“I’m Just Passing Through” A Cinematic Gesture
Wendy and Lucy and Neorealism, Resistance without Resolution
Eden Redmond
What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human. But in what way is an action endured and supported?
—Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”
Wendy and Lucy (2008) is a film full of paradox and refusal. Director Kelly Reichardt engages and often refutes multiple categories, methodologies and narrative histories at once. This creative engagement is not performed simply for cinematic competition or shrewd formal complication. Instead Reichardt’s film delivers 80 stripped down minutes focused on process, revealing tender craftsmanship and disarming cinema. This film produces what Giorgio Agamben decribes as a gesture. Gesture is a suggestion toward a way of acting or being. A gesture points the way but does not provide a resolute definition. Though this film literally has production and acting, what is purported above cinematic product is an opening into human experience that is focused on process. Wendy and Lucy offers an example of a cinematic gesture away from resolution and back toward process and ambiguity. This gesture becomes evident in the neorealistic methodology of the filmmaking, the improvised and non-professional acting and irresolute narrative, and even the co-constituted, relationship between Wendy and Lucy. This film challenges expectations of friendship and resolution, and in doing so produces ferocious liminality that cherishes relating over resolution and process over product.
Of course films with opulent production can still connect audiences in deep emotional investigations. The presence of process versus product is never a single sum game and I do not wish to purport them existing on a binary. A stripped down setting does not necessitate a meaningful movie. In the case for Wendy and Lucy however, the sparse setting and plot when joined with Michelle Williams’ acting mastery and Kelly Reichardt’s tender visual direction structure the audience’s reception toward the inarticulate and rich moments of emotional exploration, relation and discovery. Each of these pieces destabilizes movie-going expectations and asks the viewer to engage a deep consideration of liminal and complicated relationships.
Additionally, Wendy and Lucy dismantles the historical relationship between a woman and her dog but does not simply swap out dependency for co-subjectivity. Instead Reichardt halts things in their processional definition and lets us swim around in the feelings and context of a given space. Wendy and Lucy asks us to live in the in-between-ness, resist narrative conclusions, and contest the dependent, demeaning history between women and dogs. This move is especially important when we consider historically how women and dogs have been depicted together; dogs stand in for the heteronormative relationship the woman lacks. Pet dogs serve as the child the woman cannot have, the husband the woman longs for, the scoundrel who inevitably strays, the only friend who understands- isolating her from the world. It is also important when we consider the political turmoil that Reicahrdt reacts against in her Neorealistic films. Wendy and Lucy tells a story with neo realistic methodology that resists resolution and strips down stories and relationships to view the positive, negative, complicated and banal at the same focus. Destabilizing these tropes puts Wendy and Lucy in a feminist discourse though perhaps raising more questions than it answers. What better setting for this cloudy, undecided conversation than the signature grey overcast of Portland, Oregon.
Wendy and Lucy (2008) opens on a small and busy train yard. The train yard is backed by a sylvan setting that dives into the nonurban surrounding in a collision recognizable as Portland, Oregon. We meet Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) and her medium sized sandy washed mutt Lucy (director Kelly Reichardt’s dog, Lucy) on a walk. They tromp through tall grasses and play fetch together. When they move from fields to sidewalks Wendy and Lucy are joined by a red leash slackened comfortably between them. They amble and stretch and explore together in the calm morning before returning to their home, a dark 1980 something Honda Accord. We learn that Wendy and Lucy are stopped over in Portland, on their way to manifesting their destinies where Ketchikan fisheries promise a brighter future. The tone is tenuous, Wendy only has a few hundred dollars with her, she and Lucy are living out of the timeworn car transporting them, and Alaska is still a long way away. When Wendy’s car needs a vital repair, she gets arrested unexpectedly, and Lucy disappears things quickly become dire.
Reichardt encourages for the process of discovery in her movies through improvisational acting method and loosely planned shooting sequences. Reichardt claims to have less of a cinematic style but rather “personal preferences”[1]. One of the first scenes in Wendy and Lucy includes our protagonists meeting an encampment of “authentic train hopping gutter punks” in the woods.[2] Lucy bumbles into the ring of people who reach out to her and coo affectionately, unperturbed by her visiting. Wendy waits with more apprehension. She stays obscured in the trees while she weighs whether to join Lucy in the circle or let the dog return on her own. This moment of assessment is genuine- Michelle Williams and the camera crew did not expect to come across these people. It is a pitch-dark night and the flames of the large campfire feel larger than what may be safe. The flames illuminate the faces of the punks in distorted ways. Williams and therefore Wendy as well read the scene as risky.
