire, as seen in
his depiction of Boythorn’s enthusiastic endorsement of his own canary.
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and a dog known for its viciousness reveals Fosco’s own viciousness, and the connection

to the discourse of domesticated canaries is made explicit as Fosco’s touch is conferred

from the small birds to the large dog: he puts his hand, “on which the canary-birds had

been perching ten minutes before,” on the “formidable brute’s” head. Then begins his

mastery: “‘You big dogs are all cowards,’ he said, addressing the dog contemptuously,

with his face and the dog’s within an inch of each other. ‘You would kill a poor cat, you

infernal coward. Anything that you can surprise unawares—anything that is afraid of

your big body, and your wicked white teeth, and your slobbering, bloodthirsty mouth, is

the thing you like to fly at” (221). Fosco does not seem to pick up on some of the

similarities that emerge between the dog’s supposed viciousness and his own brutish

violence, such as their “big bodies,” threatening smile, and mutual propensity to pick on

creatures weaker than themselves. His condemnation of the dog seems to foreshadow the

“uncivilized” methods of mastery he will use in the near future, once his civilized

attempts fail.

Most notably—and most pertinent to Victorian concerns about domestic

violence—the canaries reveal the violence of Fosco’s mastery of his wife. Madame Fosco

was once, according to Marian, “one of the most impertinent women I ever met with—

capricious, exacting, and vain to the last degree of absurdity” (190). But now, apparently,

Fosco has tamed her to bend to his every will. Marian incredulously describes how “His

management of the Countess (in public) is a sight to see. He bows to her; he habitually

addresses her as ‘my angel’; he carries his canaries to pay her little visits on his fingers,

and to sing to her . . . The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in

company—it is a private rod, and it is always kept upstairs” (222). The Count himself

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refers proudly to his wife’s “unhesitating devotion of herself to the fulfillment of my

boldest wishes, to the furtherance of my deepest plans” and attributes them to his

character, asking, “Where, in the history of the world, has a man of my order ever been

found without a woman in the background, self-immolated on the altar of his life” (612).

Here, Fosco points proudly to the implicit violence and destructiveness of the domestic

ideal, which demands that women sacrifice themselves for their husbands: the crux of the

issue for those Victorians working to end domestic violence. The seemingly innocuous

canary visits Fosco orchestrates are in fact serious lessons in domestication; the birds sing

to Madame Fosco, demonstrating how she must properly perform her domestic role.

Indeed, Marian describes how the subdued wife frequently gives her husband “the look of

mute submissive inquiry which we are all familiar with in the eyes of a faithful dog”

(216). These canary visits also, however, reveal Fosco to be a “wife beater.” Marian’s

train of thought moves from the canary visits immediately to Fosco’s “rod of iron”; in

every reference to domestication is an implicit understanding of violence. This

association resonates in nineteenth-century canary manuals, which advocated specific

forms of abuse in order to tame and shape the birds, as well as in cultural prescriptions

for men’s roles as masters of the domestic sphere. Fosco’s rod also directly contradicts

his own philosophy of mastery, in which he had insisted that he never needs to resort to

brute force, especially with women; Marian makes clear that he does, in fact, use such

force on his wife. Madame Fosco’s willing “self-immolation” directly connects to the

similarly destructive habit of Fosco’s canaries to “burst their throats” with singing: all

inspired by the very real violence implied in Fosco’s efforts at mastery. And like the

once-wild birds, Madame Fosco seems to harbor a remnant of her untamed past. Marian

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reveals that she has seen expressions on the woman’s face that “led me to suspect that her

present state of suppression may have sealed up something dangerous in her nature”

(216). Thus, the canaries—through their ability to stand for as well as expose a variety of

meanings—create tangible connections between discourses of animality, masculinity, and

domesticity.

IV. Domestic Violence and Violent Domestication

Through their consideration of violent men and visionary canaries, Bleak House

and The Woman in White illustrate a spectrum of ways in which Victorians attempted to

digest and make palatable the new rules of engagement for human/animal relations, as

posited by evolutionary theory. The birds point to one of the most significant

consequences of rethinking human exceptionality: the reconceptualization of violence as

an inherent characteristic of all living creatures in all spaces, rather than merely an

uncivilized practice enacted by the Other and/or “the animal.” Dickens’s and Collins’s

related but differently-approached narratives thus make clear Victorians’ anxieties about

and resultant attempts to excise that violence, whether it be through willful ignorance—as

in the case of Esther and Jarndyce, who happily disregard Boythorn’s brutality—or

through force—as in the case of Walter and Marian, who rely on resources both legal and

extra-legal to remove Fosco.

However, we must be cautious about accepting the interventions into cultural

anxieties about violence reached by these novelists; a return to Derrida reminds us of the

dangers of such strategies. For Derrida, unlike Darwin, focuses on a violence that is cruel

and unusual, rather than necessary and natural: a violence that is created by humans’

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persistent attempts to separate themselves from nonhuman animals in an act of disavowal

and denigration. It is this “war of the species” that motivates Dickens’s and Collins’s

efforts to identify and excise violence from the home, even as they simultaneously

allow—to varying degrees—that it does exist. But Victorians’ stubbornly persistent

claims to the existence of conventional domesticity were infinitely more brutal than

anything such efforts attempted to conceal, stripping women of their voices and rights

and ignoring blatant examples of cruelty and abuse. Fosco’s latent brutality is a

disturbing, but emphatically not isolated, example of the violence that continuously

disrupts the serenity of the domestic sphere in The Woman in White. Threats, physical

and mental abuse, kidnapping, drugging, torture, and even murder: these are the dangers

that characters like Walter, Marian, Laura, and Anne encounter at home, causing them to

be trapped and terrorized by the boundaries that supposedly exist for their protection.

And although Dickens ultimately closes Bleak House with a scene of idyllic domesticity,

scholars have pointed to numerous examples of the novel’s pronounced ambivalence or

even skepticism of those unrealistically perfect conventions.96

Canaries function as a perfect nexus of Darwin’s and Derrida’s conceptions of

violence.97 As once-wild birds, they constantly signal the inherent violence of all living

creatures that resists even the most concerted efforts of civilization (and/or disavowal).
96
Foremost among these examples is that of Esther, whose complex narration at once depicts her as an
eager domestic angel-in-training and an intellectual whose fierce independence is stifled by that training.
The maternal neglect and emotional abuse perpetrated by both Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle—who
ignore their children’s needs in favor of tending to “greater” social issues such as sending aid to
Boorioboola Gha or forcing religion on the “savage” lower classes—is often read as an example of
Dickens’s conservatism, a warning of the dangers of women who are not perfect angels in the house.
However, the situations also point to the fragility of the domestic sphere and the potential for dangerous
circumstances that come from pinning the entire success of such an institution on an impossible ideal.
97
For alternate considerations of intersections between the two theorists, see Colin Nazhone Milburn,
“Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida” MLN 118 (April 2003): 603-621 and Linda Williams, “Darwin
and Derrida on Human and Animal Emotions: The Question of Shame as a Measure of Ontological
Difference” New Formations 76 (2012): 21-39.
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But as victims of vicious, human-perpetrated domestication, canaries also bear the marks

of Derridean disavowal. Their grotesquely distorted bodies, wildly excessive plumage,

and resultant physical frailty serve as visible warnings of a violence that is specific to the

impulse to domesticate. In the chapter that follows, I pursue this claim of violent

domestication as it appears in postbellum American texts by women writers, examining

their acts of literary revenge against canaries meant to articulate the very real violence

that women face as victims of social demands of domesticity.

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 Chapter 4

“She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”: The Violence of Interspecies Relationships

in Women’s Rights Narratives

William Merritt Chase’s 1886 painting The Pet

Canary (Figure 6) depicts a lovely yet decidedly

ambivalent domestic scene of interspecies affection: a girl

of about ten holds a small gilded bird cage and stares

solemnly at the yellow canary perched within it.98 The

child’s sedate rose-colored dress, sturdy black shoes, and

serious features convey a gravity and poise beyond her

years. Behind the girl and her pet is a large window

overlooking greenery, and elaborate lace curtains frame the

pair, softening the scene and conveying a distinctive sense

of wealth. One might easily interpret the painting as

emblematic of idealized domestic serenity; the girl and

Figure 6. William Merritt Chase, The Pet
canary bask in each other’s sweetness and inspire others to (1886). www.wikiart.org, public domain

aspire to similar conditions. Just as easily, though, one might detect in the scene a sense

of melancholy or resignation. The young girl—regarding her pet with a curious

expression of weariness—lacks the vivacity of youth. The sitting bird also seems lifeless,

98
For the British version of this tableau, see Pre-Raphaelite artist Walter Howell Deverell’s painting A Pet
(1853). Other contemporary depictions of melancholy women and their pet canaries include William Frith,
The Canary (1865); D. G. Rossetti, Veronica Veronese (1872); Henry Tonks, The Birdcage (1907);
Frederick Carl Friseke, The Bird Cage (1910); Karl Albert Buehr, A Pledge of Love (1912); and William
McGregor Paxton, The Canary (1913).
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uncharacteristically still. Both creatures are repeatedly bound: confined by either

restrictive clothes or inflexible bars, they are framed thrice-over, first by the window,

then by the carpet and curtains, and finally by the painting’s own close edges. These

stifling conditions appear in sharp relief to the verdant trees and landscape outside the

window. Chase’s painting, precariously balanced between contentment and

imprisonment, epitomizes America’s fascination with the bond between a woman and her

pet canary. More specifically, the scene gestures to Americans’ disillusionment with the

discourse of the beloved pet canary, entangled as it was with similar increasingly-stale

assertions of conventional domesticity and feminine dependency. It is to these conditions

of exhaustion that my final chapter now turns.

Put quite simply, in the aftermath of the Civil War canaries began to lose their

charm. In “Animal Angst,” Teresa Mangum emphasizes the range of “unique and

distinctive sensations” that “animals that could be imagined as pets” could evoke in their

human companions: “from deliberate avoidance to guilt, dread, fury, longing, deep

personal attachment, sentimental idealization, and anthropomorphism” (16). Americans’

imaginative conceptions of the canary throughout the postbellum period provides a

stunning example of this phenomenon. Though the transatlantic trade in canaries

prospered and even grew, though bird manuals continued to tout the collectable appeal of

the pets, and though many American homes continued to feature canaries as standard

parlor ornaments, the bird’s “new” and most insistent image was that of the worn-out

warbler: a melancholy prisoner and/or a tragic victim of intense domestic pressure and

abusive male power. The discourse of the canary—like its closely-linked ideologies of

the sacred private sphere and the angel in the house—had grown stale, even transparent.

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Americans, it seemed, were no longer seduced by the birds’ guileless charisma and

endearing evocation of all things domestic. Thus, in a variety of postbellum cultural and

literary texts, representations of canaries transformed: their cheer was replaced by

despair, their happy naïveté by soul-crushing awareness. Many texts also depicted this

forlorn creature as a deeply embodied, suffering being: recognizing the prisoner’s pain in

a way that resulted in newfound appreciation for the bird’s subjectivity. In Animalia

Americana, Colleen Glenney Boggs claims that animal representations are “a complex

site where the construction of subjectivity occurs by affective means and pedagogical

methods that hinge on the literal relationship to animals and on their figurative

representation” (2). Similarly, though postbellum conversations remained heavily

committed to conceptions of the canary as a representative figure, authors’ emphases on

physicality allowed for eruptions of sentience to subtly reconfigure the landscape of the

discourse, articulating new forms of female subjectivity.99 In this way, textual

articulations of canaries’ symbolic resonance became intimately connected to notions of

sentience and the biological experiences of animals.

