Doctor Zay

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Michael Sartisky (Afterword)

The heroine of this novel, a rational, rural Maine physician, finds herself courted by a patient whose bones she has patched together after an accident. He is a Boston lawyer who insists that marriage will not end her career. In Doctor Zay , Phelps takes on a subject unusual for 1882: the conflict, as experienced by women, between marriage and career. And as with all of Phelps’s novels, this one is both entertaining and consciousness-raising on class and gender.

Genres: Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1882

About the author

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, born Mary Gray Phelps, was an American author.

She was born at Andover, Massachusetts. In most of her writings she used her mother's name "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps" as a pseudonym, both before and after her marriage in 1888 to Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist seventeen years younger. She also used the pseudonym Mary Adams. Her father Austin Phelps was pastor of the Pine Street Congregational Church until 1848, when he accepted a position as the Chair of Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary and moved the family to Boston.

Ward wrote three Spiritualist novels, The Gates Ajar, Between the Gates and Beyond the Gates, and a novella about animal rights, Loveliness. While writing other popular stories, she was also a great advocate, by lecturing and otherwise, for social reform, temperance, and the emancipation of women. She was also involved in clothing reform for women, urging them to burn their corsets in 1874.

Ward's mother, Elizabeth (Wooster) Stuart Phelps, (August 13, 1815—November 30, 1852) wrote the Kitty Brown books under the pen name H. Trusta.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her husband co-authored two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography, Chapters from a Life was published in 1896 after being serialized in McClure's. She also wrote a large number of essays for Harper's

Phelps continued to write short stories and novels into the twentieth century. One work, Trixy (1904), dealt with another cause she supported, anti-vivisection (a topic on which she also addressed the Massachusetts State Legislature). Her last work, Comrades (1911), was published posthumously. Phelps died January 28, 1911, in Newton Center, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid stuff and you should most assuredly read it

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

"There are new questions constantly arising," she went on, "for a woman in my position. One ceases to be an individual. One acts for the whole,—for the sex, for a cause, for a future. We are not quite free, like other people, in little perplexities. It is what Paul said about no man's living to himself. We pay a price for our privilege. I suppose everything in this world renders its cost, but nothing so heavily, nothing so relentlessly, as an unusual purpose in a woman. Nothing is more expensive than sustained usefulness,—or what one tries to make such.["]

It is not the first time that a woman has been called unwomanly for saying the truth[.]

Between when I first penned my review and now typing up, I decided to go ahead with upgrading my rating, and not just because the average rating is so low and the rating count is so few that a five star would make a significantly positive difference. Whatever my rating ends up being, I am content in having recovered a buried classic, as I've gone over many an older piece of lit in my time, and this ranks next to Deerbrook in terms of undeserved obscurity, and even higher in my heart. The afterword argues that this is a flawed and less 'feminist' work than others of its period and ideation, but it also ignores so much of the thematic context that goes into my evaluation that I am comfortable in saying that this work is flawed in the way human beings are. This work is, ultimately, a subversion of a sentimental set piece that retains a great deal of the warmth while challenging more harmful of the genre's stereotypes. All in all, I regret having chosen Belinda for the Romance task of one of my reading challenges, as this work is romantic in a way that pays off regardless of whether it chooses to encourage a penultimate 'happy ending'. I went some way into falling in love while reading this, and that's not something I can say very often at all.

...Mrs. Isaiah Butterwell was one of those housekeepers who would prefer a lukewarm conscience to a lukewarm boiler[.]

You would think of the other men, whose wives were always punctual at dinner in long dresses, and could play to them evenings, and accept invitations, and always be on hand, like the kitten. I should not blame you. Some of the loveliest women in the world are like that. I should like somebody myself to come home to, to be always there to purr about me; it is very natural to me to accept the devotion of such women. There was one who wanted to come down here and stay with me. I wouldn't let her; but I wanted her.