It is unclear as to how the film crew invited the group to participate in their filming but the following scene includes Wendy walking up to the assembly to claim Lucy. She chats with them, and shares her plans to move to Alaska. One punk stands and delivers on his own experience in Alaska and how much trouble he got in when he got drunk and crashed a piece of very expensive equipment. This person however is not an actual gutter punk; this is actor Will Oldham who has been supplanted into the scene. This type of film takes root in the tiny liminal spaces between sincere engagement and sincere acting. That is, this method naturalizes the acted experience and also brings focus to lived experience and real conditions. This approach and her broader focus on struggling economic classes have planted Reichardt in dialogue with Itallian Neorealism.
Italian Neorealism developed in reaction to the lavish film sets of the 1930’s in Italy that resulted directly from Benito Mussolini’s regime.[3] These films were excessively decorated and funded and always ended in a sweet resolution. The settings were almost exclusively of a glorified Roman heyday, a promising fascist future or of l’America a paradise across the sea.[4] At this time Italy was undergoing an enormous paradigmatic shift from agriculture to industrialization. In this shift one could find the “real Italy”, this was where the resistance was born. In 1935 filmmakers were urged by anti-Fascist journalist Leo Longanesi to go into the factories, streets, train stations and barracks. Longanesi believed that this was the only place Italian cinema could be born. Cinematic journals such as Cinema and Bianco e Nero asked filmmakers to deliver the same visual verismo as books deliver literary realism. [5] Italian Neorealist writer Italo Cavino says “neo-realists new too well that what counted was the music and not the libretto.” The idea was not to record social struggle so much as to express them in an entirely new way. [6] If Reichardt is in dialogue with Neorealism, then what is she trying to express in an entirely new way? What regime is Reichardt reacting to?
Wendy and Lucy was made in 2007-2008. Reichardt is noted for her quiet and enormous displeasure with the George W. Bush presidency. When asked about Wendy and Lucy specifically Reichardt says that she was very influenced by the stories of resilience, though perhaps stories that are not resolutely successful, from those who survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005.[7] Hurricane Katrina is now characterized as the single costliest disaster in the global insurance industry.[8] The federal response to Hurricane Katrina has been considered insufficient, that blame has been set largely on President George W. Bush’s direction. As the storm itself died down, national media focused on the displacement of more than a million people in the Gulf region.[9] These stories featured stories of drifting- people were uprooted away from home and lurched into ambiguity. It was unclear where help would come from and who would be helped. The country watched largely helpless as the waters of the flooding rushed populations away from their home and into the unknown. Eventually coverage petered out because there was little to cover, just drifting.
Reichardt transplants some of that drifting and ambiguity characteristic to Hurricane Katrina media coverage into Wendy and Lucy. Toward the end of the Hurricane Katrina media cycle, news outlets were reluctant to focus on stories of personal devastation for too long, for those soon ran together and grew stale. There was also a reluctance to depict hopeful stories for they seemed deliriously optimistic when placed in context. And news stories of course could not dwell in ambiguity; it is better to make a false conjecture than not make a claim. Filmmakers however, can dwell in ambiguity and Reichardt does. She zooms in on process and gives room for experience; these moments are rich enough that though we are trained to seek a resolution it is not needed here.
As discussed earlier, Reichardt’s film style is similar to Italian Neorealism through her use of nonprofessional actors and improvisational method. Reichardt’s style has in fact been called “Neo-Neo Realism” by A.O. Scott. Here I wish to discuss further what this neorealistic method looks like visually, and expand on the importance of this acting method, specifically that allowing a margin of unknown into a controlled environment is a choice that destabilizes our expectations and hegemonic story telling.
