Sentiment and spectres: the posthumous influence of animals and women in Marie Espérance von Schwartz’s Gemma, oder Tugend und Laster (1877) and the late nineteenth-century anti-vivisection debate

Richards, Anna (2024) Sentiment and spectres: the posthumous influence of animals and women in Marie Espérance von Schwartz’s Gemma, oder Tugend und Laster (1877) and the late nineteenth-century anti-vivisection debate. The German Quarterly , ISSN 0016-8831.

Abstract

Animals enjoyed an active afterlife in late nineteenth-century pro-animal texts in Germany. Drawing on a number of primary texts and recent scholarship on the anti-vivisection movement in feminist animal theory, this article argues that remembering, mourning, and haunting by animals is part of a gendered discourse on animal rights that is associated in particular with sentiment and with maternity. This is illustrated with reference to Marie Espérance von Schwartz’s "Gemma, oder Tugend und Laster" (1877), a sentimental anti-vivisection novella in which deceased animals and women return to punish their abusers or shore up the resistant stance of the living. Viewing Schwartz’s fictional novella in the context of non-fictional pro-animal works, including Ernst Grysanowski’s "Die Vivisection, ihr wissenschaftlicher Werth und ihre ethische Berechtigung" (1877) and Ignaz Bregenzer’s "Thier-Ethik: Darstellung der sittlichen und rechtlichen Beziehungen zwischen Mensch und Thier" (1894), allows me, by means of contrast, to highlight its gendered dimension.

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