Domestic Metaphors and Scientific Illustration: Frances Power Cobbe and the Anti-Vivisection Movement in the 1880s

Loveridge discusses leading anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe and the 1880s Anti-Vivisection movement. Analysing Cobbe’s use of vivisection illustrations in her essays The Janus of Science (1882) and Light in Dark Places (1883), Loveridge shows that Cobbe used domestic metaphors of the home to characterise vivisection laboratories, conflating the laboratory and the kitchen and using domestic terms like ‘baking’ and ‘stewing’ to describe vivisectionsists’ experiments on animals. Cobbe’s domesticizing of the vivisection narrative feminised the vocabulary of the physiological manual and neutralised scientific specialisation. Exploring the anti-vivisectionist short stories C. L. Pirkis’s Jack. A Mendicant (1881) and Frances [Mrs] Cashel Hoey’s ‘Pompey’s Peril’ (1883), Loveridge also demonstrates that Cobbe and women writers of fiction entertained a two-way intellectual relationship in which female authors used fiction as a creative method to work through principles underlying late nineteenth-century vivisection debates. The vivisected body in this way became a literary object which when read through the activist gaze, could be rendered a medium for storytelling.