Climate Control: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Trixy and Sustainable Systems of Care

After witnessing his first vivisection as a medical student in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Trixy, Olin Steele emerges into a world where “the pallid sun had been gulped by massing clouds, and a dark storm was imminent.”... [ view full abstract ]

After witnessing his first vivisection as a medical student in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Trixy, Olin Steele emerges into a world where “the pallid sun had been gulped by massing clouds, and a dark storm was imminent.” Steele initially seeks comfort from his dog Barry, telling him that he will never return to medicine, but soon weathers the storm and acclimates to the conditions of a profession Phelps frames as dehumanizing and callous. While Trixy has long been considered as an anti-vivisection novel, I argue that the relationships between owners and their anthropomorphized pets work to define sustainable systems of care that nurture rather than consume practitioners and patients alike. In doing so, Phelps participates in a strategy similar to the one Brigitte Fielder addresses in the context of abolitionist children’s literature where depictions of pets enable readers to consider “how sympathy may be conveyed across positions of difference.” While Trixy is not concerned with racial difference, it does focus on figures who are otherwise socially marginalized such as progressive women like Miriam Lauriat and disabled individuals like Dan Badger. Phelps’s work draws on anti-vivisection writing by prominent women like Frances Power Cobbe to argue against animal experimentation, but it also joins literary texts like Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor and Phelps’s own Dr. Zay to expose how alternative social roles for women might foster a healthier social climate than the one tied to the medical community.