Nadia Farage

OPEN SECRET

Introduction

Open secret. Discover how 19th-century literary realism, from George Eliot to Zola, mirrors biomedical vivisection in its drive to dissect the hidden causes of human experience.

Abstract

An analogy between the biomedical practice of vivisection and the contemporary, literary realism of the second half of the 19th century was advanced by Menke (2000), when examining the literary project of George Elliot and her pro-vivisection partner, George Henry Lewes. According to Menke, both biomedical and literary practices sprang from the same impulse—a drive to examine the internal and/or deep causes of phenomena, be they of body or soul. Realist analysis would, then, stand as the functional equivalent of the vivisectionist’s scalpel, dissecting the hidden causes of social and psychological processes. In fact, the argument was not alien to the 19th century, for Zola had already claimed the link between literature and experimental science in his essay “Le Roman Expérimental”(1880), taking the physiologist Claude Bernard as his source and model. No doubt, “looking through”—the quest for the hidden, the unconfessable and, as a rule, the sordid in social and personal lives—seems to be the self-imposed task of 19th century realist and naturalist authors, running in parallel with the biomedical experimental model. As de Fontenay (1998) put it, vivisection was indeed the epitome of “looking through” in Western modernity.

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