Canine Abduction and Border Breaches in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Trixy

"Vivisection" refers to the scientific practice of experimenting on live animals. In the context of Western medicine, the tradition of live-animal dissection can be traced as far back as the mid-fifth century BCE, when Alcmaeon of Croton sliced the optic nerves of living dogs and documented their ensuing blindness. The first organized antivivisection movement in the United States emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century and was coeval with the institutionalization of experimental physiology in North American universities.

Historically, the purpose of antivivisection discourse has been to "lift the veil" on scientific atrocities inflicted on animals in laboratories. In a prefatory note to her popular antivivisection novel, Trixy, which Houghton, Mifflin and Company released in 1904, American author and social reformer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps proffers humane fiction as a purveyor of moral light and verity to the literate public. She avers, "[A] novel, which cannot be a homily, may be an illumination. [Trixy] approaches regions whose very existence is unknown to the majority of readers, and doubted by many intelligent and kind-hearted people. I take this opportunity of saying that I am familiar with the map of these dark sections of life and know whereof I write" (vii-viii).

Although she braces her readers for a tour through the coarse underworld of mercenary dog-trafficking and scientific torture chambers, Phelps makes a point of characterizing their impending journey as an "approach" rather than a full exposure to the dark regions of animal vivisection (vii). At various moments in her story, Phelps peels back the veil on the scientist's privileged institutional domain, but rarely does she grant more than a glimpse at the "horrors" that reside therein. In fact, nearly all of the interspecies relationships in Trixy unfold outside of the laboratory, in private homes or in the unregulated border zones between institutional sites. Arguably, Phelps's insistence on a sanitized narrative codifies the vivisection laboratory as a site too real for realist fiction. The unspeakable realities of the laboratory cannot be signified in the context of humane literature because they belong to a realm beyond fiction.²

Trixy retains its fictional status by re-contextualizing the laboratory dog as both a cherished family member and as private property with sentimental and market value. For this reason, the home (as the seat of familial intimacy) and the court (as a site for formalizing property claims) assume prominent positions in Phelps's narrative topography. Trixy elicits pathos for laboratory dogs by depicting them as treasured members of the American household and as defensible property in the context of the courtroom. The movement of Phelps's canine characters between the home, the laboratory, and the courthouse generates what I henceforth refer to as "the stolen-pet plot," a coinage intended to highlight the dog's context-contingent status as both a cherished dependent and private property. By tracking Phelps's canine protagonists through the narrative nerve centers in Trixy, this paper illustrates how the stolen-pet plot construes vivisection as a threat to the most sacrosanct of American values. It argues, furthermore, that Phelps's fictionalized appeal for the abolition of vivisection achieves a level of urgency unmatched by other humane discursive forms.

Although best remembered for her popular Gates novels (which offered a utopian vision of heaven to a nation still reeling from the devastation of the Civil War), Phelps devoted a significant portion of her professional energy in the final decade and a half of her life to the plight of laboratory animals. Between 1901 and 1904, she delivered three addresses on the subject of live-animal experimentation to the Massachusetts State Legislature. She also published three antivivisection narratives in addition to Trixy—Loveliness (1899), "Tammyshanty" (1908), and Though Life Us Do Part (1908)—that remain to be critically excavated after more than a century of gathering dust.³

Trixy, which represents Phelps's first book-length articulation of the stolen-pet plot, chronicles the abductions of two dogs: Caro the Cocker Spaniel and Trixy the Poodle. The latter dog, who is the precocious companion of a...