Authors expressed feelings of ambivalence over their complicity in recording this

transformation, at once acknowledging the regrettable necessity of articulating the dismal

turn while simultaneously reveling in an implicit and perverse enjoyment of the canary’s

fall from grace. Women writers, especially, indulged in violent renderings of canaries’

domestic impotence and irrelevance, celebrating the end of an era of unattainable

femininity while also demonstrating the bodily dangers that both sustaining and ending

99
Many of these ideas of canaries’ embodied experiences were, at that same historical moment, coalescing
into progressive understandings of sentience by members of the mining industry. See Chapter One or
Burton, “Risking Life and Wing: Victorian and Edwardian Conceptions of Coal Mine Canaries” in
Victorian Review 40.2 (2014).
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those beliefs might entail. Unsurprisingly, then, the canary’s new deployment was most

readily appropriated by activists in the women’s rights movement and, as I will argue

here, it became indicative of a larger social concern with how Americans might

appropriately discern and respond to the suffering of subjugated beings, both human and

nonhuman.100

In this chapter I chart the evidence and effects of the canary’s ideological decay as

they were adopted by cultural and literary expressions of women’s rights in the years

between the Civil and Great Wars. I argue that fictional accounts of the woman/canary

relationship in texts by Lillie Devereux Blake, Susan Glaspell, and María Amparo Ruiz

de Burton reflect and dramatize—sometimes in deeply unsettling ways—a larger cultural

weariness, and even disgust, with the birds and their traditional symbolic baggage. Like

Chase’s The Pet, which moodily cloaks the moment of encounter between girl and bird in

shadows and seriousness, all three of these fictional accounts testify to the postbellum

period’s extraordinary shift in contemporary attitudes toward canaries in particular, and

femininity, domesticity, and violence more generally. Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874),

Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), and Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought

It? (1872) similarly invoke the figure of the caged canary to decisively condemn the lack

of opportunities and rights afforded to women in postbellum American society. The

female characters who own these birds are worn-out, unfulfilled, and mentally and/or

100
Closely related to these concerns, this shift in canary-conception also reflects intensifying post-war
conversations about the perceived benefits and pitfalls of increased American urbanization. Some
postbellum authors—especially those working in the naturalist genre—translated their fears about the
stifling conditions of the domestic and the threat of industrial/urban decay through the glorification of the
wilderness, articulating ideals of independence, bravery, and adventure through narratives of decidedly
undomesticated human and nonhuman animals. Certain authors’ accounts of canaries as freedom-deprived,
weary representatives of failed domestic ideology, then, participate in this impulse and demonstrate how
discussions of human rights and animal ethics figured heavily into more geographical discourses of
evolving American identity.
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physically abused, and they visualize their own suffering through their canary

companions.

However, neither Blake nor Glaspell imagines a viable alternative for their

struggling human and nonhuman characters outside of their prescribed social roles. Both

Fettered for Life and “A Jury of Her Peers” depict continued despair, if not death, for

their female protagonists, and their canaries die violently and for nothing: producing no

greater effects, engendering no potential for change or hope, and ultimately failing to

reinvent their cultural caché beyond the tired trope of the traditional. Blake’s and

Glaspell’s exhaustion with the canary/domesticity discourse creates a depressive effect on

their very acts of literary invention and ideological imagination.101 Though the suffering

in their texts is articulated in dramatic and compelling ways, it simply remains.

Ruiz de Burton, on the other hand, articulates a future of opportunity and

independence through her character’s violent rejection of conventional feminine behavior

that is shockingly ahead of its time: a call to arms of sorts that anticipates feminist claims

of the late twentieth century. In Who Would’ve Thought It?, the female protagonist

responds to stifling domestic conditions with action, taking her future and happiness into

her own hands instead of perpetuating a convention of feminine helplessness (à la Blake

and Glaspell). By methodically murdering her own canaries—ostensibly for their own

good—Lavinia facilitates her own escape from the private sphere and avoids the dismal

life of suffering and stasis forecast by so many other contemporary renderings of the

trapped woman and the caged canary. Already hailed as an unconventional and even

101
Additionally, this hopelessness mirrors larger contemporary sentiments of frustration toward the
seeming inevitability of urbanization: many Americans believed that, just as there was no real alternative to
the increasing encroachment of city life and industrialization, so too was there ultimately no real alternative
to the confines of the domestic—especially for women.
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idiosyncratic author,102 Ruiz de Burton further establishes this reputation through her

radical reimagining of the woman/canary relationship.

I. “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”: Metaphors of Imprisonment and Hopelessness

For much of the nineteenth century, Americans maintained that women and

canaries were “naturally associated” (“A Gossip about Canaries”), sharing an affinity for

each other that far surpassed most other human/domestic animal relationships. This

relationship was closest in kind to that which was believed to exist between a man and his

dog; the canary, one might easily say, was understood to be woman’s best friend. Ladies’

magazines ran a constant stream of articles on the joys of canary ownership, bird manuals

explicitly targeted female readers, literary texts, artwork, and even music generated an

abundance of examples of women cooing to, kissing, and caressing their canaries. Prior

to the tumultuous political and social changes of midcentury, authors primarily described

their bond as a celebration of conventional domesticity. Because both women and

canaries were believed to be docile, beautiful, and moral creatures, they apparently

instinctually preferred each other’s company. An article in The Sunday Inter Ocean

(Chicago) notes that canaries “seem to have a great deal of affection for the fair sex under

all circumstances, and if they have a favored member in the household it will generally be

found that it is a woman with a pleasant voice” (“About Canary Birds”). Texts enthused

that wives, mothers, and spinsters enjoyed and benefitted from the birds’ generous

affection more than any of the most ardent breeders or pet owners, as canaries could act

102
See, for instance, Rosaura Sánchez’s and Beatrice Pita’s “Introduction” to the 1995 Arte Público Press
edition of Who Would Have Thought It?.
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as emotional and physical surrogates for husbands and children: presumably filling voids

left by neglectful spouses and errant offspring or easing the ache of a life without family.

Authors and artists most frequently

depicted this surrogacy by insisting on

women’s constant physical entanglement with

their birds. Cultural documents endlessly

reiterated married and unmarried women’s

tendency to train their canaries to “kiss”

them, encouraging their canaries to peck at

bits of food placed between their lips, or even

in their mouths.103 (Figure 7) One periodical

author relates how she coquettishly tempted

her canary, admitting that “I sometimes held a

little piece of bread in my mouth; and then he

would sit on my shoulder, and pick crumbs

from it as I turned my face around to him”

Figure 7. “The Pet Canary.” Frank Leslie’s
Popular Monthly VI.4 (October 1878): 412.
American Periodicals Online. (“The Tame Canary”). Not surprisingly,

these interactions often register—at least to modern readers—as sexual.104 As

demonstrated by this pet owner’s flirtatious turn, women happily confessed to engaging

in unusually-forward, even provocative, behaviors to entice their birds. And these acts

103
This dynamic was intensified by the fact that most pet canaries were male. Adding to the conceit, one of
the most popular names for male canaries was Dick, or Dicky.
104
See, for instance, an anonymous British poet’s desire to experience the presumed “rapture” of a canary
who, he jealously notes, is “Perch’d on Mary’s dainty hand . . . and now carest, / To her lips in fondness
prest” (Poetaster).
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were not limited to kissing. One anonymous female contributor to a Chicago newspaper

describes how one of her canaries “thought nothing of trotting about on my head and

shoulders, and even hopped under my throat to nestle against my chin” (“How to Pet

Canaries”). And in 1878, a Mrs. Mary Spring Walker readily revealed to a national

newspaper that she and her canary often slept together, explaining that when she “lay

down . . . he came to pay me a visit, and more than once I have taken a morning nap with

my bird perched on my finger” (6). Most texts never acknowledged any semblance of

sexuality in these encounters, however, choosing instead to focus on how such

relationships reinforced women’s status as affectionate, loving, home-based creatures.

Cultural texts also depicted canaries—prized for their playfulness and cheerful

dispositions—as ideal substitutes for children. Mrs. M. E. C. Farwell, author of Common

Sense in the Care of the Canary (1886), earnestly asks her readers to “Study [canaries],

dear friends, and see if you can liken them to any other than a lot of riotous, laughing,

scrambling, merry-hearted school-children!” (108). Manual authors encouraged women

to nurture these child-like creatures, extending their maternal impulses with the

expectation that these birds would repay their efforts. William Kidd, whose canary

treatises were quoted extensively by American bird fanciers, thus begs his (largely

female) readership to “remember to keep them in every respect as clean, and give them as

much change of air and scene as you would your own children. They will render you in

return the affection of a child” (48-49). Texts emphasized that the reciprocity of these

relationships in fact made canary-rearing more satisfying and instantly gratifying than the

relatively thankless work of child-rearing. And for childless women—especially

spinsters, who were routinely mocked for their inability to achieve basic tenets of

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womanhood—canaries figured as companions who could help ease the supposed ache of

unrealized maternal love.105 The narrator of “A Coquette’s Caution,” for instance,

ruefully admits that, after years of scorning potential lovers, she now “sit[s] in lone

despair” and bestows her pent-up “love and care / On kittens and canaries” (l. 10-12).

Though the poem insists that this pitiable woman mishandled her social obligation to

acquire a husband, it also implicitly demonstrates—through her affection for her

animals—her ability to successfully perform basic characteristics of womanhood.

Like the aforementioned scenes of interspecies kissing, these depictions of

intimate relationships between women and canaries reinforced conditions of

conventionality, even in less-than-ideal circumstances. In these ways, authors singled out

canaries as uniquely suited to women’s needs, causing one journalist to exclaim that “It is

one of the cardinal points in the average woman’s faith that a canary bird adds to the

happiness and joyousness of life . . . She will cheerfully part with her last pin money to

buy a bird” (The Daily Picayune 4). Women could provide canaries with an abundance of

food, shelter, and care; canaries, in turn, offered entertainment, preferential treatment,

comfort, and—above all—elements of conventionality to their doting mistresses.106

But in the years following the Civil War, women’s rights activists capitalized on

and rewrote this traditional relationship between woman and canary, invoking the bird’s

reputed closeness (figuratively, emotionally, and physically) to women to promote their

105
Authors routinely caricatured the figure of the spinster by depicting her as excessively fond of her
pets—most frequently, canaries, poodles, or cats. For example, an article in an 1872 edition of Every
Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading describes the typical American old maid as a woman “who rears
canaries, hawks scandal, does crochet-work, and attends every service” (Taine 157).
106
American bird manual author Mary S. Wood, for instance, rapturously insists that a woman can even
“hold converse with” canaries (viii), emphasizing the supposed reciprocity of such interspecies interactions.
147
agenda of equality.107 It was in this significant shift in ideological purpose that the canary

began to lose its charm. Integral to this rewriting was a firm denial of one of canaries’

previously most-valued qualities: their exemplification of and ability to confer

conventionality. With vivid, often pathos-laden imagery, activists’ revisions used caged

canaries to signify the tragedy of domestication—how, through relentless, soul-crushing

cruelty, imprisonment in the home permanently rendered its victims helpless, passive,

and forever unable to escape. Activists approached this reappropriation of the canary

from several angles. One popular strategy was to depict the canary as a pathetically

deluded victim of domesticity, a prisoner who stubbornly—and erroneously—insists on

his or her happiness behind bars. In this way, audiences could witness and come to

understand their own delusions through an extension of sympathy for or even

identification with the misguided canaries. The anonymous author of an 1898 article in

The Milwaukee Journal, for example, bemoans young women’s lack of independence by

comparing them to pet canaries, lamenting, “Poor little creatures, caged by custom and

with wings clipped by prejudice, no wonder they lose the instinct of soaring aloft and are

content behind their gilded wires” (“Society’s ‘Caged Canaries’”). The author’s explicit

identification of the problems of domestication—characterized here as a widely-

implemented phenomenon applied without distinction to human and nonhuman animals

alike—advocates for women’s rights as well as a more generalized sense of the

importance of living creatures’ birthright of freedom.

107
Scholars have firmly established the many intersections between discourses of women’s and animals’
rights in the nineteenth century. Martin A. Danahay, for instance, explains that women “frequently
identified with domestic animals as the victims of violence. When advocating women’s rights . . . writers
would often link the status of women as the property of their husbands to that of domestic animals” (100).
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 One of the most popular iterations of this strategy is found in the 1903 music hall

song “Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird,” written by prolific composer Clarence Wainwright

Murphy and recorded by a series of well-known singers, both female and male.108

(Audio) Nostalgic yet resolutely progressive, the lyrics tenderly recount a wild sparrow’s

last rendezvous with her beloved domestic canary, testifying to the difficult but

courageous sacrifice she must make to preserve her freedom. In her attempts to convince

the “spoiled and petted” male canary that the cage is no place for any animal, the female

sparrow—channeling the discourse of women’s rights—insists that she would

rather brave the cold

On a leafless tree

Than a prisoner be

In a cage of gold.