Michelle Williams’ character Wendy Carroll certainly has some normative features of beauty. She is thin and white, and average height. She is a young woman of about 30 with deep dark eyes that peer up under a borderline- fashionably- but- not –quite- so chop of dark straight hair. She takes care of herself. In Wendy and Lucy we see Wendy bathe herself in a gas station bathroom and brush her teeth regularly. And yet it is clear that Wendy’s physical wellness is on the brink of being so. She is thin but very thin. She has a small unexplained bandage wrapped around her ankle and given her unfed state one begins to worry as if her injury is healing properly. She has plaid shirts and brown shorts and hoodies that are generally stylish but could be found in nearly every working and middle class American closet. The clothing is beginning to look worn and thin beyond what is desirable.
This is the idea for a neorealistic image, that Wendy is both an individual and at the same time part of the working and middle class struggle. More importantly, neorealism depicts each person in the working and middle class struggle as an individual with shared experience and strife. Managing this balance requires a masterful actor and director who know when to seize, wait and receive. Reichardt credits Williams as a true master of her craft and it shows in Wendy and Lucy.
Michelle Williams’ performance in Wendy and Lucy has been praised for being so “believably ordinary in her look and so rigorously un-actressy in her manner that you could easily forget her celebrity”[10]. She balances all of the emotional control of a highly trained actor with the tenuous self-determination of a genuinely uprooted person. Michelle Williams likens her experience portraying Wendy Carroll as “catching the right light”. [11] A beautiful moment exhibiting this occurs when Wendy makes a phone call. Wendy uses a pay phone to place a call. The call is received by a woman’s terse voice. Wendy asks to speak to her brother and her brother’s wife concedes with a sigh. Wendy and her brother speak briefly, kindly and vaguely, asking, “how things are”. His wife is heard shrilly in the background refusing Wendy’s silent request for help, “Well what does she want us to do about it?” Wendy’s brother cannot offer Wendy help at this time, but asks that she call him when she is settled. He is neither siding completely with or against his wife. The phone call ends politely but as soon as the phone is back in it’s cradle, dismay crosses Wendy’s face. Dismay that she could not get fiscal assistance, dismay that she could not speak more openly with her brother, maybe dismay toward a long history with her brother.
Williams’ pulls off this conversation with complete comfort, depth and casualness signature to mainstream American familial phone calls. We do not know the context but what is clear in this highly concentrated moment is that Wendy and her brother currently have a good relationship, Wendy and her sister in law currently have a tense relationship, and that Wendy was invited to call again. Reichardt designs her plotlines by installing blinders on the audience; they cannot see the periphery of the picture. As such they cannot be distracted by sordid detail and story. Like blinders on working horses, this structure directs the audience toward the core purpose of the moment. For the case of this phone call we get a sense, a fleeting feeling into the nature of Wendy’s relationship with her brother. This gesture is far more revealing and connective than an explicit narrative description could be.
This produces a sincere sense of what the actor brings to the film, illuminating for the viewer the sensational space between the process and the product of controlled acting. Reichardt seeks out this liminal space. Reichardt puts a tremendous amount of faith in her actors; this is the engine for her films. Wendy and Lucy is motorized by Michelle Williams’ ability to portray disillusionment and endurance that is recognizable and even expected in ordinary lived experience.
But is Michelle Williams’ portrayal enough to keep an audience engaged for 80 minutes? 40 of those minutes are spent looking for a missing dog and there is hardly any dialogue. There is no music. Nothing is clear. The setting backdrop, soundtrack (and even the plotline) are so banal that Williams’ acting ability is put under the microscope- in a movie so still and so simple, will Wendy Carroll be enough to care about?
The plain answer is yes. Reichardt’s films remind the viewer that relating and caring and connecting with just humans is at the heart of every filmic engagement, we don’t need flashy periphery or tidy resolution to be affected by people, and moreover to be affected by animals.
In Wendy and Lucy there is a heightened sense of risk and improvisation because they are working with a dog. Lucy is director Kelly Reichardt’s personal pet dog. She is a medium sized, yellow lab something mutt. Williams and Lucy have chemistry on film. This is apparent when they play and walk and how they pay attention to each other’s actions. Donna Haraway writes in the Companion Species Manifesto that dogs and humans require and deserve co-constituted relationships that are as subjectively created as those relationships between humans.
there cannot be just one companion species, there have to be at least two to make one…Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships- co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all [12]
Haraway is discussing this idea of co-subjectivity within a post humanist dialogue. This may be a relevant path to explore Wendy and Lucy’s relationship further but for the sake of this paper I wish to focus on the nature of “relating that is never done once and for all”. Wendy and Lucy spend half of their screen time together in absentia. The local pound has picked up Lucy and Wendy is looking for her. Wendy’s life is shaped and defined by Lucy’s wellness and vice versa.
