New Publication: Review of Trixy by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Northwestern University Press, 2019)

Last year, I took on two book reviews; the second, though it has a 2022 publication date, came out this April, though it took me some time to remember to mention it here.

I was approached by the book reviews editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Woman Writers to review a new edition of Trixy, a 1904 antivivisection novel by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, from Northwestern University Press, with introduction and notes by Emily E. VanDette, as well as some contextual material.

Like many antivivisection novels, it's not a great book but it is an intensely interesting one; I found myself wishing it had been written by a Brit so I could use it in the antivivisection chapter of my book. As it is, I will have to slip in a footnote! The novel's scientist character dissects the brains of fifty dogs searching for love... but since he never finds it in them, he concludes love does not exist!

In grad school, one of my friends—who specializes in American women's writing—used to make fun of me by claiming I hated all books by women... so I was kind of smug that I actually got invited to review a book for a journal of American women's writing! If you're interested in science and literature, women's activism, or animal studies in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, it's a very well-timed new edition of a potentially useful old book.

Here's how my review begins:

Originally published in 1904, Trixy is an antivivisection novel by the activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Aside from print-on-demand editions, this is the first publication of the novel since 1905. In this new edition, editor Emily E. VanDette reprints the complete text with a forty-page introduction, seven pages of endnotes, and contextual materials.

Trixy is of a piece with other antivivisection novels of the era, pitting a sympathetic female protagonist against a harsh male vivisector and strongly emphasizing dogs in particular as a victim of vivisection. In this case, the sympathetic Miriam Lauriat is wooed by the accomplished young doctor Olin Steele, who, unbeknownst to her, is a vivisector. At the same time, Miriam makes the acquaintance of a young man named Dan and his performing dog, Trixy, who is snatched in order to be made an experimental subject in Steele's laboratory.

Like many other antivivisection novels Trixy associates the danger of vivisection with a danger to women. The threat Steele poses to Miriam is not physical danger but, rather, his possessive attitude toward women. Although as a young trainee he could not bear to see an animal experimented upon, he has by the novel's present time dissected the brains of fifty dogs in his search for the physiological cause of love and concluded that love doesn't exist. He believes that the weak must be sacrificed to the strong and that women must therefore be gained by force. Steele loves Miriam, but his clinical training has destroyed his capacity to understand his feelings. Phelps's novel thus argues that vivisection is dangerous because of the harm it causes not only to innocent animals but also to the vivisector. While this argument is not uncommon, Phelps's emphasis on misogyny and her exploration of the continuity between the animal and the human distinguish her approach within the convention. As a result, the republication of Trixy will be of interest to scholars of feminist activism as well as scientific ethics.

Legacy is a paywalled journal, but if you have access to Project MUSE, you can read the full review here.