Unconvinced, the canary counters that there are distinct “advantages of riches and of

gold” to be found in domesticity, and he happily, though misguidedly, chooses the

security of his cage over personal freedom and the love of the sparrow. The song,

structured around its sad farewell refrain—“Goodbye, little yellow bird”—emphatically

reads as both a turn to women’s rights as well as society’s regretful but firm rejection of

the traditional and timeworn image of the canary. The birds in the song are explicitly

aligned with contemporary American narratives of identity and progress that favored

independence and the pioneer spirit over established wealth and bloodlines; the

independent-minded sparrow is described as an adventure-seeking creature who is most

108
Though widely-known and enjoyed at the turn of the century, this song reached its height of popularity
after appearing in the film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), where it was sung by Angela
Lansbury.
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happy when wild and free, while the ultimately-unappealing canary is a presumptuous

bird with objectionable “blood so blue.” The canary, along with its old-fashioned ideals

of indulgent, opulent, and noxiously sedate domesticity, is outmoded, failing to represent

the pluck and self-reliance of Americans, and especially American women.

A second and often more dramatic strategy activists used was to reimagine the

canary as intensely aware of—rather than indifferent to or ignorant of—the privations of

imprisonment. Authors would pair the narratives of a captive bird and an ill-treated

woman, collapsing the levels of distinction between the plights of woman and animal in

order to heighten and make explicit the intensity of their suffering. For instance, a short

story published in an 1891 Kansas newspaper relates how a canary’s “little heart panted

for freedom, after all these years, and she beat her poor bosom against the cruel wires

until it was bruised and bleeding. O, to be free, free! But all in vain the desire, so she

sunk down, prone, suffering, crushed” (“Why the Canary Sings”).109 The vivid

metonymic imagery of this article transforms the bodies of both canaries and women:

instead of being cast as peaceful, affectionate beings, the conflated bird/woman of this

story suffers violently, desperately striving away from—but ultimately unable to

escape—the expectations of domestic serenity.

This technique of emphasizing awareness also found expression in contemporary

popular music. Harry Von Tilzer and Arthur Lamb’s ballad “She’s Only a Bird in a

109
Similar, though less specific, comparisons between women and birds were made even more frequently.
In “Wife Torture in England” (1878), for instance, Irish suffragist and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power
Cobbe declared about male abusers that “in the hands of such a man a woman’s heart must be crushed, like
the poor bird under his heel.”
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Gilded Cage” (1900)110 sold millions due in large part to lyrics that hit home with a

generation of women.111 (Audio) The chorus of the song—which narrates the tragic life

and death of a kept young woman who marries for money through metonymic

comparison with a caged bird—mournfully waltzes,

She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,

A beautiful sight to see,

You may think she’s happy and free from care,

She’s not, though she seems to be,

’Tis sad when you think of her wasted life,

For youth cannot mate with age,

And her beauty was sold,

For an old man’s gold,

She’s a bird in a gilded cage.

The text captures the contradictory nature of the bird/woman’s compelled domestication,

identifying the hypocrisy of a beautiful—and socially-constructed—domestic veneer that

hides a wellspring of grief. The pathos of this song derives from the bird/woman’s stifled

suffering, a loss of love and opportunity (“her wasted life”) that is intensified by society’s

failure to recognize and validate that loss. Written, appropriately, at the end of America’s

Gilded Age, the song makes concrete connections between canary discourse and larger

social conversations of the dangers of decadent deceit. Like “Good-bye, Little Yellow

110
Though the song does not specify what type of songbird the woman resembles, gold, or gilded, cages
were most often reserved for canaries, as they were thought to complement the birds’ traditional bright
yellow coloring.
111
Von Tilzer reportedly claimed that upon performing it for the first time in public, he was shocked to see
several women in the audience weeping in empathy (Reublin).
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Bird,” “She’s Only a Bird” echoes conversations about the corrupted, unfulfilling nature

of society’s supposedly most highly civilized and elite upper class. Though the woman in

question “lives in a mansion grand” and is “fashion’s queen,” we hear that these lavish

accomplishments exacerbate, rather than ease, her heartache. As such, the ballad

unapologetically invokes canary imagery in order to identify and condemn problematic

expectations of social ascendency and class status that destroy women.

The desolate canaries depicted in these various cultural instantiations emphasize

the decidedly pessimistic nature of the texts, which—though designed to draw awareness

to and/or advocate change for the status of women in American society—repeatedly

foreclose options for the future and invariably end with heartbreaking stasis or death.

Positioned at either end of the postbellum era, Blake’s 1874 Fettered for Life and

Glaspell’s 1917 “A Jury of Her Peers” similarly depict imagery of the decay of canary

discourse—most explicitly through the violent murders of their female protagonists’

birds—that shuts down alternatives for their texts’ human and avian sufferers. United

with contemporary cultural texts in their frustration with the traditional social resonances

of pet canaries and domesticity, as well as in their authors’ inability to imagine a way out

of such ideological and structural dead ends, Fettered and “Jury” feature birds whose

victimization and bodily disfigurations dramatically distinguish them from the idealized

avian imagery of pre-Civil War literature.

Fettered for Life is Lillie Devereux Blake’s earnest if overwrought attempt to

shed light on the injustices of unequal rights and the brutalities of domestic abuse taking

place behind New York City’s closed doors. The highly didactic, cliché-heavy novel

tracks the lives of several young women—upper-, middle-, and working-class—as they

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encounter abuses of all sorts at the hands of cold, cruel, and/or ignorant men. Blake’s

text, though admittedly not the strongest example of postbellum literary achievement, is

perhaps best appreciated as a snapshot of contemporary women’s rights propaganda. The

author carefully reconstructs many of the most prominent issues and party lines of the

movement, allowing her female characters—especially her protagonist, the independent-

minded Laura Stanley—opportunities to voice their awareness of and objections to

institutionalized inequality.

Unsurprisingly, one of Blake’s strategies is to invoke the parallels between animal

abuse and domestic cruelties, presenting numerous examples of men who are

unapologetically cruel to animals and then transfer those same attitudes and actions to

their wives.112 The most extended explication of this approach takes place through the

death of a domestic canary: a bird who has overstayed his ideological welcome, and

through Blake’s dramatic reimagining, becomes a symbol of the decay of the institution

he is meant to endorse. Fettered for Life demonstrates the canary’s cultural

oversaturation, as well as changing attitudes about the bird’s fitness as a household

fixture and feminine companion. Amidst several other narratives of abusive marriages,

Blake depicts the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Moulder as one of emotional

stagnation and insensitivity, as Mrs. Moulder attempts to placate her volatile husband at

the expense of her own happiness. One of the few bright spots in Mrs. Moulder’s bleak

life, she explains to Laura, is her beautiful yellow canary, Cherry: a creature she

introduces as if he is one of her children. In his early appearances, Cherry—whose name

112
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason explains, “animal abuse was widely believed to be not just a
wrong in and of itself but an act that vitiated the character, led undoubtedly to other acts of violence, and
threatened the very future of the nation” (154).
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puns his infallibly cheerful disposition—embodies all the traditional characteristics of

American society’s beloved pet canaries. His very presence ostensibly contributes to “a

sense of refinement about the place,” as visitors to Mrs. Moulder’s apartment take in a

variety of markers of appropriate middle-class domesticity, including “flowers and

trailing vines in the window, a cage, containing a lively canary hung in a warm corner . . .

books in a set of shelves and some good engravings on the wall” (80). Cherry is friendly,

engaging, endearingly tame, and a loving friend to his beleaguered mistress—Mrs.

Moulder tellingly insists that he is “such a comfort to me, such a companion!” (290-91).

Cherry himself seems “aware of the praise that was bestowed upon him,” preening and

showing off for his mistress (81). This domestic pet does everything “right,” fulfilling his

expected duties as a kept canary down to the letter.

But even these efforts, Blake makes clear, lack the ability to create or sustain an

idealized domestic environment, and they are ultimately useless—even incendiary—

when confronted with the violence and disregard for suffering of a limited social sphere

and an abusive male presence. Mrs. Moulder’s home, though at first glance a place of

sanctuary and charm, is actually an tension- and abuse-filled prison for the young mother;

Laura quickly amends her initial impression to instead describe herself as uncomfortable

in such “uncongenial surroundings” (83). Cherry’s supposed powers to signify security

and guarantee his mistress’s happiness do not prevent Mrs. Moulder from suffering a

variety of abuses from her insensitive husband. In fact, Cherry becomes another,

incredibly effective avenue through which Mr. Moulder can torture his wife. Through her

depiction of the bird’s murder, Blake demonstrates that—for women especially—

idealizing the canary is a dangerous act, an act that must be abolished in order to

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understand the true import of the cult of domesticity. Thus, the protracted scene of

Cherry’s painful death is (literally) his fall from grace, as the charming bird becomes a

tattered reminder of the deception of such ideological aspirations, taking on the new and

more poignant role of a powerless, feeling victim: a creature, like his mistress, upon

whom others violently achieve and indulge their superiority.

When Cherry initially escapes from his cage, his mistress is frustrated but

relatively calm. She watches him “enjoy his liberty,” perching about the room and

communicating sweetly with “a few musical notes, and then a little song” (289). It is only

when she hears her husband at the door that Mrs. Moulder becomes anxious, as she

anticipates that the bird’s freedom will annoy Mr. Moulder. Upon entering the room, Mr.

Moulder takes note of Cherry with excessive irritation, grumbling about the “fuss” made

by the “squalling little beast” who is “always a plague” (289). Noting his wife’s inability

to re-cage the pet and apparently at his wits end to deal with the animal’s noise, Mr.

Moulder takes action. Oblivious to his wife’s pleas to “remember he is only a frail little

creature!” (290), Mr. Moulder exercises swift and brutal force to silence the bird, who

notes his advance and transforms into a “trembling and frightened warbler” (290).113

Though Elizabeth B. Clark claims that Mrs. Moulder “suffers a more subtle oppression”

(1) than the working class women of the novel—as epitomized by her husband’s canary

beating—the scene that ensues is incredibly and overtly violent. With wordless blows

that are punctuated only by Mrs. Moulder’s screams—“Oh Alexander, don’t be rough . . .

113
Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun” (1891) offers similar sentiments about a canary’s
intuitive fear of men. In Freeman’s short story, the protagonist Louisa—a middle-aged woman happily
living alone and dreading her impending nuptials—owns a canary who flies into a terror every time
Louisa’s suitor Joe—a gentle, thoughtful, but inexcusably awkward middle-aged man—visits. The canary
mirrors Louisa’s thinly-veiled horror of masculinity and its potential for disruption of the feminine, just as
Cherry (like his mistress) perceives a constant threat of violence implied in Mr. Moulder’s presence.
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don’t, please, please don’t strike so hard! oh Alexander, don’t, don’t!”—Mr. Moulder

attacks Cherry: “enraged by the bird’s escape, he beat the cloth at him viciously, and

presently with some effect, he hit the fluttering yellow wings; struck them again and

again, and in a moment, brought a mere ruffled mass of feathers to the floor” (Blake

290). The canary’s cultural cache as a stalwart of conventionality and security is dashed

to pieces under Mr. Moulder’s brutal blows. Cherry’s dying moments as a feebly

fluttering, exhausted, and exploited mass of feathers mirror, metaphorically, the general

sense of cultural weariness, tragedy, and violence that now surrounds the once-revered

domestic pet and its companion domestic ideology.

If Cherry’s death too subtly intuits the implosion of the domestic ideal, Blake

makes sure to hit the point home in the following scene, where Laura learns that—as a

direct result of the “paroxysms” of distress she suffers over Cherry’s death (291)—Mrs.

Moulder has had a miscarriage. Minnie, Mrs. Moulder’s oldest child, whispers to Laura

that “there came a little dead baby to [Mamma] in the night, and she is so weak that no

one can see her” (295), while Biddy, the washer-woman, elaborates that Mrs. Moulder is

“very bad, intirely . . . the poor dead babby was . . . not to come so soon, you know . . .

but the poor leddy was worritted yesterday evening wid de little bird dyin’; the docther

says that was waur for her nor onything, and so she was awful bad in the night, and the

babby dead when it came, as foine a b’ye as you’d wish to see, too” (296). This “fine

boy” would have carried on the family name, and his death reiterates the lack of futurity

that Mr. Moulder’s abuse—if not the abuses of an entire society of patriarchal rule—

engenders. Mrs. Moulder’s female doctor identifies the deeply intertwined demise of

idealized domesticity and the conventional canary, citing the two factors together as

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“undoubtedly” the cause of Mrs. Moulder’s miscarriage: “I suspected as soon as I was

called in that there had been some unusual agitation. I knew, of course, that she was

never as well as she might be if her home were happy, and it was that long pent-up

distress that added intensity to her grief when she gave way over her poor pet . . . Mr.

Moulder little realized when he killed the bird, that he destroyed the life of his unborn

son” (297-98). In the cruel world that Blake depicts, society’s insistence on the inherent

safety and morality of the home is as false, broken, and potentially dangerous as its

deification of the canary as woman’s saving grace. These structures hide, antagonize, and

allow to exist a horrifying array of injustices and abuse.