I wish to focus specifically on the relationship formed between women and dogs, how that relationship has operated in the past, and how within Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt unfastens that relationship. This tender film has the beginnings of a reimagined account of girls and their dogs. Through Wendy and Lucy we can rescript stories of women and canines to be richer, more complex narratives featuring deep and unresolved relationships.
There is this amazing unscripted moment in Wendy and Lucy that threatens the neorealistic sensibility of Reinchardt’s film with sentimentality and surrealism but actually operates very differently. Wendy and Lucy are woken early one morning by a local security guard (Wally Dalton). Wendy is groggy and takes a few moments to wake up but Lucy lurches up from the back seat barking occasionally, jumping between rows of the Honda. While the security guard is reluctantly informing Wendy that she cannot sleep where she is parked, Lucy wanders in between the camera and Wendy to produce the effect in Figure 1. The camera is looking in through the passenger side window and is focused on Wendy who is in the driver’s seat. When Lucy cuts into the shot she is in the foreground but blurred because the camera was not anticipating her presence. When Lucy intercedes the shot her head is positioned perfectly to suggest that she and Wendy actually share a cranium though have separate faces. Their mind is joined but their subjectivity is intact. The fact that this exchanges takes place inside their Honda, their home, further delineates the car as their shared domestic space. The intimacy and subjectivity here is both highlighted and blurred beyond that which is normally described between humans and dogs. It certainly goes beyond the historically harmful tropes of women and dogs. Though this certainly touches on some of the same themes: if Wendy and Lucy live in this car, does that mean that they sleep together? How does this affect their relating? Does this necessarily imply a sexualized relationship? Do Wendy and Lucy technically cohabitate if they do not share a house? It is not unusual to see humans and dogs depicted as close friends. However to see women and dogs as close relators has a condescending history fraught with sexual innuendo and codependent suggestions.
From the beginning of pet keeping in Victorian England, dogs have been the most popular and celebrated animal companions. Lapdogs were companions, trinkets, and hobbies, competitively bred and exclusively shared. Though there is vast documentation of the aristocratic fascination of keeping fancy goldfish, pigeons, monkeys and squirrels, dogs have been unrivaled as the favorite.[13] More than any other pet, dogs provided the complete prototype for the kind of intimacy proposed by the modern bourgeois idea of pet-keeping… Dogs slept with their owners in their beds, ate at their tables… and appeared prominently in individual and family portraits (Brown, 4). These household canines were well documented in paintings, poetry, satire and literature. These first written accounts however were almost exclusively of female owners. It is not until the writings of William Wordsworth at the very beginning of the nineteenth century that dogs begin to be celebrated as noble laborers accompanying solitary men in the field (Brown, 5). While these industrious depictions of dogs and men highlight canine characteristics of loyalty and devotion, accounts of dogs and women are full of innuendo and absurdity.
In her essay The Lady, the Lapdog and Literary Alterity, Laura Brown illustrates through Victorian literary examples how pet dogs replaced a normative sexual relationship his female owner was certainly lacking. For instance, in Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little (1751), whose protagonist is an “over-indulged lapdog”, the “ardour” the female protagonist experiences for the dog is a “commonplace of the sexualized representations of the lady and the lapdog” (Brown, 7). Even when sexual implications are not center stage as in the case for satire, they are always present.
To bring about a more complicated, contemporary example, Brown writes briefly visits Virginia’ Woolf’s 1933 novella Flush. Flush has been a popular platform to investigate canine subjectivity for feminists and post humanist scholars. Flush is a biography of a dog, but through the pet’s life, we actually are told of his owners, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Flush’s life is well documented in letters and poems between Barrett and Browning. In a poem by Browning, he locates the spaniel as both a familiar household resident and in contrast establishes Flush’s acts of affection as alien, intimate and strange. In the rhetoric of (a poem written by Robert Browning)…is a violent dynamic, marked by the words “sudden,” “against,” “thrust,” “started,” and “amazed,” which erases an ordinary or naturalized distance and replaces a surprising intimacy with alterity. (Brown, 2).
