Little Puggies: Consuming Cuteness and Deforming Motherhood in Susan Ferrier’s Marriage

Frequently represented as substitutes for children by eighteenth-century satirists and moralists, lapdogs stood accused of distracting their mistresses from maternal obligations. These women supposedly projected the feelings and desires of children onto their canine companions. In Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), the target of this animal-commodity fetishism is the pug dog. Why was this particular lapdog so well-suited to the attentions of consumers and critics, and what might “ugly” animals beloved by people tell us about human tastes? Reading contemporary aesthetic theory alongside eighteenth-century literary and material culture reveals that the quality identified today as “cuteness” was considered a factor in women’s affection for certain pets. Just as aesthetic theorists find freakishness to be concomitant to cuteness, so too did critics of these dogs discuss the pug’s “deformity.” Current debates about the moral worth of cuteness likewise have eighteenth-century analogues. In Marriage, Juliana Douglas’s interactions with her companion animals and their ceramic simulacra reveal the threat posed by the cute and its ability to collapse distinctions between objects, animals, and people.