The experiences of Cherry and his mistress also put into sharp relief the often-

unarticulated physical horrors of forced imprisonment that so-called “caged creatures of

society” face. If Blake’s purpose is to break the silence of women’s subjection, much of

her effort is spent detailing this embodied suffering, refusing to turn a discreet literary

eye away from the bruises, the broken bones, and the blood of their everyday miseries. 114

114
Later in the novel, Blake crystalizes the shared plight of animal and woman through the violent assault
and murder of Mrs. Bludgett at the hands of her husband, and the echoes between the two scenes are
overwhelming. Bludgett, an angry, perpetually drunk and abusive political henchman, advances on his
pitiful wife for her inability to stop “whining” (374). As he menaces toward her angrily, Mrs. Bludgett
gives a “wild shriek” (374) much like the “screaming bird” of the earlier scene (290). Her husband’s
resultant “fearful blow” causes her to stagger and fall, just as Cherry falls from flight after Mr. Moulder’s
attack, and as Bludgett violently batters his wife, her desperate, repetitive pleas for mercy mirror those of
Mrs. Moulder’s: “‘John!’ she moaned, ‘don’t kill me! don’t kill me! . . . John! John! dear John!’” (375).
Mr. Moulder becomes more enraged by the sight of the suffering canary, and so too does the sight of his
bloodied wife “stimulate [Bludgett’s] rage to madness” (375). Both violent husbands also engage in
excessive carnage. The narrator describes how Bludgett
rushed upon her and beat her down; then setting his teeth hard, while his eyes glowed
blood-red with fury, he seized her by her hair and pounded her head against the floor . . .
[he] smote her down again, silencing that pleading mouth by a stamp of his heavy boot-
heel on the helpless mouth. After this there were only moans, growing fainter and fainter;
but the man, like one possessed by some fiend, struck and kicked the poor helpless body
long after all motion had ceased, and until the crushed spirit had escaped from the
tortures of this life through the terrible gateway of death! (375)
In the two most violent scenes of the novel, woman is practically indistinguishable from animal, and both
men merge into a type, the brutal male killer.
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Cherry’s besieged body transforms the once-idealized symbol into a (barely) living body,

a creature who trembles, shudders, and breaks. Mrs. Moulder picks up and cradles her

pet, narrating his death for all those gathered around the scene: “‘You have killed him,

Alexander,’ she said, with intense mournfulness; ‘my little pet is dying! Little Cherry,

dear little Cherry!’ putting her cheek down against the soft yellow down. ‘His heart

scarcely beats; poor little bird, poor dear little bird!’ trying to smooth his broken

plumage; ‘It is no use! he is dead!’” (290). Mourned in this way, Cherry is not merely an

emblem of Mrs. Moulder’s broken dreams: he is also a living creature who dies in agony.

Mr. Moulder’s uncontrollable savagery and repeated blows to the helpless bird’s body

demonstrate his utter lack of regard for the sentient being’s experience of fear and pain, a

lack of regard that extends to Mrs. Moulder. The candid details of Mrs. Moulder’s

miscarriage would also have been seen as unconventionally—even offensively—explicit

for late-nineteenth-century literature, where authors often still refused to even directly

acknowledge a character’s pregnancy. Repeated references to Mrs. Moulder’s

uncontrollable “paroxysms” of distress, which evoke experiences of cramping and labor,

as well as allusions to her extreme loss of blood from childbirth—she is for some time

extremely weak, pale, and hovering between life and death—convey a deeply embodied

sense of suffering that is both explicit and explicitly feminine.

Though Blake clearly condemns the violence of a misogynist society dominated

by illusions of the cult of domesticity—both in its systemic and individual

manifestations—her treatment of Cherry’s transformation hints at the author’s eagerness

to indulge in his rewriting and even death. Mr. Moulder batters Cherry, the narrator

explains, because he cannot control his temper and because insists on a household of

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beings who are subservient and cowering. Blake paints his abuse of creatures weaker than

himself—the bird, his wife, his children—as unacceptably shameful and infuriating. But

for Blake, Cherry is not always an innocent, powerless being, and it is perhaps for that

reason that the author lingers over his downfall. Blake’s ambivalence toward the bird can

best be appreciated through the stages of Cherry’s depiction. The canary, at least in the

beginning of the novel, holds over Mrs. Moulder a power of expectation and assumption,

lulling the young wife into subscribing to ideals about women’s domestic roles that Blake

clearly finds abhorrent. In his initial scenes of cheerfulness, Cherry is not just a

companion, but rather a self-satisfied symbol of an entire system of inequality: almost,

one might say, a smaller, more brightly colored version of Mr. Moulder who is all the

more dangerous for his deception. Similarly, in the early moments of his escape, Blake

depicts Cherry as a chirruping tease who flies around the room taunting Mrs. Moulder

with her ineffectuality and powerlessness. Through Mr. Moulder’s assault, Blake allows

Cherry to gain status as an empathetic, suffering creature, as each blow to Cherry’s body

strips him of his cultural power. But after his death, Blake reminds readers of her effort to

dethrone the overused emblem of the canary, asserting that Cherry has been rendered

powerless, meaningless, and is now nothing but a “tiny, crushed object” (290). Mrs.

Moulder finally realizes the full import of how depressing her life of imprisonment is;

thus the removal of the canary icon—Mrs. Moulder’s last desperate attempt to cling to

the promises of ideal domesticity—catapults the wife into despair. While Blake’s

depiction of Mr. Moulder’s violence against the bird is certainly a condemnation of

patriarchy, that condemnation extends to both the victim and his victimizer.

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 Blake describes an end to the canary’s iconic reign as devastating, final, and

without redemption. Cherry is, quite definitively, dead, and in his wake remains an

unresolved torrent of tragedy. Mrs. Moulder’s child—who, while unborn, had provided

his mother at least the hope of future moments of joy and purpose—is also irrevocably

gone, and Mrs. Moulder is emotionally broken. The vignette of the Moulders lacks

narrative resolution, as Blake essentially abandons their story after Mrs. Moulder’s

miscarriage. The author denies her very readers the kinds of hopeful closure they might

expect: no moment of moral enlightenment for Mr. Moulder—described after his wife’s

miscarriage as “surlier than ever” (298)—no exciting decision to reject such conditions

from Mrs. Moulder—only the suggestion of stasis, where their bleak domestic conditions

remain ever the same. Even the family’s last name suggests, in its invocation of

“molder,” the embodiment of stillness and decay.115 A year after the deaths of her canary

and child, the narrator describes Mrs. Moulder as “much paler and feebler . . . with the

same patient light in her soft brown eyes, and apparently the same infinite capacity for

uncomplaining suffering” (369). Though she is denied any spoken lines after she breaks

down at Cherry’s death—likely meant to drive home the woman’s continued, if not

exacerbated, subjugation—Mrs. Moulder’s haunting last lines make her depressing

survival explicit, as, in response to exhortations to calm her extreme distress, she replies,

“I will try to be quiet . . . but life is all so hard, so hard! Work and endure and suffer and

no hope in the future” (291).

115
Blake is quite committed to such suggestive naming. In addition to cheerful Cherry and the decaying
Moulders, Judge Swinton is a swindling liar and Mr. Bludgett is a savage man who brutally beats his wife
to death.
160
 This hopelessness engendered by Cherry’s death—as well as the exhaustion with

all things conventionally domestic—permeates the entirety of Blake’s novel, where most

of her female characters fail victim to a depressingly pervasive lack of futurity, despite

their awareness of and attempts to avoid such results. Flora, a close friend of the novel’s

protagonist, expresses her terror over “the life to which women are so often condemned,”

the “dreadful inevitable future” of “stupidity and neglect” that awaits all women (Blake

42-43). An upper-class debutante who panics at the thought of relinquishing her interest

in writing poetry to the expectations of being a rich man’s wife, Flora registers both

paralysis and despair at the thought of that inevitability, alternately wondering “what can

one do to avoid it?” and insisting that she “had rather die” than succumb to such results

(42-43).116 Another character, the working-class Rhoda, believes that for her, “the future

was all black and grim” (119), and “society and the world offered her no hope of escape

from it” (120). Regardless of social standing, both women feel haunted by the specter of

domesticity and its incapacitating expectations.

Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers,” written forty years after Blake’s novel,

emphatically reiterates the end of the canary’s reign. If Blake, along with Ruiz de Burton,

is part of the initial efforts to diagnose and defy the tired discourse of the cheerful

domestic canary,117 Glaspell is best understood as part of a consolidating effort to close

116
In a death-bed confession that anticipates the melodramatic message and chorus of “She’s Only a Bird,”
Flora whispers to her mother, “You thought I should be happy in my marriage, but it has killed me . . . if
my fate can save any one else, it will not matter. There are the other girls, you know, and I want you to
remember this . . . that women as well as men need an occupation for their energies, and that marriage
without love, is worse than death” (351).
117
Rebecca Harding Davis might be one of the first American authors to identify this concern. In Life in the
Iron-Mills (1861), the narrator’s gaze rests for a moment on “a dirty canary [that] chirps desolately in a
cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out” (12). Her
161
the chapter on the canary’s cultural dominance.118 Blake uses Cherry’s murder to forecast

the outcomes of the privations of unreachable cultural ideals, exposing women’s

susceptibility to the physical violence of domestic abuse as well as the mental violence of

stagnation and hopelessness. Glaspell treats similar issues, but from the vantage point of

an early twentieth-century American society that has made both significant progress as

well as frustratingly little change in its expectations for women. Thus, Glaspell’s short

story takes up where Blake leaves off—adding, in a way, to the unresolved narrative of

the Moulders—by considering the aftereffects of the dissolution of ideal domesticity and

conventional canary-worship. “Jury” indulges in the fantasy of a woman’s revenge, but

comes to the same conclusions as Blake: that there is no hope of redemption or futurity

for “society’s caged birds.”

Glaspell’s short story, an adaptation of her successful one-act play “Trifles”

(1916), attempts to validate the meaning and importance of women’s community and

daily lives, and it is also a scathing indictment of the conditions of isolation and abuse

that arise from conventional attitudes about a woman’s place. The narrative recounts the

scene of a violent crime through the eyes of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, neighbors of

accused murderer Minnie Wright. John Wright has been found dead in his bed, a rope

twisted tightly around his neck. Through their attention to domestic details—the “trifles”

of the everyday—Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters seemingly outwit male law enforcement

officials to piece together a series of events that explain why Minnie might have strangled

her husband as he lay sleeping. Their discovery of a dead canary, neck violently twisted

attempt to articulate the cruel realities of her decidedly non-ideal life relies on her inclusion of the
conventional canary’s antithesis: an aesthetically unappealing, sad creature who is “almost worn out.”
118
This “closure” is fleeting, however, if not elusive; the conception of the canary as ideal pet resurfaced in
full force—alongside conventional ideologies of domesticity and femininity—during the 1950s.
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asunder, leads them to surmise that Minnie murdered her husband in retaliation for his

own murder of the animal. The story ends as the women decide to enact their own

version of justice, concealing the dead bird from officials to avoid assuring Minnie’s

conviction.119

Much like the circumstances depicted in other early-twentieth-century cultural

texts—such as “She’s Only a Bird,” where the verses reflect on the bird-woman after her

fateful marriage and tragic death—in “Jury” the implosion of the domestic ideal has

already occurred.120 Both members of the story’s featured woman/canary relationship

have fallen from their pedestals and are situated imaginatively, if not physically, amidst

the disarray of the Wright homestead. Of course, the most obvious evidence of the

Wrights’ deficient domesticity is the murder itself: the most intimate spaces of the

home—the bedroom and the kitchen—have become public sites of violence and clues.