In their courtship Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning exchanged 574 letters in twenty months; before they eventually eloped to Florence where they had a family and lived happily until Barrett’s death June 29, 1861.[14] In choosing to write about Elizabeth Barrett, Virginia Woolf has engaged a story that could reinforce the notion that a woman can only become independent after being rescued by a man. In fact in Flush, Wolf references a line from Barrett’s poetry where Barrett equates rescuing Flush with Browning rescuing herself (Friis, 129). Woolf was not interested in perpetuating this narrative. This dilemma was coupled with Woolf’s disdain for the boastful reductiveness characteristic of biographies of the day.[15] How could Woolf tell the story of Elizabeth Barrett without diminishing her life to another helpless love story?
Woolf’s radical solution to this problem was to write a biography- not of Elizabeth Barret, but of her dog- a golden brown spaniel named Flush whose life is well-documented in Elizabeth’s letters and in her two poems about him- an innovative move which precisely creates the possibility of changing the point de capiton of the romantic fabula. (Friis, 129)
When the Relocating Flush as the focus of a biography opens up for a retelling of Elizabeth Barrett’s life. By situating Flush as the main character, Barrett’s implicated role as owner is seen in a new light. From Flush’s perspective the author and reader can see not only the facts of Barrett’s life, but the potential “forces at work in this reality” (Friss, 128).
This move by Woolf is contested in post-humanist discourse. While the story is told uniquely from Flush’s perspective, Flush is still a literary cipher rather than a participant in a relationship. This is precisely the type of relationship that Donna Haraway asks audiences to abandon. Instead Haraway advocates for the co-subjectivity of humans and dogs. In considering the subjectivity of companion animals we can revise these relationships to be deeper and richer.
Wendy and Lucy’s relationship is one of friendship. They walk and play together, they eat together, they sleep together. They are moving to Ketchikan together. Wendy and Lucy clearly have affection for eachother, their focus throughout the majority of the film is on each other, is turned inward. They co-habitate. Donna Haraway says in Companion Species Manifesto that co-habitation is not all fuzzy happy feelings. Instead co-habitation is a relationship to explore the multiform, unresolved, at stake nature of relating. Haraway suggests that through co-subjectivity this nature of a relationship can be made possible. Howwever how much subjectivity can a canine actually have if that canine’s life is ultimately determined by the human they cohabitate with?
Vicki Hearne in her seminal essay “Hounds, Horses and Jeffersonian Happiness: What’s Wrong with Animal Rights?” Hearne asks what could an animal’s happiness look like? Her answer is that animals striving for excellence find happiness. This means being put to work, bringing out what animal trainers call “talent”. Further, Hearne explains that this talent can only come to be through harmonious relational training, and is driven by the effort of “getting it right”. Hearne’s deployment of Aristotelian and Jeffersonian happiness is about developing as conjoined mortal beings.
What are Wendy and Lucy trying to get right? While the film gives us very little context, we know that they are on their way to Ketchikan for steady work and security. There is an idea of moving on in hopes of embetterment for both of them. Wendy and Lucy are bound by their pursuit for a better life.
But how much subjectivity and mutual striving is happening is Lucy is not making these decisions? Can we really call this co-subjectivity if the dog is ultimately along for the ride? When Haraway reads Hearne she explains that Hearne never advocates for a relationship that is not heirarchical:
“Put in another way, she is in love with the cross-species achievement made possible by the hierarchical discipline of companion animal training. Hearne finds excellence in action to be beauiful, hard, specific, and personal. She is against the abstract scales of comparison […] she is after specificity”
Can we look to make Wendy and Lucy’s story specific? Of course. When asked twice in the film if she belongs in town, Wendy Carroll responds, “I’m just passing through”. This phrase epitomizes Wendy’s paradox, the desire to move and her inability to go. There is one scene of the movie that does allow for some cinematic expectations to be met; the finale is a masterpiece. The finale epitomizes Wendy and Lucy’s fluid relating, highlights Reichardt’s neorealist predication for improvisation and deploys her resolutely unresolved narratives to make for a tragic and touching ending, though not a conclusion.
