In Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science, gender is handled very carefully and intentionally. The women within this novel are characterized into two categories: sexually inexperienced and intellectually provocative. Women in the novel that represent the ideal English woman, such as Carmina, are presented as sexually inexperienced and full of compassion for animals. The ideal woman was child-like in her sexual inexperience and naivety towards topics easily understood by men. Meanwhile, women who represented the New Woman, such as Mrs. Gallilee, are presented as intellectually provocative and cruel. The New Woman was a woman who did not conform to societal expectations of women in the 19th century, and Collins’s interpretation of the New Woman as void of compassion reflects the public tensions against the insertion of women into male-dominated fields during the Women’s Rights Movement. This strain is integral to understanding the insurmountable pressures placed upon Victorian women in a society, such that society would dissect her choices and presentation regardless of which category she fell in.<br/><br/> Both the ideal woman and the New Woman in Wilkie Collins’s “Heart and Science” are repeatedly compared to children and animals, exposing the degraded stance of women within nineteenth-century society. Women were viewed as having lesser intellectual and emotional capabilities than their male counterparts, resulting in the association of women with other “lesser” beings. Collins’s negative portrayal of the New Woman and the pedophilic sexualization of the ideal woman represent how the Victorian woman was “vivisected” by patriarchal society. The meticulous and nonconsensual dissection of a woman’s entire being, from her sexuality to her intellectual capacity, resulted in women identifying with vivisected animals and thus resulted in a strong feminine presence in the Anti-Vivisection Movement. <br/><br/>The connection between women, the Anti-Vivisection Movement, and female sexuality provides context for the success of the Women’s Rights Movement. Victorian women stood against vivisection because they understood what it was like to have their bodies be used without their consent, and they understood the battle between men’s desires and women’s rights to their bodies. Women also identified with being picked apart by society, as a woman’s worth lay in her physical appearance and her sexual and intellectual reputation. Through the Anti-Vivisection Movement’s success, women realized that they could insert themselves into scientific conversation and succeeding at helping those who are voiceless. The traction from the Anti-Vivisection Movement carried into the fervor for the Women’s Rights Movement, because women stood together in a way that had never been done before and rejected all preconceived notions of their status in society.

The rigid hierarchical social structures that dictated nineteenth-century English society were capped at the municipal level for anyone who was not an Anglican citizen of Britain. Rather than shirk this exclusion, many communities who fell outside of the upper echelon of society mimicked this practice internally. One such example of this adoption was the Jewish community in Britain; in order to be accepted into aristocratic Britain, a handful of generationally wealthy Anglo-Jews conducted a campaign to elevate themselves across the Victorian era through demonizing their less assimilated Jewish brethren. In 1828, Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters were granted parliamentary access, and the absence of this ability shot to the forefront of concern in Jewish High-Society. What ensued was an attempt to mold their Jewishness into a form as close to Protestantism as possible, and a campaign to separate their community from the vast majority of Jews who were not Anglo-born. In an effort to distance themselves from the less palatable Jews, England's most privileged Jews placed perpetuations of antisemitic stereotypes upon other Jews in order to show their demonstrable difference. Anglo-Jews, successfully, made the case that the form of Judaism which they practiced was a more refined version of the exotic savagery that was the other type of Judaism. The influx of Eastern European refugees in the 1840s fleeing pogroms and antisemitic legislation aided Anglo-Jews in making the case for their separation from Ashkenazim. By othering, their non-anglo counterparts, the highest class of the Jewish society in Britain mimicked the British colonial mentality in verbalizing and specifying their superiority.

1. Across modern literature focusing on Victorian views of animals, scholars have observed that Victorians compare non-European people, women, and children to animals via anthropomorphization or the attribution of human characteristics to an animal. It is crucial to look at non-Europeans, women, and children because they represent a Populus that Victorians perceived as needing to be civilized. During this time period, colonization by Britain was rampant, women were questioning the validity of their societal roles, and children needed to be a successful generation for the future of Britain. The Victorian novels, Heart and Science and The Island of Doctor Moreau both provide fascinating examples of anthropomorphization in entirely different ways. Heart and Science takes place in the British metropole and merely fantasizes about anthropomorphization while The Island of Doctor realizes that fantasy on a remote island controlled by a French scientist who turns animals into humanized Beast People. Analysis of these novels allows readers to see how Victorians fantasized about anthropomorphization and how that connects back to their need for control and dominance. Furthermore, the various scholars brought up in this thesis discuss how non-Europeans, women, and children were all alike compared to canines, birds, and primates across Victorian literature and art. These scholars begin to point out the anthropomorphization that occurred in Victorian society and literature, but they either downplay the role of anthropomorphization or fail to address it. This failure leads to an inability to see the full subtly of British dominance over people regarded as undisciplined and could lead to ignorance of how long anthropomorphization has existed.

First-wave ecocriticism, while studying the relationship between humans and the environment with the focus of emphasizing the value of nature, maintains a categorical divide between these two highly connected subjects. However, second-wave ecocritical studies reduce this gap between nature and humans by analyzing the environment’s ultimate self, humans as part of that environment, and comparisons between the treatment of enslaved bodies and the land. A second-wave ecocritical approach is used to examine the vilification of wilderness versus the claim of the cultivated environment despite its violent history and its impact on other captive bodies within Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). It finds the perception of the wilderness is used to define other enslaved entities, characterizing them as villainous and so excusing their exploitation and mistreatment. Conrad's novel follows the story of Marlow and internally, the story of Kurtz, both of whom are members of The Company that goes on expeditions to find ivory in the Congo. The jungle, which is seen as a possession and exploitable by other colonists, differs from Kurtz’ view after living with the Natives in the Congo. Rather, Marlow finds that European colonists possessive hunt for ivory, a sought-after commodity, into territory they claimed for themselves after brandishing it wild, reflected their perceived darkness of the jungle back onto themselves. Morrison’s novel introduces Sethe, who kills her child, Beloved, to spare her from the life of a slave. In both novels, the utility of the enslaved body is regarded as more important than its selfhood, which serves to not only categorize slaves as lower than both humans and animals, but removes their ability to represent themselves through communication, further disallowing them to own themselves or speak against actions that have been taken against them.

The application of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a lens through which one can analyze intergenerational trauma on an individual and communal level results in a blueprint towards a remedial process. The characters and their experiences in her novel are representative of a myriad of ways in which trauma is manifested. I have broken down the concept of intergenerational trauma into the idea that it can be seen as the state where one is both simultaneously “falling” and “fallen” at the same time. Used here, the term “falling” refers to the consistent, individual trauma that one is experiencing. On the other hand, the term “fallen” refers to the trauma that a community as a whole has experienced and internalized. This framework that I establish based off of Beloved is a launching point for the conversation surrounding the topic of remedial actions in relation to intergenerational trauma that resulted from slavery. Using it as a basis of knowledge allows one to truly gather the weight of the situation regarding trauma postbellum. Considering the current climate surrounding any meaningful dialogue, knowledge is one of the most important aspects. Along with the concepts of “falling”/”fallen,” I also coined the term productive memory, which refers to the act of confrontation as well as the remembering of intergenerational trauma. The use of productive memory is imperative in addressing the prior ideas presented regarding intergenerational trauma and the possible pathways to move forward.