But among the members of the rural Dickson County community, there are no

pretensions that the Wright household was ever a “place of Peace,” as Ruskin would have

it.121 Mrs. Hale reluctantly confesses that Minnie’s home “never seemed a very cheerful

place” (Glaspell 265)—the reason she provides for never having visited her beleaguered

neighbor—and the others gathered at the murder scene agree. The characters, male and

female alike, continuously point out fractures in the home’s veneer, identifying a messy

kitchen, shabby furniture, and well-worn clothes, among other things, as evidence of its

119
In “Rethinking Literature’s Lesson’s for the Law,” Dawn Keetley rightly cautions us against closing
down the ambiguities of Glaspell’s text, challenging the long-standing critical assumption that Mrs. Hale
and Mrs. Peters “correctly” determine that Minnie Wright did murder her husband but deserves sympathy
for the act.
120
Nils Clausson points to this when he claims that Glaspell’s text “exposes not an aberrant murderer but
the disturbing reality of a typical farm woman’s life in early twentieth-century America, a life that was
already troubled before murder added the ultimate trouble” (95).
121
From “Of Queen’s Gardens,” Sesame and Lilies (1865).
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deficiencies. Similarly, everyone agrees—with varying degrees of sympathy—that

Minnie herself was not an ideal housewife. On one extreme, the county attorney snarkily

comments on Minnie’s lack of industry after noting the dirty hand towels by the sink,

chuckling, “I shouldn’t say she had the home-making instinct” (265). His observations,

compounded by those from the other men conducting the investigation, contribute to the

officials’ efforts to malign Minnie’s character in their quest to make her out as a

murderer. On the other extreme, in response to these condemnations of Minnie’s

shortcomings, Mrs. Hale emphasizes how difficult it is for women to keep up with

chores—“Farmers’ wives have their hands full” (265)—and then insists that it is

“sneaking” on their part to “get her own house to turn against her” (270). Thus the case

develops for society’s deeply intertwined expectations of feminine and domestic

perfection: expectations which the text exposes as brutally detached from reality.122

Minnie’s relationship with her canary provides the context for understanding the

suffering that such contradictory impulses entail. The metonymic comparison that

Glaspell establishes between woman and bird is, by the early twentieth century, a reliable

and even cliché trope that would instantly signal discourses of women’s suffering and

rights activism to readers.123 Thus Glaspell takes the bird’s fall from grace as a certainty,

but one that must still be processed, reconciled, with its fallout. The canary of “Jury” is

always already dead, appearing first as an imagined companion, then as a metaphor, and

122
Glaspell’s clear-sighted estimation of the cultural myth of the sacred home extends beyond the
particularly bleak conditions of the Wrights’ household, although in more subtle ways. Mrs. Peters and
Mrs. Hale share a common sense of distrust and disgust for men in general and their expectations of
domestic perfection in particular, while the male characters volley a never-ending onslaught of
stereotypical witticisms about women and women’s work that seem only to convey their anxieties about the
existence of such things.
123
Scholars readily identify the importance of this metonymic conceit to the story’s narrative effectiveness.
See, for example, Keetley’s “Rethinking . . . ” and Brian Sutton’s “‘A Different Kind of the Same Thing’:
Marie de France’s ‘Laüstic’ and Glaspell’s ‘Trifles.’”
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finally as a broken body: never an active, present representation of its iconic image. This

construction mirrors that of the bird’s owner, a wife always already jailed and dethroned

from her pedestal of idealized femininity: as scholar Dawn Keetley points out, Minnie,

though central to the narrative, never speaks, is never seen, and exists for the reader only

through the stories of other characters (342). Both bird and mistress are shadows of their

former selves.

Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, in their quest to solve the dual mysteries of the empty

birdcage and the dead husband, take it upon themselves to process these shadow-

creatures in their new, decidedly less-glamorized roles. As they piece together the

backstory of the domestic details laid bare to them, the women diagnose the canary’s

literal and figurative fall. Regarding the broken door of the birdcage skeptically, Mrs.

Hale wonders aloud, “What do you s’pose went wrong with it?” “I don’t know,” Mrs.

Peters answers, “unless it got sick and died” (275). The latter woman’s otherwise

unindicated guess at sickness neatly glosses society’s fatigue for the bird’s symbolic

perfection, which is no longer understood as healthy or sustainable. The women move on

from this tentative diagnosis to reiterate the metonymic implications of Minnie’s

relationship with her canary, engaging in a series of comparisons that indicate both

creatures’ inarticulate—and often physical—suffering.124 Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters

presume certain characteristics about the missing canary that serve to flesh out the

imprisoned woman’s personality, claiming that Minnie “was kind of like a bird herself”:

124
Blake’s Fettered for Life anticipates this scene of discovery and its communication of a woman’s story
in a broken domestic context. After hearing about Mrs. Moulder’s miscarriage the morning after Cherry’s
murder, Laura wanders into the sitting-room, where she finds the scene of the crime virtually untouched,
and “the neglected work-basket, the dead bird on the flower-stand, everything speaking of the absent lady”
(Blake 295).
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“[r]eal sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery” (275). Charming but weak: the

reader hears that both mistress and pet are highly sensitive creatures whose superficial

attractions are crushed by a lack of proper care and attention. These diagnoses track the

history of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, serving to highlight the old stereotypes

of petted creatures like the canary and its benevolent angel, as well as the dangers of

those stereotypes, which make the creatures more prone to abuse and lacking resiliency.

But Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters generate these unflattering comparisons with compassion

rather than cruelty, as both understand from firsthand experience the impossibilities of

sustaining happiness and perfection in a hostile domestic environment.125

More profoundly, Minnie’s perceived intensity of attachment to the canary offers

her neighbors an opportunity to reconstruct an act of revenge that provides a momentary,

if unsustainable, break from the specter of hopelessness confronting the abused wife. The

women depict the canary’s death as violent, inexcusably cruel, and the final straw: the

impetus for Minnie’s refusal to continue to silently submit to her husband’s abuse and her

resultant murderous act of revenge. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters react viscerally to their

discovery of the canary’s broken body, with a focus on physicality that is all the more

notable because of its absence in their descriptions of murder victim John Wright.126 The

125
Glaspell depicts Mrs. Hale in particular as a sturdy and independent-minded woman whose tenacity
helps her better navigate the gap between ideal and real conditions of feminine domesticity, but even this
heartier version of womanhood is not impervious to the suffering of her sex. Mrs. Hale makes this shared
feminine experience more explicit when she bemoans her lack of intervention and justifies their
interpretation of the events leading up to Minnie’s presumed act of murder: “I might’a known she needed
help! I tell you, it’s queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the
same things—it’s all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren’t—why do you and I understand?
Why do we know—what we know this minute?” (279).
126
The men gathered at the Wright household conspicuously avoid discussing the gruesome details of
John’s dead body in front of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, as if in deference to the women’s delicate
sensibilities. Later, the women themselves mimic this avoidance, skirting around the details of the man’s
murder as they quietly assess Minnie’s probable guilt. When faced with evidence of male brutality,
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women’s refusal to validate John’s potential for suffering, which Glaspell implies is a

deliberate choice rather than an over-delicateness, demonstrates how they are more

deeply disturbed by his long-term, unrepentant torture of Minnie—partially articulated

through the torture of the bird she loves. The canary’s specific mode of death—

strangulation—also becomes a crucial metonymic detail for the neighbors’ conception of

the kinds of suffering that both wife and husband endure. Dead bird in hand, Mrs. Hale

demands visual recognition of the animal’s torture, whispering in horror: “Look at it! Its

neck—look at its neck! It’s all—other side to” (276). Mrs. Peters submits to this

insistence on witnessing, peering closer and finally pronouncing that “Somebody wrung

its neck” (276). That John dies in almost the same way as the canary—even when, as the

investigator points out, there were easier modes of killing available—implicates Minnie

in the eyes of her sympathetic female neighbors. But they also find that specific return of

violence fitting, justifiable, even satisfying. Whereas Minnie and the canary were

innocent victims undeserving of such treatment, John originated and sustained that

stifling form of emotional and physical abuse, making his death from strangulation well-

deserved: an eye for an eye, they insist. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters show their approval of

Minnie’s actions—and find a way to participate in her subversion—by hiding the

damning evidence of the canary’s broken body.

Thus the women characterize Minnie as brave rather than cowardly, and they

skew her act of revenge, though troubling and problematic for her own well-being, as a

daring response to the hopeless stasis of female suffering that they all experience. Both

women admit harboring violent urges, fantasies of revenge that bond them to their

however, the women refuse to turn a blind eye, lingering over and constantly returning to the evidence of
the canary’s mangled body.
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imprisoned neighbor and govern their actions in her home. Mrs. Peters, in an

unprecedented moment of openness, is the first to confide that she is intimately familiar

with Minnie’s murderous feelings. Sitting shell-shocked in the living room with Mrs.

Hale after their hasty concealment of the canary’s body, she confesses: “‘When I was a

girl . . . my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—before I could

get there—’ She covered her face an instant. ‘If they hadn’t held me back I would

have’—she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished

weakly—‘hurt him’” (277). Mrs. Hale responds in kind, angrily though indirectly

accusing John Wright of getting what he deserved for killing the bird as he so cruelly

killed Minnie’s spirit.

In Glaspell’s hands, then, the canary dramatically sheds its cliché imagery—as

either an idealized companion or a fellow sufferer—and becomes infused with meaning

as a catalyst for female agency and resistance. The canary in “Jury” is a victim of male

violence, but it also motivates and calls into being a specifically retaliatory form of

female violence. Mrs. Peters’s and Mrs. Hale’s impassioned responses to the evidence of

Minnie’s guilt imply that this retaliatory impulse is an universal feminine desire,

generated especially by women’s reactions to witnessing the abuse of beloved pets. In

other words, this response is exactly the kind of reaction that decades of women’s rights

activists sought to instill through sustained public campaigns connecting the abuse of

animals with the abuse of women.127 Male violence against domestic animals was meant

to—and in Glaspell’s story, clearly does—evoke women’s identification with, outrage

127
Consider the 1887 report of a double canary homicide, which depicts the animals’ assault as tantamount
to an attack on their female owner: “Through their tender bodies . . . the cruel hand with its knife struck at
the heart of their kind mistress” (“She is Properly Punished.” The North American [22 Dec. 1887]
Philadelphia, PA: 1).
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about, and desire to put an end to such cruelty: a reaction necessary to stop patterns of

abuse that many activists thought regularly crossed species lines.

But Glaspell’s consideration of female retaliation is short-lived, curtailed by the

realities of the female characters’ circumstances. Though it considers in exciting new

ways the possibilities inherent in female community and perspective, “A Jury of Her

Peers” is not, in the end, a hopeful story, nor does it provide an optimistic assessment of

the immediate future for women’s rights. As in Blake’s novel, there is no foreseeable end

to the suffering that caged creatures must endure: a conclusion Glaspell makes all the

more poignant by insisting that not even female action is a viable alternative to

imprisonment. Though Minnie dares to fight back, and though Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters

exercise an exciting form of quiet resistance by hiding evidence of domestic unrest,

ultimately nothing changes. Robin West somewhat inexplicably insists that “Jury” is not

tragic, ending “triumphantly” as the women “join forces with each other and in solidarity

with Minnie Foster, protecting her from her legal fate” (242). But Mrs. Hale’s and Mrs.

Peters’s attempts to protect Minnie, though encouraging, are depicted as an exercise in

futility. Despite the women’s skilled detective work and defiant manipulation of clues,

the story closes with Minnie still in prison, still the primary suspect, potentially facing

life in prison for her actions. But even were she not legally sentenced to hopelessness,

Minnie has already been broken into submission and passivity by her husband’s cruelty.

And instead of being energized by her resistance to the forces of male domination,

Minnie seems all the more cowed by her action, recognizing how it has sealed her fate.

According to the testimony of Mr. Hale, Minnie’s behavior in the aftermath of her

husband’s death was disturbing, “queer” (260): she “just set there . . . quiet and dull . . .

169
not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth” and seemed as if “she didn’t know

what she was going to do next” (261). Frozen and unresponsive, Minnie seems to

anticipate the inevitability of her hopeless situation through her repetitive, non-productive

rocking and yielding acceptance of others’ authority. Meanwhile, the women’s “power”

of community depends on absolute silence and commitment to the preservation of

appearances, the maintenance of the status quo: not by any means a bright beginning to a

new era of women’s rights. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters cannot make their subversive act

of concealment public without similarly exposing themselves to the much more powerful

forces of the male-dominated law. Instead, Glaspell leaves her unofficial detectives to

continue their unchanging existence as housewives whose daily work is derided and

diminished as “trifling” compared to the larger concerns of men in the public sphere.

And finally, the canary—momentarily a reworked symbol of ideological

resistance catalyzing justified female vengeance—disappears into Mrs. Hale’s pocket, the

telling evidence of its body suffocated and stripped of all meaning once again. In

Glaspell’s rendition of the woman/bird pairing, the fallen canary becomes a liability,

rather than a possibility. Though the animal—as both a symbol and a living creature—has

the ability to powerfully articulate the tragic status of “society’s caged creatures” as well

as motivate women to fight back against that status, Glaspell characterizes the latter

effect as dangerous, uncontrollable, and ultimately ineffectual. Better, as Mrs. Hale

decides, to conceal the evidence; better, as Mrs. Peters has done her whole life, to stifle

and try to forget the violent urges of defense and retaliation that threaten to destroy even

the small domestic comforts they create for themselves in their cages. Thus Glaspell’s

prescription for the fatigued discourse of the canary is death without resurrection.

