Though Life Us Do Part (1908)

AUTHOR: Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

KEYWORDS: animal welfare, experimentation, marriage, social reform, Temperance, vivisection, women's rights

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

Though Life Do Us Part is a social reform novel, focusing on women's rights, Temperance, and opposition to vivisection. The protagonist, Cara Sterling, is a dog-loving socialite who cares for a dog that survived vivisection. One of Cara's suitors, Dr. Thomas Frost, “a rising young physiologist” (7), happens to be the vivisectionist who experimented on Cara's collie Clyde, as her cousin discovers. True to his telling name, Frost is portrayed as detached, cold, and insensitive – at one point, Frost himself says that he is “not sensitive” (49) – qualities that do not serve his wooing of Cara. She is characterized as “the eidolon of all that is human and high, tender, and remote” by her other suitor, Dr. Chanceford Dane (69). Rejecting Frost's advances, Cara marries Chanceford who, though from a much humbler background, is initially portrayed as thoughtful, amiable, and caring. Later, when the couple experience relationship problems, he succumbs to alcohol and becomes detached and abusive as a result.

The first encounter with Frost, in the opening pages of the novel, finds him engaged in conversation at the local country club. He is explicitly introduced as a “vivisector,” voicing his enthusiasm for vivisection and proclaiming “the immense results of our experiments, – the tremendous possibilities of the future” (9). When he gets up from the table, he is described as being “painted blood-red as a butcher, from brow to chin” in the refracted sunlight (10). When Clyde, having just arrived at the scene with Cara, recognizes his tormentor, “a curious change passed over the dog. His upper lip wrinkled wickedly; a sinister expression crossed his face; it was swiftly smitten and replaced by one of inexplicable terror” (20). Terror quickly turns into anger and aggression as the dog attacks the vivisectionist, jumping “at the man's throat” and biting his “right hand, – the hand that had torn a hundred veins and nerves from living dogs bound and helpless, but conscious of their torments. It was the experimenter's expert right hand, whose merciless dexterity had created his professional success” (25). Cara, who at this point does not yet know about this history, manages to placate the dog and to calm down the situation.

Cara's cousin, Reverend Sterling Hart, had found Clyde in Frost's laboratory after the dog had gone missing a few months earlier. Reminding Frost of this fact in a conversation shortly after the incident at the country club, Hart says: “'When I found the dog … he had recognized you. Before you made your first incision, he was trying to kiss your hand – I see it in my dreams, yet; I shall, I think, for a while; the worst of it was that poor Clyde thought he had found a friend'” (54). Even though Frost vehemently insists that he “did not recognize the dog” (54), the passage clearly paints him as cold and unempathetic. Hart avers that “he must be a tenderer man than you are who shall win a heart like [Cara's] and take her life into his keeping” (56) and asks Frost to end his courtship of Cara. Otherwise, he warns Frost, he will tell Cara about the suffering of her collie at Frost's hands. In response, Frost accuses Hart of “'strik[ing] the villain out of the play in the first act'” (57), though the villain Frost makes another appearance towards the end of the novel “for a brief and final scene” (258). Having been appointed the “Chair of Physiology in an important New England Medical School” in the interim (261), and having just married one of the town's regular summer belles, he returns for his honeymoon. When Clyde meets Frost again, again he attacks him:

A dog, raging with memory of the unforgiven, leaped and sprang. The collie would have none of the physiologist's body except his hand, – the hand that had committed the unpardonable sin of all that man may inflict upon an animal; the hand that had dissected conscious, helpless flesh alive. Clyde's teeth fastened upon the vivisector's cruel, valuable right hand, and crushed it, crunching (262).

In the wake of the attack, Cara finally learns of Frost's earlier experiments on Clyde. Frost has to cancel his honeymoon and leaves town with a disfigured hand.

Clyde's status as much more than a pet but a companion to Cara is made clear early in the novel, when the narrator remarks that “[i]t seldom occurred to Cara that her dog was classified among the inferior species” (33). Later, while holding her infant son in her arms, Cara muses that humans “always do look like some of the inferior species – at first” (119). The dog's sentience is repeatedly emphasized in passages narrated from Clyde's point of view, focussing on the dog's state of mind and sense of responsibility, such as the following:

The collie Clyde ran the length of the avenue, nose down and sniffing anxiously. At the road he planted his feet, and stood, like the iron dogs that are set to guard old-fashioned estates. One ear pointed upwards and forwards; but the other lopped down – as a collie's ears will disagree when he is perplexed. The dog's eyes were heavy with speculation; he experienced unshared and unsharable responsibilities (135).

This subjectivity informs Clyde's jealousy of Cara's new-born son, so much so that Chanceford decides to chain him up if only briefly (120), while Clyde's compassion, “deference,” and “confidence” keep Cara's chronically ill father from shooting himself, having fallen into depression after losing the family's fortune in financial speculation (146).

The limited income from Chanceford's “struggling practice” (156) generates conflict within the marriage; Chanceford becomes increasingly irritable and Cara's reaction is compared to that of a hunted animal, emphasizing both Cara's affinity for animals and implicitly likening the plight of women to that of prey: “The first time that he swore at her, his wife received the outburst with the dumb astonishment of a doe who has seen its first hunter and met its first wound. She accepted her husband's apology in trembling silence, but whether she remembered or forgot the shock of that shot, he never knew” (156-157). The narrator makes a plea for Temperance and women's rights by demonstrating that Chanceford's abuse of his wife accompanies his alcohol abuse: “Sometimes he seemed to feel sorry for her. Sometimes he was kind. At first he did not repeat his fault. But by midwinter he was drinking heavily. His practice began to suffer, and his temper with it. … He drank all winter, and the spring found him a tempted, yielding, and a half-ruined man” (164-165). He enlists “as a private” in the Spanish-American war (176), “this latest and saddest of our national errors” (177), in which he is killed, or so it seems.

The novel promotes other social reform movements. A new physician arrives in town, Dr. Charles Royal, who rents Chanceford's old office which is located in Cara's house. Her struggle for economic independence includes giving drawing lessons and domestic work. Charles practices reform medicine; he does not “drug people to death; he gives nature a chance” (220). Charles is the inverse of Chanceford in many respects. Although Cara does not find the physically impaired doctor amiable at first, particularly when compared with the “gay, gregarious nature, debonair and winning,” of her deceased husband (249), he is “chronically, ingeniously kind” (248), tactful, “quiet, unobtrusive” (237), and an “unimpeachable tenant” (236), who drinks “nothing stronger” than coffee (238). Cara develops an affection for him that slowly grows into love. In a final plot twist, it is revealed that Charles Royal is, in fact, Chanceford Dane; rehabilitated, reformed, and marked by his war injuries (the confusion is resolved by the revelation that the man buried in the town's cemetery is his brother. Eventually, the couple are reconciled at the end of the novel.