Joyce Carol Oates has to be a living literary phenomenon. I have been following her work for over fifty years and she is still going strong, still getting better and better. Butcher is as recent as 2024. How could she possibly bring herself to undertake a massive task like this? In her stride seems to be the answer.
She has never been better. It is as if the awfulness of her subject matter (the early, gruesome years of male physicians' attempts to understand women's minds and bodies) spurs Oates on to greater heights. Dr Silas Aloysius Weir, who until 1851 had been repulsed by women's gynological processes, finds himself the director of the Women's Lunatic Asylum in Trenton New Jersey. Eager to make a name for himself he experiments on the women supposedly in his care and so builds himself a national reputation as the Father of Gyno-Psychiatry. I know from my own research how close Oates's Weir comes to the ghastly truth; frankly, it continues today with so-called specialists needlessly mutilating women for no other reason I can fathom save sadism and mysogyny.
Ten years on, Weir's patients strike back. For a man, these scenes are equally horrific, but for a (hopefully) balanced man, you have to say it's deserved. And yet I was quite moved with Oates's depiction of Weir in his later years - retired, reclusive, refusing to discuss what happened and flatly disclaiming any knowledge of who was responsible (although we know that he knows). I found this a masterful and at the same time compassionate use of dramatic irony. Oates never at any stage loses sight of the humanity of any of her characters (which, of course, is precisely what Weir has done with his patients).
A modern masterpiece but not for the fainthearted.
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