Cultural Geography

Wolf representations emphasized so-called

savagery, lack of mercy, unfair habits of pack

hunting, and cowardice – all contravening norms

of masculinity in the American frontier centred

around virility and prowess, sporting honour,

and willingness to kill in the name of chivalry,

morality, progress and civilization. Emel showed

how these sorts of images not only devastated

wolves and other animals, but were analogous to

racist and sadistic treatment of people falling

below European-American males on the hierar-

chy of beings.

Animals were imbricated as well in the con-

structions of urban identity in Victorian Britain.

Philo (1995) explored the emergence of a dis-

tinctive Victorian, urban identity associated with

standards of civility, public decency, sexual

licence and norms of compassion, in contrast to

rural stereotypes. Live meat markets and in-town

slaughterhouses, such as Smithfield in London,

violated these standards and norms, obliging

civilized city dwellers to witness sexual

intercourse among animals on their way to

market, exposing their delicate senses to the vio-

lence of auction and slaughterhouse, and risking

their moral decay by forcing them to mingle with

drovers perceived by bourgeois reformers as

inclined to drink and sexual excess. To distance

the emerging urban order from its rural and animal

origins (as well as for sanitary and organizational

reasons), meat markets and slaughterhouses were

excised from the city, reinforcing urban identi-

ties defined in opposition to a countryside popu-

lated by beastly people and animals.

Howell’s (2000) study of dog-stealing in

Victorian London shows both dogs and bour-

geois women as victims of a patriarchal society,

confined to domestic captivity but vulnerable to

the actions of lower-class men, the venal public

world of cash, commerce and calculation, and

the dangers and degradations lurking in the city’s

poorest districts. Borrowing from Virginia

Woolf ’s satirical tale of the theft of Elizabeth

Barrett’s dog written from the dog’s point of

REANIMATING CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 191

Figure 9.4 Trapping ‘Old Three-Toes’(from S.Young and E. Goldman,The Wolves of North America, 1944)

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