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Lädt ... Trixyvon Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Keine Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.  Stevil2001 | Jun 10, 2023 |  keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
"At the height of her fame in the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911) was a highly visible author and women's rights advocate. Phelps is still best-known for her Spiritualist novel, "The Gates Ajar" (1868), which offered a comforting view of the afterlife to (women) readers traumatized by the Civil War, and was the century's second bestselling novel, after "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Phelps has received increased critical attention in the last twenty years, but while her work begun has begun to be restored, most scholars have glossed over the most passionate cause of her late career -- her campaign against animal vivisection. In the 1904 novel "Trixy," Phelps centered this then-common practice of experimenting on live animals, which she believed was cruel, immoral, and degrading. This contemporary edition of "Trixy" restores Phelps' role in the history of animal rights advocacy, and recovers contributions critical to her literary activism. Emily VanDette's introduction notes that Phelps' protest writing -- which included fiction, essays, and speeches -- was ahead of its time. And as well-known authors like Peter Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna Haraway, and Gary Francione have extended her vision, they have also created new audiences for her work"--Provided by publisher. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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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.
You can read the rest of this review at Legacy: A Journal of American Woman Writers, though only if you have access to Project MUSE, alas.