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II. The Warrior Spinster: A Metaphor of Freedom and Futurity

Just before successfully murdering twenty of her twenty-one pet canaries, Lavinia

Sprig—the pathetic yet endearing spinster of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who

Would’ve Thought It? (1872)—experiences a rush of power and elation that defies her

identity as an ostensibly meek and affectionate pet-owner and demonstrates her readiness

for public service. Though first she weeps at the thought of killing the birds for their own

good, she quickly recovers her composure and stands “erect with clasped hands and fixed

gaze . . . She felt that what she was about to do, only an Electra, or an Antigone, or some

such classic heroine, could have done, outside of New England” (Ruiz de Burton 86).

Under the intoxicating influence of her own narrative of heroism, Lavinia “stalk[s] with

majestic stride” to retrieve the chloroform and—“tenderly” yet “with more courage than

Virginius” (ibid.)—kills her birds. Her reaction of strength substantially differentiates

Ruiz de Burton’s unlikely heroine from the disconsolate mistresses of Fettered for Life

and “A Jury of Her Peers,” as well as from the vast majority of postbellum cultural

appropriations of the imprisoned woman/canary motif. While Blake cannot imagine any

resistance or future for her trapped creatures, and Glaspell indulges in retribution but

ultimately insists that such actions are futile and still result in hopeless stasis, Ruiz de

Burton envisions an option that allows women to achieve both freedom and futurity.

Who Would’ve Thought It?—published only two years before Fettered for Life—

offers a significant and early contribution to the postbellum period’s burgeoning

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conversations about domestic corruption and canary malaise.128 Ruiz de Burton’s novel, a

historical romance with elements of realism and naturalism and a bitingly satirical

omniscient narrative voice, follows the adventures of the Norval family and their New

England neighbors from the outbreak to the conclusion of the Civil War. Jesse Alemán

claims that the novel “expos[es] the cultural hypocrisy of the North” (4), and much of

Ruiz de Burton’s incisive social commentary articulates the hypocrisies of conventional

ideologies, arguing that American society’s absurd distinctions between the public and

private spheres create manipulative, short-sighted, and selfish individuals of both

genders. The primary storyline focuses on Lola Medina, a wealthy Mexican-American

girl of “pure Spanish blood” who Dr. Norval rescues from a Southwestern Indian tribe

and subsequently raises alongside his own children. Woven into this account—which

devolves into a rather conventional romance plot—is the related narrative thread of

Lavinia, Mrs. Norval’s younger sister, who sheds her identity as a ridiculous, sheltered

spinster to become a noble, more engaged public citizen. Her complex relationship with

her pet canaries traces her suffering and later success by reproducing and then rewriting

the stereotypes of the spinster/canary pairing.

Though Who Would’ve Thought It? posits a dramatically different outcome of

agency for its canary-owning protagonist, Ruiz de Burton still develops a narrative of

constrictive domesticity that has much in common with those established by Blake and

Glaspell. Rosaura Sànchez and Beatrice Pita explain that Ruiz de Burton parodies the

128
It is striking that Ruiz de Burton achieves her radical and more optimistic narrative before Blake and
Glaspell write their decidedly less-hopeful texts. Ruiz de Burton’s exceptional perspective was likely
facilitated by her closer proximity to and more overt literary entanglement with the Civil War, a period of
time that allowed for exceptional and fleeting experiences of violence-as-liberation and options for
women’s public service.
172
ideals of the cult of domesticity and republican motherhood that so dominated early and

mid-nineteenth century culture and literature, considering whether the home might be “a

site for the reproduction of dominant culture, a site itself of oppression within which

women negotiate power, or a site of resistance and change within which women develop

critical perspectives—or potentially all of these” (xi). In particular, Ruiz de Burton, like

Blake, makes some of the postbellum period’s first diagnoses about the problems

inherent in the canary/woman relationship—and, by extension, domesticity—and her

assessment engages with women’s rights activists’ rewritings of that narrative to

emphasize imprisonment rather than contentment. But where Blake focuses on the

physical abuses that result from confinement, Ruiz de Burton focuses primarily on the

emotional violence of such social expectations: how codes of domestic propriety and

manners cause feelings of sadness, isolation, frustration, and anger. As an old maid—a

woman held to cultural standards of “proper” femininity who is mocked for her inability

to ever achieve any semblance of that role—Lavinia suffers this emotional trauma

doubly, and almost entirely on her own.

Initially, Ruiz de Burton invokes traditional cultural conceptions of the canary’s

role as a comforter and companion to show—with gentle, compassionate humor—

Lavinia’s attempts to ease her pain. The narrator explains that the arrival of Lavinia’s

birds was the first sign of her spinsterhood, as well as her primary way of coping with the

onset of that “affliction”: “From those gloomy days in which [her suitors] the Rev.

Hackwell and the Rev. Hammerhard proved so faithless, Miss Lavinia Sprig had devoted

herself to raising canary birds. The little innocents were the recipients for Miss Lavinia’s

pent-up caresses, and thus were useful as well as ornamental, for no doubt they had saved

173
Miss Lavvy from many a fit of hysterics” (85).129 Lavinia takes her cues from the

profusion of contemporary bird manuals that counseled women to acquire canaries in

order to experience the joys of spousal and maternal affection. These “little innocents,”

who she describes as her “delight and amusement” (ibid.), allow her to exercise and

satisfy her physical desires for touch, as well as cope with the slights of suitors and

society. The relationship is decidedly reciprocal. Lavinia is a tender and caring mistress,

and the narrator reports that “In the sunshine of Miss Lavvy’s love the canaries thrived,

as though in a genial atmosphere” (ibid.). Though she is decidedly unmarried, she creates

an environment—a “genial atmosphere”—that approximates the warmth of the domestic

hearth, and thus the birds “loved her, judging from the way in which they shook their

little wings and flew to meet her as soon as they heard her voice” (ibid.). As creatures of

comfort and convention, the canaries partly benefit Lavinia by showing her fitness—even

if only to a small degree—for the role of nurturer.

Ironically, though, by redirecting her “feminine impulses” to these creatures,

Lavinia also cements her status as a stereotypical old maid unhealthily obsessed with

pets. Pet companionship could only take a woman so far; ultimately, if she could not

transition those caretaking skills to real people—namely a husband and children—such

interspecies relationships became a sign of feminine failure, even ridiculousness. Lavinia

feels this perceived failure deeply. Early in the novel, the reader discovers her sitting by

the fireplace late at night, mourning “the laurels that might have been her own”: namely,

that “her two victorious rivals were happy mothers,--whilst poor Lavinia was not even a

wife!” (Ruiz de Burton 38). Even after she retires to her room, it is the thought of the

Ruiz de Burton’s narrator frequently addresses Lavinia—Lavvy for short—with the title of “Miss,”
129

emphasizing her unmarried status.

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women’s babies, in particular, that causes her the most anguish, keeping her awake, nose

“red with crying” and eyelids “heavy, but not sleepy” (41). Rather than silently

submitting to censure, however, Lavinia repeatedly objects, pushing back against the

people who attempt to narrowly limit her identity and behavior. It is, in fact, her role as a

confirmed spinster that appears to provide the motivation for her defiance: she has

nothing to lose.

Ruiz de Burton demonstrates Lavinia’s resistance to circumscribed roles of old

maidenhood most dramatically through her interactions with her canaries, and in doing so

simultaneously dethrones the birds from their pedestal of iconic conventionality. Though

this trajectory of transformation ultimately ends in death, the process begins with a

christening. Lavinia transforms her birds from traditionally-conceived animals of comfort

to icons of resistant femininity—a renaming that reveals her identification with creatures

for whom the home simply does not suffice and a willingness to sacrifice propriety for

opportunity. As she cultivates her menagerie of canaries, Lavinia substitutes traditional

bird appellations like Dicky, Joey, and Fifi for unconventional, even defiant labels that

directly challenge domesticity. The reader learns that, despite horrified reactions from

Mrs. Norval and the Rev. Hackwell, Lavinia lovingly adopts scandalous names suggested

by her beloved brother Isaac. Thus, canaries Jenny Lind, Sontag, Gazzaniga, Carlotta

Patti, Adelina Patti, and Grisi are all named after notorious female singers in the 1860s

whose careers kept them in the public spotlight, rather than in the “proper” privacy of the

home.130 Upon hearing these choices, Hackwell vehemently cries, “You might as well

130
Several of these women owned canaries of their own in real life. According to the News and Observer (2
April 1893), Mme. Patti reportedly collected a menagerie of one hundred, while The Daily Gazette reported
in 1890 that after the death of her beloved canary Fifi, Mme. du Barry erected “the finest monument
175
call them Clytemnestra, or Jezabel, or Messalina as to give them the names of actresses,”

and Mrs. Norval insists that “Lavinia, being a Christian girl, will not call her little birds

by the names of horrid actresses. I positively object to it” (87). But in spite of (or perhaps

in light of?) these objections, Lavinia happily and unhesitatingly commits to the names.

Editors Sanchez and Pita emphasize in a footnote to the only modern printing of the

novel how subversive Lavinia’s actions in fact are: “Clytemnestra, Jezabel and Messalina

are invoked by Hackwell, and seconded by Mrs. Norval, as disreputable and evil women,

implying that actresses, singers and foreigners in general are wicked and always suspect

and consequently not ‘proper’ names to be uttered in a Christian household” (ibid.).

These allusive names foreshadow Lavinia’s self-comparison to prominent historical

women at the crucial moment of the canary murders, where she imagines that she is a

nineteenth-century version of Electra or Antigone, defiant women from Greek mythology

who take active roles in their families’ violent dramas.131 The self-made comparisons

highlight Lavinia’s understanding of—and ability to revel in—the ambiguousness of

being a woman in the public sphere, navigating the blurry line between scandalous and

virtuous.

Ultimately, however, Who Would’ve Thought It? is a novel deeply committed to

the idea that no amount of lip service to a cause is ever as meaningful or substantive as

decisive action, and Lavinia’s relationship with her canaries is no exception. As her

obtainable to be raised to the memory of her pet.” According to the article, this tomb was “an excellent
work of art” dramatically “surmounted by a recumbent figure of the dead canary, with breast turned up and
head thrown back” in “very touching attitude.”
131
As this warrior, she vividly resembles certain strains of contemporary feminist discourse in which
women were described as soldiers fighting for the cause, for rights and independence. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, describing her relationship with fellow women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, clearly
envisioned herself and her friend as warriors—with a classical allusion so similar in style to Ruiz de
Burton—explaining that “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them” (as qtd. in Mountjoy).
176
desire to contribute to the war efforts increases and she finds herself “want[ing] nothing

better than plenty of employment for her exuberant moral energies and redundant force of

will” (85), Lavinia identifies her canaries as the only obstacles standing in the way of a

fulfilling nursing career. Part of her precedent for understanding the birds as indicative of

problematic domesticity, inherently opposed to the freedom of the public sphere, comes

from her brother Isaac. As she stands contemplating her dead canaries, Lavinia recalls

how her sister’s horrified reaction to Isaac’s controversial bird names had been the straw

that broke the camel’s back, providing the much-less-judgmental young man the

motivation and resolve he needed “to go away from home” (87) and enlist in the war.

Recalling this scene, Lavinia refers to her now-dead birds as “the innocent occasions of

Isaac’s voluntary exile” (ibid.), importantly establishing them as contradictory beings,

innocuous yet persistent purveyors of the weight of restrictive social norms of the private

sphere: the essential tension of the postbellum figure of the canary.

