Jersey Bookshelf: ‘Butcher’ by Joyce Carol Oates
Butcher
by Joyce Carol Oates
(Knopf 2024)
Has Princeton Professor Joyce Carol Oates gone too far this time? Butcher is truly horrifying. Based on the journals of J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” and the infamous Dr. Henry Cotton, who believed mental illness in females could be cured by the forced removal of teeth, tongue and sexual organs, it takes place in the 1800s at an actual Trenton mental hospital, renamed here as “The New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics.” The terrifying Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, and his inhumane experiments on helpless females, makes The Handmaid’s Tale seem like a walk in the park by comparison.
This protagonist is an odious misogynist, torturing his way through half the book. When he meets albino indentured servant Brigit, he takes particular delight in his experiments. Drunk on power, operating unsupervised for decades, with no need of anesthesia, this 19th Century doctor is repulsed by the female body, self-assured in his faith that he’s doing the right thing, believing he’s blessed with divine insight, and dedicated to the cause of eradicating mental illness in females.
Oates does not shy away from graphic depictions of his atrocities. It’s hard to read. And to think that it’s based on real-life doctors with little or no care for the patients themselves, many of them enslaved, in the interests of furthering science, causes the reader to wonder how women were thought of in the 1800s. It’s not a far jump from when women were thought to be witches and burned alive in Salem Massachusetts in the 1690s for simply being unconventional, to the experiments that actually went on in Trenton. Read this if you dare.
(Advertisement)