In the final scene of the film Wendy finds Lucy has been picked up by the pound and fostered out to a local home. Wendy catches sight of Lucy through waist high chain link fence carving out a plush green lawn preceding a squat clean house. Lucy is lying in the grass facing away from Wendy. Wendy approaches Lucy calling to her, and Lucy trots over to the fence with enthusiasm. Wendy throws a stick for Lucy and they engage in a clumsy but loving game of fetch. After a few rounds Lucy and Wendy settle next to each other and interact through the fence. Wendy feeds Lucy treats, and reaches insufficiently through the fence. Wendy kisses Lucy and Lucy licks back. Soon Wendy is quietly, tearfully moaning “I’ll come back, I’ll come back” and it is clear that Lucy will not be accompanying Wendy out of Oregon. Seeing that Lucy is safe Wendy decides to move on to Alaska, promising that she will return for Lucy when the time is right. Wendy picks herself up and walks away briskly, leaving Lucy and her promise for return.
From a narrative perspective we are left asking many questions: Will Wendy and Lucy ever be reunited? Will Wendy get to Alaska at all? Is Wendy’s car actually repaired? Is Lucy actually better off at this fostered arrangement? We cannot know. Reichardt says that she is surprised that people see hope in the end of the movie, that she does not see it as very hopeful.[16] Neither does Reichardt discredit this reception.
From a neorealistic perspective Reichardt gives several minutes to the heartbreaking and not uncommon decision of leaving a pet and moving on in the hopes of finding something better. The scene is set at a candid site of a nonurban home furnished modestly with the trappings of the working class. This normal middle class home is demarcated as a significant site for relating.
From a relational companion species perspective Wendy made a decision that benefitted Lucy the most. This defies historical tropes of women who are dependent on their dogs and instead dignifies both Wendy and Lucy with a mutually beneficial decision, even if that decision is to separate.
Reichardt’s movie resists many categories both methodologically and narratively. In method Reichardt’s movie depends on candid appearances and acting that is believably common. In relating Wendy and Lucy is fluid and questions historical and social expectations of subjectivity. In narrative Wendy and Lucy want to be together but cannot be together. Wendy and Lucy is an immobilized road film. Vehicles, footsteps and trains provide the soundtrack to a sparse environment and raw emotional landscape. Anywhere she is, Wendy is reminded of the need to get moving and of her critical inability to go. The train yard is the cairn for the film; if the train yard is not visible in a frame, the trains are almost always audible, calling Wendy, just as Wendy called Lucy when they were apart. Searching for each other, searching for something better.
[1] Porrill, W. (2011, April 17). Conversations at the Cinematheque: Kelly Reichardt for WENDY & LUCY/ OLD JOY, 4/17/11. Retrieved May 9, 2015.
[2] Van Sant, G. (2008). Kelly Reichardt by Gus Van Sant. BOMB
[3] Ratner, M. (n.d.). Italian Neo-Realism. Retrieved May 11, 2015, from http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/neorealism1.jsp
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Van Sant, G. (2008). Kelly Reichardt by Gus Van Sant. BOMB
[8] Hurricane Katrina Statistics and Fast Facts. (2013, August 23). Retrieved May 10, 2015. From http://www.cnn.com/2013/8/23/us/hurricane-katrina-statistics-fast-facts
[9] Ibid.
[10] Scott, A. (2009, March 22). Neo-Neo Realism. The New York Times, p. MM38. Retrieved May 9, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/magazine/22neorealism-t.html?pagewanted=all
[11] Chan, J. (2008, December 10). Exclusive: Wendy and Lucy Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt Discusses Her Slice of Life New Indie. Retrieved April 4, 2015
[12] Haraway, D. (2003). 12. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, Illinois: Prickly Paradigm Press.
[13]Brown, L. (2011). The Lady, The Lapdog, and Literary Alterity. The Eighteenth Century, 52(1), 1-15. Retrieved April 15, 2015, from https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-pennsylvania-press/the-lady-the-lapdog-and-literary-alterity-gDdmWimAR6
[14] Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2015, from http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/elizabeth-barrett-browning
[15] Friss, Elizabeth (2014). 129. Becoming Flush, becoming Elizabeth. (125-136). In Exploring the Animal Turn: Human-Animal Relations in Science, Society and Culture. The Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies.
[16] Van Sant, G. (2008). Kelly Reichardt by Gus Van Sant. BOMB