Persistently conventional, the birds—with their demands on her caretaking time

and energies—keep her locked in frustrating domestic stasis, and both mistress and pets

suffer for it. Lavinia grows increasingly desperate for ways to satisfy her “patriotic

enthusiasm” and “sacred fervor,” and in the process her “little darlings [a]re neglected”

(85). Whereas most other postbellum renderings of this interspecies domestic malaise

find themselves frozen in that misery,132 Ruiz de Burton seizes on the suffering as an

impetus to action. Explicitly identifying Lavinia’s difficult dilemma as one generated by

the separation of spheres—“She saw that she had to decide between her country and her

132
For example, “Society’s ‘Caged Canaries’” and “Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird,” described above.
177
birds, and her heart seemed to collapse with pain” (ibid.)—the narrator credits Lavinia

with making a brave choice by choosing her country.133

Like Blake and Glaspell, Ruiz de Burton does not shy away from describing the

gruesome details of death that accompany the canaries’ dramatic descent from domestic

idealism. After overcoming her initial dismay, Lavinia revels in the process of

methodically massacring the birds, reimagining the moment as one of (her) noble

sacrifice and generous charity rather than (their) murder. She attempts to justify the

killings as humane and conscientious, meant to avoid the inevitable agony she claims the

birds would feel were she to leave them in another’s care, where they might “die of

hunger” or be “devour[ed]” by “some miserable cat” (ibid.). As she goes about “plunging

their little heads inside the flask” of chloroform (86), she coos, “Yes, my little angels, it is

best that you pass away without pain. Sleep, sleep, sleep forever!” (ibid.). Her

unwillingness to recognize the implications of murder make her seem naïve at best,

delusional and even psychotic at worst.

But the scene is steeped in the physiological consequences of the act, and Ruiz de

Burton articulates the animals’ sentience in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to

fully appreciate Lavinia’s enthusiasm.134 The narrator repeatedly draws the reader’s

attention to the birds’ dead bodies, describing how “She laid them in couples, in a row.

Yes, there they were” (ibid.). Jules, Lavinia’s first and oldest canary, also watches the

murders carefully, cuing in on the clear threat that his once-beloved mistress now poses

and responding with calculation and cunning. The narrator’s description of this process—

133
The narrator handles the scene of Lavinia’s canary-murders with a mixture of sincerity and gentle
sarcasm, emphasizing the importance of her decision while simultaneously mocking the woman’s
tendencies toward hyperbole and the dramatic.
134
See below for more on this tension between animal sentience and animal abuse.
178
where Jules observes his mistress “with profound attention all the while,” “began to be

suspicious” when her actions contradict his expectations (“in all the days of his life he

had never seen her act thus”), and flies out the front door after meeting her gaze (87)—

attribute to the bird the ability to make logical judgments based on reasoning and

reflection.135 In creating her own narrative of feminine independence, Lavinia draws a

clear distinction of and preference for the emotional suffering she endures over the

physical distress her canaries experience.

Lavinia’s actions expose a persistent and problematic holdover between the

canary’s conception as a domestic icon and its reworked role as an evocative image of

women’s suffering. In both instances, the bird’s mistress is depicted as a devoted, loving

pet-owner whose duty is to protect the life of her charge through careful attention to its

bodily and emotional needs. Rather than incidental, this requirement was crucial to

women’s rights activists’ rewriting of the canary narrative, where the birds needed to

inspire women, through their suffering, to make efforts to think more critically about

their imprisonment and attempt to ease their pain. Regardless of whether the political

perspective was conservative or progressive, then, American society would have

identified a woman who willingly harmed her own dependent pets—as Lavinia so

brazenly does—as a disturbing aberration. That kind of violence would have been for

many clear indication of a woman’s depravity, monstrosity, and even utter failure as a

woman.

For proof of this, one need look no further than “She is Properly Punished,” an

1887 article from the Philadelphia-based North American that describes the crime and

135
His ability to recall the past would have been the most controversial and progressive element of his
sentience.
179
sentencing of a female canary murderer. According to the anonymous report, two

“innocent little birds” whose “only offence was that they sang too much and too merrily”

were “deliberately carv[ed] up” by an irritated neighbor, Ms. Ida Van Zandt. The crime is

rendered graphic and melodramatic, and the judge finds the case particularly distressing

because in court, the accused could “find in [the description of the murders] only food for

laughter.” The appalled author of the article indignantly calls into question the murderer’s

gender status, referring to her as a “creature masquerading as a woman,” for carrying out

such a crime against canaries and therefore harboring “a spite so malignantly fed upon

suffering.” Ms. Van Zandt’s sentence of several months in prison receives the express

approval of the reporter, who ends the piece by claiming that any man fool enough to

marry her will likely be subject to the same abuses. “She is Properly Punished” outlines

the dire consequences of a woman’s refusal to demonstrate conventional attitudes of

nurturance, extrapolating from the incident of canary-killing a future of social censure,

imprisonment, and un-marriageability: a life with no happiness and no future.

This cultural insistence on sustained feminine impulses of nurturance explains

why so many of the postbellum authors depicting women with metonymic or empathetic

connections to imprisoned birds could not imagine a hopeful future: they remained

limited in their estimations of women’s abilities to take on roles beyond that of domestic

nurturer.136 Though Fettered for Life ardently advocates for an end to domestic abuse,

136
This is, in fact, the accusation that—a century later—prominent second-wave feminist Germaine Greer
would level at nineteenth-century women’s rights activists. In the introduction to The Female Eunuch
(1970), Greer identifies herself as part of a “second feminist wave” composed of “ungenteel middle-class
women . . . calling for revolution” who differ dramatically from the “genteel middle-class ladies” of the
nineteenth century who “clamoured for reform” (11). Her feminist suffragette precursors, she claims, made
important strides, but in the end their efforts failed because of their desire to avoid disrupting institutional
fixtures such as “[m]arriage, the family, private property and the state.” In other words, she claims, “The
cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. The conclusion was that the cage door
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Blake does not challenge the notion that women are natural caretakers whose first

priorities must be their husbands and children (and potentially pets?): even her most

progressive female characters demonstrate their commitment to domesticity, albeit a

domesticity characterized by spousal respect. Thus Blake’s canary owner, Mrs. Moulder,

has no future because she cannot escape her abusive husband and needy children without

compromising her obligations to her home. Likewise, “A Jury of Her Peers” is

sympathetic to the plight of a “failed” woman, but Glaspell’s female protagonists are

those who find ways to be both subversive and conservative, to be adept at both detective

and domestic skills. Minnie Wright, on the other hand, is sentenced to a lifetime of literal

caging after she proves unable to perform this balance.

But Lavinia adopts the violent efforts that particularly characterize the public

sphere at this point in her life: that is, in the midst of the bloody and brutal Civil War.137

Facilitated by her importantly and unusually selfish perspective, Lavinia assures herself a

future far different from those guaranteed to women like Mrs. Moulder and Minnie

Wright. The spinster’s accomplishments in the wake of her (supposed) mercy killings

vividly demonstrate her new position as a progressive and active, rather than

conventional and ineffectual, woman. Lavvy comes closest to realizing her desire for

independence and equal recognition as a nurse: that most complicated of public services,

where participants attempt to maintain private sphere boundaries, and yet, inevitably,

must break them down. Sànchez and Pita claim Ruiz de Burton identifies these spaces—

which “mark the continuity between private and public spheres and in effect blu[r] the

ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative
had only confused and saddened them” (11).
137
Significantly, Ruiz de Burton depicts Lavvy’s violence as infinitely more effective than the fighting of
the War, which the novelist repeatedly decries as useless, hopelessly disorganized, and random.
181
distinction between these sites” (xxxvii)—as particularly suited to “the competence and

power of women” (ibid.). After discovering how crucial her services are for the hospital

in which she works, Lavinia begins to espouse some of the most blatantly feminist

sentiments that Ruiz de Burton includes in the novel. The narrator reports that she

became from that day more firmly convinced than ever that ladies with

hearts and brains were absolutely necessary to her country’s cause. Not

merely paid menials should attend the sick and wounded, but thoughtful

women, who could judiciously order as well as obey in an emergency like

this, which ended so tragically. Lavvy was no advocate of “women’s

rights.” She did not understand the subject even, but she smiled sadly,

thinking how little woman was appreciated, how unjustly underrated.

(129)

A woman who recognizes her ability to hold power, to order others outside of the home,

and insists that there are clear and defined roles for women in the public sphere is a far

cry from the disappointed old maid who spent her evenings alone by the hearth mourning

her lack of children. Sánchez and Pita also notice the role the hospital plays in Lavinia’s

development: “Lavvy, ridiculed earlier in the novel . . . is ‘rescued’ and ultimately

vindicated as a character when she moves from domestic to public spaces . . . [becoming]

wiser, unselfish, loyal . . . with a strong sense of right and responsibility. Her hospital

experiences are crucial in this regard, allowing Lavinia to textually constitute herself as a

middle-class woman in her own right” (xxxix). The extreme conditions and turmoil that

American society experienced during the Civil War help facilitate Lavinia’s newfound

futurity, although the carnival-esque scenario also allows for situations that would not

182
have been allowed in the regular day-to-day operations of the country. Either way,

however, the nationwide slippage in foundational expectations of behavior allow Ruiz de

Burton to expose the problems of conventional domesticity, as she provides Lavinia

concrete ways with which to engage with a wider world and sets the stage for what

opportunities do—or at least could—exist for women outside of the home.

Ruiz de Burton’s depiction of Lavinia’s killings destabilizes traditional notions of

domesticity by destroying the influence of the conventional canary and, by doing so,

disavowing women’s duty to dedicate their lives exclusively to maintaining the order,

safety, and nurturing atmosphere of the home. Ironically, though, this achievement is

made at the expense of her rather blatant disregard for the importance of nonhuman

sensory experiences and rights: an importance that is not so quickly dismissed in Blake’s

and Glaspell’s texts. Fettered for Life, “A Jury of Her Peers,” and Who Would’ve

Thought It? all make bold contributions to postbellum discussions of women’s rights, in

large part through their careful consideration and rejection of traditional woman/canary

relationships and symbolism. Though all three depict this rejection through the violent

deaths of female characters’ beloved birds, Ruiz de Burton is the only author to sacrifice

a more nuanced appreciation of nonhuman suffering in order to achieve a more optimistic

outlook for her beleaguered spinster. Blake and Glaspell admittedly remain stuck in their

consideration of their characters’ futures, mired in a sense of static hopelessness that Ruiz

de Burton deftly avoids. But this stasis is, to some degree, due to the significance they

give to the avian lives lost in the process of challenging domestic norms.

183
 The canaries of Fettered for Life and “A Jury of Her Peers” are not depicted—nor

do their mistresses appreciate them—as obstacles, simply symbolic constraints of the

private sphere. Instead they are simultaneously symbolic and sentient: holding cultural

meaning, certainly, but also existing as living creatures whose suffering is just as

unbearable as the human suffering that their mistresses endure. Thus, Mrs. Moulder and

Minnie Wright cannot contemplate purposefully destroying their pets, even if doing so

allows them to sever ties with stifling domesticity. Instead, the birds’ murders leave both

women essentially incapacitated, cowed by knowledge that their own lives are as fragile

and susceptible to conventional cruelties as those of their pets. Cherry’s death in Fettered

for Life is a deeply-felt tragedy for Mrs. Moulder, both mentally and corporeally, and it

causes and is equated to her subsequent miscarriage. The woman never recovers from the

loss of her canary/companion/child, never daring to escape her cage and risk the violent

death that Cherry experiences at the hands of unrepentant patriarchy. In a similar vein,

Minnie Wright is so tormented by her husband’s brutal treatment of her animal that she

inflicts the same deadly punishment on him: an eye for an eye, a clear indication of her

equation of human and nonhuman animal experiences.

Lavinia, on the other hand, experiences a moment of sadness before she kills the

birds, but this moment passes quickly and is readily replaced with a sense of nobility and

victory. She is not haunted by her actions, and she clearly considers the loss of the birds

justifiable collateral damage. Her attitude of euthanasia—that she must kill the birds in

order to end their suffering—is not one that she ever adopts toward human suffering; in

her subsequent role as a nurse to Civil War soldiers, she tirelessly works to save lives no

matter how far gone the patients seem to be. This ultimate disregard for the birds’ lives—

184
despite clear acknowledgement of their sentience—makes Ruiz de Burton’s articulation

of an otherwise socially radical and empowering moment incredibly unsettling. Lavinia

perpetrates the same crimes against lived experience that she resents when they are

practiced against herself and other women, essentially recreating the systems of violence

and disregard that have made her own life as a trapped spinster so miserable. She exploits

the very alliance with the suffering canary/animal that so many women’s rights activists

found helpful in articulating the need for a more capacious understanding of suffering

and equality. Thus, the reader must reconcile Lavinia’s accomplishments with her

violence, forced to consider the ways in which Ruiz de Burton’s refutation of women’s

marginalization relies deeply on the marginalization of animals: her triumph as an author

of women’s rights rests squarely on her failure to extend those rights across species lines.

