The Cocker Spaniel and Its Double; or, Great Reckonings in Little Kennels: A Queer History of Service Animals in Midcentury US Theatre

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel enjoyed a vibrant queer afterlife in the mid-twentieth century. Virginia Woolf’s 1933 “biography” of Flush ventriloquized the sentiments of both the spaniel and the disabled Victorian poet who loved him. Less remembered is a different Flush, or series of Flushes, who populated U.S. stages between 1931 and 1947. The occasion for his stage performances was Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a play starring and produced by lesbian actress Katharine Cornell (in collaboration with her husband, and fellow homosexual, Guth McClintic). When the production’s first Flush (played by Cornell’s cocker spaniel of the same name) retired from stage work in 1936, a series of other dogs (including, in one casting anomaly, a Yorkshire terrier) joined Cornell onstage for more than one thousand performances. (Cornell’s Flush similarly received biographical treatment, in Flora Merrill’s Flush of Wimpole Street and Broadway, also published in 1933).

My paper explores the comingling queer disability histories of 1) Flush, an actually existing historical cocker spaniel who was both Cornell’s co-star and a member of her extended queer family (including her partner Nancy Hamilton, Helen Keller, and rehabilitation leaders Mary Switzer and Isabella Stewart Diamond); and 2) “Flush,” a theatrical representation of Barret Browning’s service animal. Drawing upon Cornell’s biographies, theatre criticism, personal correspondence, and additional archival materials, my paper will address a series of labor controversies that haunted Flush’s stage career. These controversies, I argue, reveal the conflicts and confluences between Flush’s work as a family member and “Flush’s” work as a service animal. By tracing public and private debates about Flush’s labor onstage and off, I examine how U.S. theatrical culture linked queer and disability communities at midcentury.