Blog14-LAU

“This composite portrait blends the animate and the inanimate, the object with the subject, to unhinge their epistemological meanings and ontological differentiation. But what exactly is the surplus that makes her ‘Companions . . . better than Beings’? In using the term companion, Dickinson draws on the same vocabulary that informs Donna Haraway’s reading of human beings and dogs as ‘companion species’ that stand ‘in obligatory, constitutive, historical, protean relationship’ to each other (12). Like Haraway, who argues that animals “are not about oneself. . . . They are not a projection’(12), Dickinson abandons the normative reference to human subjectivity by making the dog “better than Beings” and erasing “human,” the implied adjective before ‘Beings.’”(534).

“‘I thought for a little and I said, "I am going to find out who killed Wellington.’

And Father said, ‘Were you listening to what I was saying, Christopher?’

I said, ‘Yes, I was listening to what you were saying, but when someone gets murdered you have to find out who did it so that they can be punished.’

And he said, ‘It's a bloody dog, Christopher, a bloody dog.’

I replied, ‘I think dogs are important, too.’”(20).

Christopher is a boy who has a mental disease in the book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. He could not distinguish the emotion on the face however he felt sad about the dead dog, Wellington. When he found Wellington died in the garden, he thought the murder was so cruel that using the fork to kill the dog. In the book, he lifted the dog into his arms and hugged him. He likes dogs. However, Mrs. Shears thought he was the murder and called the police. He experienced the stereotype of psycho that people thought he killed the dog. Police took him to the police office and interrogate him as the prisoner. His father bailed him and asked him to stay out of trouble. However, he still wanted to find out the murder. His father was angry with him because his father thought that it was unnecessary for Christopher to spend too much time on a dead dog. “A bloody dog” was repeated twice in his father’s word because he wanted to make his son attention that his son was in trouble because of this dog. It also raises the atmosphere of anger. However, Christopher answered that the dog was also important. He actually cared about the dog and anthropomorphizes the dog. In the article, Animal Pedagogies written by Emily Dickinson showed that Dickinson regarded her dog as a part of her family. When her dog died, she felt really sad so that she wrote a poet. She showed the relationship and gave it humanity. “Higginson connects the two performances in his 1887 article “Women and Men: Children and Animals,” where he insists that “the care given by the young girl [to her pet] was simply the anticipated tenderness of a mother for her child.” Casting the girl’s relation to her dog as analogous to the mother’s relation to her child infantilizes women (women are like girls), anthropomorphizes animals (pets are like children), and animalizes children (children are like pets)”(534). This quote proved the human relationship between dog and human. When they get along with each other, they would generally become family. In western country, the parent would keep a pet with newborns. Children would grow up with the pets and they could be partners in their life. Christopher was a taciturn child, however, he noticed these young lives. Pets would be ignored because they were lower animals however Christopher knew to cherish animals’ life. He was incompatible with the society because he did not get well along with his classmate. However, he was a kind-heart child.