185
 Conclusion

Over the course of the past hundred years, the clamor for canaries has died down

substantially. Whereas at the turn of the twentieth century caged birds ranked first in pet

popularity, today they fall well below fish, dogs, and cats; in the UK, they also lose to

rabbits and only barely edge out hamsters (“Pet Population”). In 1981, even canaries’

most ardent supporters moved on, as the British mining industry officially abandoned the

animals in favor of new detection technologies.138 But I would argue that the legacy of

the “little saffron immigrant” remains rooted in our cultural consciousness in familiar,

relevant, and sometimes even—if I can indulge in a moment of cautious optimism—

progressive ways. Canaries, less tied to discourses of domestication and more firmly

linked to innovations in intelligence, now speak more substantially to new possibilities in

interspecies relationships.

Twenty-first century thinkers and writers seem committed to advancing canaries’

reputations as intensely embodied and intuitive beings. Animal theorists from a variety of

disciplines group the birds with a select cohort of mostly-mammalian creatures—dogs,

elephants, dolphins, etc.—whose sensory acuity and readiness for response make them

popular choices for intellectual investigations into human/nonhuman animal

relationships. Ironically, however—though perhaps unsurprisingly—many of these

outlets have also adopted the canary as a symbol for sentience. This is in large part due to

the fact that the coal mine canary—the nineteenth century’s dirty little secret—has

become popular shorthand for cutting-edge conversations about climate change, sentinel

138
American miners had discontinued the birds’ use several years earlier.
186
animals, biopolitics, and more. Yale’s Canary Database, for example, is an online project

aimed at facilitating an “evidence-based approach to animal sentinel data” through

“greater communication between human health professionals and animal health experts”

(“Project History.”) Their name, they explain in their mission, acknowledges canaries as

some of the first and most extensively studied examples of sentinel—or early warning—

animals. But in doing so the birds are reduced to a signifier, representing a quality that

they are then denied, standing in for an entire archive of materials dedicated to

interspecies reliance that ignores its complicity in the birds’ objectification.

This strange, living-yet-symbolic conception even extends into technological

fields. The Canary home security system, for example, bills itself as the “perfect security

system for every home,” offering homeowners the chance to sync their smartphones to an

“intelligent,” motion-detecting device. Canary systems explicitly promise to provide

intelligent, timely warnings of danger and disruption, but they also make implicit claims

about the kinds of homes they will, essentially, create by excising fear and violence:

peaceful, safe centers of family and morality. The system provides constant HD video

surveillance of buyers’ homes as well as continuous mobile updates and alerts. “It all

adds up,” the website proudly proclaims, “to a smarter and safer home environment”

(“Canary—A Complete . . .”). With its promises of effortless communication and defense

of domesticity, however, Canary is more than a sleek, intuitive recorder. At the core of

the company’s marketing is an appeal to posthumanistic modes of being: from its

appellative homage to avian sentience to its celebration of “smart” technology, Canary

casts its consumers as participants in a uniquely advantageous collaboration. To buy this

product may be to buy into a distinctly posthumanist worldview, a cyborg existence, as

187
Donna Haraway might have it, where human, animal, and machine work as one. But

canaries are strangely absent from the company’s marketing materials: their website

contains no explanations about their allusive name, and there are no written or visual cues

that might serve to flesh out the sentience behind the symbol. The birds themselves are

irrelevant to the company’s purposes—they trade only in the symbolic resonance of the

animals’ name.

The canary’s standing in these scientific and technological venues is, on one hand,

a much-deserved turn of events, as some of the most advanced Victorian-era thought

about human/nonhuman animal relationships sprung from those dangerous,

unacknowledged conditions of interspecies reliance. On the other hand, that symbolism

adds insult to injury by systematically acknowledging canaries’ abilities to think, feel,

and respond by objectifying them. In this way, many modern canary iterations reduce the

birds to a symbolic shadow of their supposedly sentient selves.

To end on a literary note: amidst the scientific and technological efforts to cash in

on the canary’s cache, a small publishing imprint’s journal takes seriously the call to

unsettle traditional distinctions between “the human” and “the animal.” The Canary

literary journal bills itself as “a literary journal of the environmental crisis” that is “based

on the premise that the literary arts can provide an understanding that humans are part of

an integrated system” (“Canary”). They too participate in the symbolic erasure of

canaries themselves—like the Canary home security system, the journal does not attempt

to explain its allusive moniker (although they do, at least, include a picture of a yellow

canary on their homepage). But their mission echoes the pronouncements of scholars

such as Erica Fudge, who famously claims that “it is through the animal the human-ness

188
can be found . . . There is no human without an animal present, but the presence of the

animal can itself disrupt the status of the human” (90). Similarly, Derrida, demands that

we reconsider ourselves as “After and near what they call the animal and with it—

whether we want it or not and whatever we do about it” (380); that “There is no animal in

the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to

envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within

the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity” (415). Thus this

journal continues the project of reconsidering canaries that began in earnest at the end of

the nineteenth century. Canary literary journal is the logical next step after the

consciousness-awakening efforts of Arnold’s elegy, an active call for submissions to the

next generation of animal autobiographies.

189
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T.S.A. “The Green Canary.” The Mirror 31 (April 7, 1838): 212. British Periodicals.

Untitled. The Daily Picayune (New Orleans) 29 December 1895: 4.

Vance, Norman. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian

Literature and Religious Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Vann, J. Don and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, ed. Victorian Periodicals and Victorian

Society. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994.

von Tilzer, Harry and Arthur B. Lamb. “A Bird in a Gilded Cage.” New York: Shapiro,

Bernstein, and Von Tilzer, 1900.

Walker, Mrs. Mary Spring. “A Wonderful Canary-Bird.” The Congregationalist (Boston)

6 November 1878: 6.

Wallace, Robert L. The Canary Book: Containing Full Directions for the Breeding,

Rearing, and Management of Canaries and Canary Mules; Cage Making, &c.;

Formation of Canary Societies; Exhibition Canaries, Their Points, and How to

Breed and Exhibit Them; and All Other Matters Connected with this Fancy. 3rd

ed. London: L. Upcott Gill, 1893.

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West, Robin. “Invisible Victims: A Comparison of Susan Glaspell’s ‘Jury of Her Peers’

and Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’” Cardozo Studies in Law and

Literature 8.1 (1996): 203-249.

“Why the Canary Sings.” Atchison Daily Champion (Kansas) 29 January 1891: 5.

Wood, Mary S. Canary Birds. A Manual of Useful and Practical Information for Bird

Keepers. New York: William Wood & Co., 1869.

Worth, George J. Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859-1907: “No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed.”

Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003.

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 Curriculum Vitae

EDUCATION
Ph.D. English, Lehigh University, May 2016.
M.A. English, University of Connecticut, May 2008.
B.A. English, University of Connecticut, May 2006.
Summa cum laude, University Scholar, Honors Scholar.

DISSERTATION
Canaries beyond the Coal Mine: The Plight of the “Little Saffron Immigrant” in
Victorian and Postbellum American Literature

PUBLICATIONS
Peer-reviewed
“Risking Life and Wing: Victorian Conceptions of Coal Mine Canaries,” Victorian
Review 40.2 (2014)

Review of Janelle A. Schwartz’s Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism (2012), in Keats-

Shelley Review (2013)

“Poeticizing the ‘Pet of the Parlor’: Domesticated Canaries in Victorian Periodicals,”

Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Revise and resubmit.

Professional blogs
“Grad School: An Ode Instead of an Elegy?” MLA Connected Academics. March 1,
2016.

“Posthumanism Matters for the Humanities.” Drown Unbound: Lehigh Department of

English. October 9, 2014.

HONORS AND AWARDS

Connected Academics Fellowship, $2,000. Modern Language Assoc., August 2015 –
May 2016.

Senior Teaching Fellowship, $20,000. Lehigh University, August 2014 – May 2015.

Strohl Dissertation Fellowship, $25,000. Lehigh University, June 2013 – May 2014.

Gipson Institute Research Grant, $450. Lehigh University. June 2013.

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Dissertation Fellowship, $9,700. Lehigh University, Spring 2013.

Teaching Fellowship. Lehigh University, Fall 2010 – Fall 2012.

University Fellowship, $25,000. Lehigh University, Fall 2009 – Spring 2010.

Teaching Fellowship, University of Connecticut, Fall 2006 – Spring 2008.

Summer Undergraduate Research Fund Award, $500. University of Connecticut, May

2005.

Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Grant, $1,000. Univ. of Connecticut, Jan.

2005.

Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Resource Grant, $500. Univ. of

Connecticut, Jan. 2005.

CONFERENCE PAPERS AND PANELS

“Connected Academics: Preparing Doctoral Students for a Variety of Careers.” NeMLA.
Hartford, CT. March 17-20, 2016.

“The Violence of Interspecies Relationships in Postbellum Women’s Rights Narratives.”

C19 Conference. State College, PA. March 17-20, 2016.

“‘Disagreeably suggestive of something animal’: Species Indeterminacy in Richard

Marsh’s The Beetle.” Victorians Institute Conference. Charlotte, NC. October 24-25,
2014.

“Coal Mines and Virtuous Signs: Canary Evidence in the Late Nineteenth Century.”
North American Victorian Studies Association Conference. Pasadena, CA. October 23-
27, 2013.

“Symbolism and Sympathy: Canaries in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Children’s

Literature.” Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States
Conference. SUNY Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY. October 11-13, 2012.

“‘The most charming pets that can possibly be possessed’: Canaries as Companions to
Violence in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies
Conference. Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. March 31-April 3, 2011.
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“Whiteness as Inhibitor in Plum Bun.” 23rd Annual Symposium on African American
Culture and Philosophy. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. November 1-3, 2007.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
All designed and taught independently, unless otherwise noted
Literature
Vision and the Private Eye (ENGL 187), Summer 2015. Lehigh University. Online.

British Literature II (ENGL 126), Spring 2015. Lehigh University.

Sensational Narratives of Illness and Medicine (ENGL/HMS 115), Fall 2014. Lehigh
University.

Victorian Conceptions of Africa (ENGL 372), Spring 2012. Team-taught with Michael
Kramp. Lehigh University.

Popular Culture and Literature (CORE 164), Fall 2008, Spring 2009. King’s College,
Wilkes-Barre, PA.

Composition
Seminar in Literature (ENGL 011), Fall 2014. Lehigh University.
“The Underground,” Fall 2014.

Composition and Literature I (ENGL 001), Fall 2010 – 2012, 2015. Lehigh University.

Composition and Literature II (ENGL 002), Lehigh University.

“Exposure,” Spring 2015.
“Animal Encounters,” Spring 2012.
“Vision and the Private Eye,” Spring 2011.

Composition Studies (WRTG 107), Fall 2008, Spring 2009. University of Scranton.

English Composition (ENG 101), Fall 2008, Spring 2009. Wilkes University, Wilkes-
Barre, PA.

Writing through Literature (ENGL 111), University of Connecticut.

“Social Responsibility,” Spring 2008.
“Suspicion in Literature,” Fall 2007.

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Academic Writing (ENGL 110), Fall 2006, Spring 2007. University of Connecticut.

Tutoring
Sylvan Learning Center. August 2006 – April 2008. Wallingford, CT.

EDITING EXPERIENCE
Supervisor, The Lehigh Review undergraduate academic journal (published annually),
November 2009 – July 2014. Lehigh University.

Editorial assistant, Writing Through Literature: An Anthology of Literary Texts for

Academic Inquiry, ed. Mary Isbell, Spring 2010. University of Connecticut.

Copy Editor, The Long River Review literary journal (published annually), January 2005
– May 2006. University of Connecticut.

Copy Editor and News Correspondent, The Daily Campus newspaper, September 2004 –
April 2005. University of Connecticut.

Marketing Intern, Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, Fall 2004.
University of Connecticut.

SERVICE
All at Lehigh University, unless otherwise noted.
Panel chair and moderator, “Transferable Skills” departmental presentation/workshop,
April 2016.

Panel moderator, “Women in Literature,” Literature and Social Justice Graduate

Conference, March 2015.

Judge, Williams Prize Competition, January 2010 – April 2015.

Mentor, Incoming Graduate Student program, 2011 – 2013.

Moderator, Literature and Social Justice Reading Group, November 2011.

Panelist, Graduate Student Panel, Board of Trustees Meeting, October 2011.

Orientation Leader, Department of English Implementation Committee, University of

Connecticut, Summer 2007.
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PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Modern Language Association

New England Modern Language Association

North American Victorian Studies Association

Victorians Institute

C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

LANGUAGES
French: reading proficiency

TECHNOLOGICAL SKILLS
Banner, Course Site, Blackboard, Peoplesoft, Microsoft Office, Panopto

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