Victorian experimental physiology and the empire of bodily interiors: vivisection, sexuality, imperialism

Abstract

Because late-Victorian pro- and antivivisectionists vigorously and publicly inveighed against one another by, surprisingly, invoking discourses of gender, sexuality, and imperialism, experimental physiology became a vehicle through which debates about proper gender and sexuality were played out, and the practice of vivisection itself became a site through which imperialism's powers and pleasures came to be reenacted in the physiology laboratory and experienced as the advancement of science. On the one hand, the physiological mapping of animals' bodily interiors was persistently described as a sort of imperial exploration that filled provivisectionists with inappropriate desires and perverse pleasures by means of their repeatedly causing and witnessing animal pain. On the other hand, male antivivisectionists were routinely described as effeminate and overly sentimental, while female antivivisectionists were described as mannish, ugly, and possessing an excess of desire directed toward animals rather than toward men. As a result, live dissected animal bodies came to function as a sort of an Orient in which (literally, inside of which) imperial, colonial, sexual, and “racial” (that is, animal/human) anxieties and desires could be produced and managed in the metropolitan physiology laboratory.

Keywords::

• Victorian England
• nineteenth-century Britain
• physiology
• vivisection
• gender
• sexuality
• imperialism
• colonialism
• postcolonial studies
• queer studies

Notes

^1. For connections between Victorian antivivisection debates and emergent Victorian feminisms, see Mary Ann Elston, “Women and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England, 1870–1900”; Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire; Richard D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society;Susan Hamilton, “Introduction,” xiv–xlvii; and Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. For a fascinating discussion of nineteenth-century animal suffering, women's suffering, science, Theosophy, and secularism, see Gauri Viswanathan, “Monism and Suffering: A Theosophical Perspective”. For an excellent discussion of fin-de-siècle human-animal sociality, vegetarianism, and anticolonial thought, see Leela Gandhi, “Meat: A Short Cultural History of Animal Welfare at the Fin-de-Siècle”. And for an analysis of vivisection, Sensation fiction, and moral responsibility, see Jessica Straley, “Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science”.

^2. I would like to thank Catherine Dunlop and Billy Smith for generously inviting me to present this work at their conference “Mapping History: New Directions in Interdisciplinary Research” in October 2012. The ideas for this essay had been percolating in my head for several years, but Catherine and Billy's invitation is what pushed me finally to face these difficult materials and to work hard to make an argument that would stand up to the scrutiny of both literary scholars and historians. I owe a debt of gratitude to Catherine Dunlop, Jen Hill, Susan Kollin, Michael Reidy, Billy Smith, and Marlene Tromp, all of whom discussed with me at length and at important junctures the arguments I was working to bring together in this piece. They energized me with the desire to take risks, and they urged me toward clarity of vision that only collective knowledge production can produce. I owe a special additional thanks to Susan Kollin for indefatigably reading multiple drafts of this essay and for offering her characteristic wisdom and insights. Finally, an enormous thanks to the students who took my course “Nineteenth-Century British Science Fiction and the Fantastic: Race, Gender, Sexuality” in fall 2011 at Montana State University, and who, during our discussions of H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, helped me to think in new and exciting ways about the relations between vivisection, pain, pleasure, and pornography.

^3. Quoted in Richard D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society 23, 23n20, and 23n21. French in turn cites Dorothy George's London Life in the Eighteenth Century for pointing out the connection between the rise of public sentiment against cruelty to animals in mid-eighteenth-century London and Hogarth's remarks.

^4. Shortly after its founding, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals became known as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or RSPCA.

^5.D. A. Miller, for example, in The Novel and the Police, explores the importance of the unstable and paradoxical relationship between publicity and privacy in the making of queerness. Taking Miller as her jumping-off point, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, explores the open secret as that which structures notions of homosexuality. Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, demonstrates how, in the last third of the nineteenth century, desires and sex acts coalesced to produce the homosexual as a set of character traits, as a species, and as an identity. And Ellis Hanson, in “Screwing with Children in Henry James,” has argued for the ways in which knowledge, especially late-nineteenth-century British knowledge, is always already sexual knowledge and how therefore the drive to know is always already structured according to sexual desire.

^6.Saturday Review xli (1876): 773. Quoted in French, Antivivisection and Medical Science, 50.

^7. Also cited, in part, in Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science, ed. Farmer, 16.

^8. Cited in Collins, Heart and Science, ed. Farmer, 340.

^9. For a discussion of Cobbe's relationship with Mary Lloyd, whom she referred to in letters to friends as both “husband” and “wife,” see Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, 2 and 20.

^10. Elie de Cyon, Part I, in Elie de Cyon and Richard Holt Hutton, “The Anti-Vivisectionist Agitation,” 506. Cited in Collins, Heart and Science, ed. Farmer, 16.

^11. See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. Krafft-Ebing notes that

the patient produced a remarkable impression by reason of her attire, features, and conduct. She wore a gentleman's hat, her hair closely cut, eye-glasses, a gentleman's cravat, a coat-like outer garment of masculine cut that reached well down over her gown, and boots with high heels. She had coarse, somewhat masculine features; a harsh, deep voice; and made rather the impression of a man in female attire than that of a lady… . [I]n all respects her tastes and passions were masculine. (309 and 312)

Later, in a discussion of “lesbian love,” Krafft-Ebing quotes Parent-Duchatelet's “De la prostitution,” 1857, vol. i, p. 159:

sexual intercourse between women has especially the significance of a vice which arises on the basis of hyperaesthesia sexualis…. In many cases of this kind, however, aside from congenital contrary sexual instinct, one gains the impression that, just as in men…, the cultivated vice gradually leads to acquired contrary sexual instinct, with repugnance for sexual intercourse with the opposite sex. (429).

See also John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891) and Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896; 1897, English translation).

^12. The 1927 English translation reads “displacing living organs,” but because the original French is “disloquant les organismes vivants,” I have changed the translation here to “taking apart living organisms.”

^13. The 1927 English translation reads “a man of fashion,” but because the original French is “un homme du monde,” I have changed the translation here to “a sophisticated man of the world.”

^14. Burdon-Sanderson was both editor of and one of the four contributors to the Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory. The other three authors were E. [Edward] Klein, Michael Foster, and T. [Thomas] Lauder Brunton. While each of the men individually wrote different chapters in the book, I treat the book as a single text and therefore refer in this essay not to what individual authors say, reveal, and demonstrate, but simply what the Handbook says, reveals, and demonstrates.

^15. Images from Burdon-Sanderson provided by Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. (Volume 2, which consists entirely of plates, contains no page numbers.)

^16. Review of The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells. The Athenæum 3576 (9 May 1896): 615.

^17. See Linda Williams, especially chapter 2, “Prehistory: The ‘Frenzy of the Visible’,” 34–57.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Agruss

David Agruss is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Montana State University. His research focuses on gender, sexuality, colonialism, and imperialism in Victorian England, with a particular attention to normativity and popular culture. He is currently completing a book titled Between Boys: Metropolitan Masculinity and the Colonial Imaginary in Victorian England. Address: Department of English, Montana State University, 2-176 Wilson Hall, P.O. Box 172300, Bozeman, MT 59717-2300, USA. [email: [email protected]]