Abstract
This chapter will re-evaluate critical work on the importance of biology in the modernist period in the light of early twentieth-century vivisection debates. We might think of this period after the Brown Dog affair as a moment of defeat or quiescence for anti-vivisectionist movements, especially given the importance of experimental medical procedures during and immediately after the First World War. However, I will argue that, in fact, intense debates about animal bodies and the ethics of scientific experiment are taking place in fiction of the day, both through metaphor and directly. Animal rights and human rights (particularly in relation to gender, class and race) are deliberately entangled by the authors and texts I will examine as case studies, including Dorothy Richardson’s Interim (1919), Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body? (1923), John Cowper Powys’s Weymouth Sands (1934) and Agatha Christie’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (composed during WWII). In these texts, the vivisecting scientist’s treatment of animals is found to be an index of their attitude towards violence more generally, while each author’s approach to vivisection is directly informed by a fashion for psychoanalysis which is a significant departure from earlier debates.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Philip Armstrong writes that “the decades that closed the nineteenth century and began the twentieth saw the conclusive defeat of the anti-vivisection movement and the triumph of scientific authority” (Armstrong, What Animals Mean, 93).
- 2.
My description of the Brown Dog affair is indebted to Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights. The inscription on the statue of the brown dog read “In Memory of the Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903 after having endured Vivisection extending over more than Two Months and having been handed over from one Vivisector to Another Till Death came to his Release. Also in Memory of the 232 dogs Vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England, how long shall these Things be?” Tired of the unrest, the local council destroyed the memorial: a replacement statue was erected in 1984.
- 3.
The OED attributes both the first and second usages of the word “hormone” to Starling: one in a 1905 issue of The Lancet, “These chemical messengers, however, of ‘hormones’ … as we might call them”, and one in a 1906 issue of Recent Advances in Physiology Digest, “This substance may be called the gastric secretin or gastric hormone” (“hormone, n.” OED Online, July 2018, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com. sheffield.idm. oclc.org/view/Entry/88473?redirectedFrom=hormone (accessed September 17, 2018).
- 4.
For example, Jane Goldman argues for the direct influence of the Brown Dog affair on Virginia Woolf and especially, the literary value of Lind-af-Hageby’s On Immortality: A Letter to a Dog (1916) for Woolf’sFlush (1933), her literary biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cockerspaniel in “Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading and Writing with the Companion Species”, 163–177 (167–169). Similarly, Crispian Neill includes reference to the influence of the Brown Dog affair on D. H. Lawrence’s portrayal of dogs: “D. H. Lawrence and Dogs: Canines and the Critique of Civilisation”, 95–118.
- 5.
Christie wrote Curtain during the Second World War and kept it for 30 years in a bank vault with a note that it should only be published posthumously. She eventually authorized its publication in the year before her death, 1975, but period details were not updated and the novel remains frozen in its mid-century setting in its attitudes to vivisection and other topics.
- 6.
Richardson “The Life Sciences”, 6–33.
- 7.
Morrison, “The Life Sciences”, 83–116.
- 8.
Armstrong, “Modernism, Technology, and the Life Sciences”, 223–241.
- 9.
Preece, Animal Sensibility and Inclusive Justice, 125.
- 10.
Li, “Mobilizing Literature in the Animal Defense Movement”, 27–55 (43).
- 11.
Coleridge, Vivisection: A Heartless Science, 6–7.
- 12.
Hovanec, Animal Subjects, 89.
- 13.
Armstrong, “Modernism, Technology, and the Life Sciences”, 223–241 (225–226).
- 14.
Dorothy Richardson, “The Tunnel”, 100.
- 15.
Richardson, “Interim”, 386–387.
- 16.
Winning, “Masculine Women”, 39–68 (64).
- 17.
Richardson, “Interim”, 414.
- 18.
Sayers, Whose Body?, 202.
- 19.
McLaren, Reproduction by Design, 88.
- 20.
Sayers, “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey”, 48.
- 21.
McLaren, “A Sort of Animal or Mechanic Immortality”, 86–87.
- 22.
Hovanec, Animal Subjects, 92.
- 23.
Huxley, Those Barren Leaves, 195.
- 24.
Armstrong, “Modernism, Technology, and the Life Sciences”, 223.
- 25.
Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism, 69.
- 26.
Powys, Weymouth Sands, 119–120.
- 27.
Powys, quoted in Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism, 69.
- 28.
For a later, more philosophical development of this argument see Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Man and Beast” appendix to Dialectic of Enlightenment, 203–212.
- 29.
Christie, Curtain, 12.
- 30.
See David Nibert’s Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation and his Animal Oppression and Human Violence, as well as the two volumes of Animal Oppression and Capitalism.
Works Cited
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Lind-af-Hageby, Lizzy, and Leisa K. Schartau. 1903. The Shambles of Science; Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology. London: E. Bell.
Morrison, Mark S. 2017. The Life Sciences. In Modernism, Science and Technology, 83–116. London: Bloomsbury.
McLaren, Angus. 2012. Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Neill, Crispian. 2015. D. H. Lawrence and Dogs: Canines and the Critique of Civilisation. Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 4 (1): 95–118.
Nibert, David. 2002. Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
———. 2013. Animal Oppression and Human Violence. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2017. Animal Oppression and Capitalism. Ed David Nibert. Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Preece, Rod. 2011. Animal Sensibility and Inclusive Justice in the Age of Bernard Shaw. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Powys, John Cowper. 1949. Autobiography. London: John Lane The Bodley Head.
———. 1984. Weymouth Sands. New York: Harper Colophon.
Richardson, Angelique. 2003. The Life Sciences: ‘Everybody Nowadays Talks About Evolution’. In A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw, 6–33. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Richardson, Dorothy. 1979. “The Tunnel” and “Interim”. In Pilgrimage: Volume 2. London: Virago.
Sayers, Dorothy L. 2016a. The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey. In Hangman’s Holiday. London: Hodder.
———. 2016b. Whose Body? London: Hodder.
Winning, Joanne. 2000. Masculine Women: Sexology and the Discourse of Femininity. In The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson, 39–68. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Wiseman, Sam. 2016. The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Recommended Further Reading
Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max. 2002. Notes and Sketches: Man and Beast. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Trans. Edmund Jephcott, 203–212. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bierne, Piers. 2018. Murdering Animals: Writings on Theriocide, Homicide and Nonspeciesist Criminology. Houndmills: Palgrave.
Hovanec, Caroline. 2018. Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism: Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nibert, David. 2013. Animal Oppression and Human Violence. New York: Columbia University Press.
Setz, Cathryn. 2019. Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, Transition (1927–1938). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Ebury, K. (2021). Vivisection in Modernist Culture and Popular Fiction, 1890–1945. In: McHugh, S., McKay, R., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9_28
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