The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Professor Eric Grant, Physiologist (The Professor's Wife, 1881)

PDF eBook, 167 pages
Published 1881
Read December 2018
 

The Professor's Wife: A Story
by Leonard Graham

"What are you talking about, Eric? What can you mean? Have I vexed you?"
     "No, my darling. I am a wretched actor, Beatrice. I ought not to let you see—I am—out of temper tonight," finished Eric, trying to laugh, holding her close to him in a hunger of love, as he accused himself. (112)

This short novel (novella?) mostly focuses on Beatrice Egerton, a young orphan raised by her uncle. While visiting her cousins, Beatrice meets two men of science: the pugnacious, musical, cold, humanitarian Eric Grant and the sensitive Bertram D'Eyencourt. Both men are physiologists, but they take very different approaches to their subject. Grant is the "arch-vivisector," reviled by anti-vivisectionist reformers for the cruelties her pursues in the name of science. Bertram has no ability for practical work; all of his science comes in the form of observation and theorizing. Yet the two men are great friends (Grant saved Bertram's life) and work together, and both men fall in love with Beatrice. Beatrice previously knows of Grant from a book he wrote about his wartime medical humanitarian work, and she accepts his proposal, becoming the "professor's wife" of the title.

Much of the novel is taken up by Grant defending his vivisection; he tells Bertram, "Life is not made up of strawberry cream. Someone must do the painful part of progress" (26). He refuses to tell Beatrice exactly what the study of physiology entails, even once they're married, because she is too pure to know about the horrors of vivisection. So far, so familiar-- it's not too far off others anti-vivisection/scientist novels I've looked at, like Heart and Science and The Beth Book. It also reminds me of Hardy's The Woodlanders.

But there are some important differences that make it really interesting. One is that its vivisectionist genuinely loves his wife. Yes, Grant won't tell her what he does because he knows she'll disapprove, but bound up in it is a real (if patriarchal) desire to protect her. He really struggles with the decision to essentially live a lie: "There was no one to see him in the hour of his fierce struggle between his passion for knowledge and his love. No voice poke audible words of counsel or of warning. The powers of good and evil strove with him in silence" (73). Evil ends up winning.

Some of his intellectual beliefs are sympathetic, too, at least to a modern reader; Grant is a Darwinist (54), and he's more of a feminist than any other character in the book, telling a skeptical Beatrice, "you will see the disabilities of women removed, and the professions thrown open to them; as they ought to be" (37). I don't know enough about Leonard Graham to know if we're meant to sympathize with Grant or Beatrice in these debates (according to At the Circulating Library, no one knows anything about him at all, even whether or not "Leonard Graham" was his real name), but even if we're meant to side with Beatrice (which seems likely), Grant's perspective is rendered with intellectual honesty; he's no strawman.

Unlike some other literary vivisectors, he's not a hypocrite; he really does believe he's doing good by vivisecting, and he doesn't just want to cause pain. As the novel goes on, Beatrice learns more and more about what he does behind the closed door of the laboratory, but Grant won't confirm anything outright, even as she keeps meeting more and more anti-vivisectionists.

Don't read on if you think you'll actually read this book, because its best part was a surprise. (But there's little danger of you reading it, I suspect.) Beatrice comes down with some kind of nervous disease, only vaguely described, and Grant hides it from her, which is where my epigraph comes from. He despairs that the science he's studied his own life cannot do anything for her: "What is our science worth?" (111)

She ends up dying, but after she dies, Bertram discovers that in her final days of life, Grant experimented on her! Not vivisection, but he "induc[ed] abnormal sensibility and play[ed] upon it" (154), because the opportunity represented by her condition was too good to pass up (156). He didn't cause the illness or anything, but with his typical pragmatism, decided that if she was ill, he couldn't miss the opportunity to learn more about the human nervous system!

Bertram breaks off their friendship, becoming a committed antivivisectionist, and Grant ends up spending the rest of his life alone, with nothing but science. The novel's final lines are, "After his wife’s funeral, he resumed his classes and delivered his lectures as usual. The only change visible in him was a growing hardness and indifference, which there was nothing in his inner or outer life to soften. He had buried his one year’s love, and his one friend had left him. From henceforth, his powers were concentrated on science" (158).

So probably not a great book, but a surprisingly interesting one because of how multi-faceted its depiction of a vivisectionist is. I think I'll need to incorporate it into my book.