Loveliness (1899)

AUTHOR: Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

KEYWORDS: animals, experimentation, vivisection

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

There are multiple references to dogs being “higher” or “superior” to humans; however, other animals, such as the carriage horses and the “meat” animals who provide food for the dog, are not given this same consideration.

The story opens with an almost-human description of Loveliness, who is eventually revealed to be a small Yorkshire dog. Favorable comparison is made between Loveliness and women: “His brain was in his heart. In saying this one does not question the quality of the brain, any more than one does in saying a similar things of a woman” (2). The dog, Loveliness, once saved the family’s daughter, Adah, from a fire by covering her with a rug. Recovering from the fire, Adah had to be kept quiet, so Loveliness wasn’t allowed to sleep with her. Loveliness dropped a pamphlet by the father, a professor of psychology, which advertised for a group protecting animals. The maid let the dog out and was distracted by a young Black boy, while a man stood nearby. When she looked around again, the dog was gone, as were the boy and the man. The neighborhood rallies together to find the dog – the president of the university, his cabman, the postman, the cook, the newsboy, and the police. For months, the professor continues the search, but “the ‘dog banditti’ had done their work too well” (19).

One night, the professor discovers the pamphlet and reads, “like a man himself bound, without anesthesia, beneath the knife” (23). The professor researches the topic and starts searching the laboratories; he learns the “curious trades developed themselves to his astonished ignorance: the tricks of boys who supply the material of anguish; the trade of the janitor who sells it to the demonstrator; the trade of the brute who allures his superior, the dog, to the lairs of medical students” (25). Adah sits, dying, in the window watching the street. One day a man ("the man") sees her and asks the carrier what’s wrong with her and is told that she is dying of heartbreak because someone stole her dog. The newsboy finds the professor and tells him: “‘There’s a little nigger that wants yez, perfesser, downstreet. He’s in wid the dog robbers, that nigger is'” (27). The boy is called “nigger” by the maid as well, when he is first seen, but not by members of the family. The boy tells the professor that the dog is “down for the biggest show of the term, he is” (28). Learning that the dog is held in “His own university!” the professor goes immediately, “trembling like a woman” (28). In travelling quickly to the university, “the excited driver lashed the St. George horse to foam” (29).

The professor is stopped outside the laboratory by the janitor, who will not let him in: “We don’t take gentleman’s dogs, nor ladies’ pets. And we always etherize. We operate very tenderly” (30). The demonstration begins with the operator explaining that “‘We have not put the subject under the usual anesthesia … because of the importance of some preliminary experiments which were instituted yesterday, and to the perfection of which consciousness is conditional” (33). Loveliness was “about to endure the worst torture of them all, – that reserved by wisdom and power for the dumb, the undefended, and the small” (36). Loveliness is restored to Adah and both make a slow, but full recovery.