One thing Phelps has down in spades is the sort of command of prose and literary allusion that I'm a total sucker for. Add in what is essentially a character study heavily, yet cleverly, relying on various fanfiction-level plot gimmicks such as 'thrown together out of medical necessity only to become so much more', and you have something that could either brilliantly draw from the cornerstones of its craft or be unremittingly dull in succumbing too much to the safe narrative path traversed many times before. I am firmly in the camp that believes Phelps has crafted a work of art that strikes the right gorgeous balance between the familiar and the novel, for as much credibly literary reason as personal bias. You see, it is very easy to infuse this love story with queer readings, as it is a woman the reader is supposed to fall in love with, and the woman herself, much as was the main character of Asunder, to me, is very lovable in that half-exacting, half-worshipful frame of mind of mine. It doesn't hurt that the character herself is surprisingly direct about wishing to have a woman to come home to, even going so far as to describe an opportunity that she unwillingly rejected, which as queer as it gets in late 19th century US lit. All in all, this is no monumental philosophical spread coupled with sweeping landscapes and huge arcs of time and theme, but something drawn on the level of The Age of Innocence and, to me, just as good as that next-century Pulitzer winner, if not better. Self-indulgent, perhaps, but all a classic has to do is indulge generations forever on, and I can well see this work doing such on a much larger scale if given the chance.

Yorke was receiving that enlargement and enlightenment of the imagination which it is the privilege of endurance alone, of all forms of human assimilation, to bestow upon us. Experience may almost be called a faculty of the soul.

He sat and watched her, thinking that he would not have borne from any other woman in the world what came like a fine intoxication from her; he drank her noble severity like gleaming wine.

This ranks up with the works I've rated the highest so far this year and is otherwise a very lovely surprise, which just goes to show that a rather off putting cover design and a not at all apolitical publishing outfit do not serve as excuses to forgo what proved to be a gloriously, deceptively complex story. This is not a work that achieved the US breed of intersectionality to much extent, but it isn't nasty either, unlike certain works published a mere half century afterward. As such, in my honest opinion, this work deserves as wide and as serious a reputation as other romances that take the time and energy to probe social malignancies without losing sight of the human heart. Not only the level of Austen or the Brontës, perhaps, but definitely on that of Gaskell, especially when considering the theme of women in work that both books are concerned with: factories in one, medicine in the other. All in all, I may have been misguided in putting this off out of uneasy assumptions of less than quality writing, but that only increased my heights of unexpected pleasure experienced after trudging through more than one work with far more elevated reputations and not finding much to crow about. Here's hoping this reaches a vaster audience in my lifetime. It's apparently on Kindle Marketplace of all places, and as much as I loath Amazon, I won't begrudge anyone who uses it in this case as an initial foothold.

You do not love me. You have needed me. I have been useful to you[.] I have occupied your thoughts, You may miss me. But that is not love.

[Jamieanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Waldo Yorke, a Boston attorney, is injured on his horse while riding in rural Maine. He is rescued and transported to town by a stranger, who later turns out to be his doctor. When Yorke awakes from his short coma, he is surprised to find out his doctor, and rescuer, is a woman, Dr. Zaidee Atalanta Lloyd. But, at first Yorke is not only suspicious of his doctor’s gender, but also her role as a mere country doctor: “The thing which worried him most was the probably character of his Down-East doctor upon whose intelligence he had fallen…he though of some representatives of the profession whom he had met in the mountains, and at other removed from the centres of society” (38). Even though the novel is titled after Dr. Zay, the story focuses much more on Yorke’s psychological development from hyperaesthentic (a condition in the 19C described as an “excessive and morbid” sensitivity to the stimuli of the senses and “nerves or nerve centres”) to healthy suitor. As Yorke begins to heal, he not only realizes Dr. Zay’s medical expertise, but also that he is falling in love. Yorke makes his feelings known to Dr. Zay, but she resists him until she is eventually worn down at the very end of the novel. Dr. Zay demands that she continue her medical practice after the two are married, to which Yorke can’t imagine any other alternative. Together, Dr. Zay and Yorke, then, form the union of the New Woman and the New Man.

It’s possible to read the novel as a seemingly simple restitution narrative–doctor cures sick patient, then doctor and patient get married and live happily ever after; but, Phelps’s focus on a female homeopathic doctor’s treatment of a male patient provides a “feminist alternative to both mainstream allopathic neurology and traditional gender practices” (Swenson 101). Yorke’s transformation from sick to well demonstrates, according to Swenson, how Phelps “uses homeopathic neurology to oppose conservative medical and cultural practices by championing the radical figure of the female physician, by challenging gender roles for both women and men, and questioning the relative merits of marriage and career for women.” Dr. Zay is recognizable as a New Woman not only because of her chosen profession, but also her style of dress, her resistance to Yorke’s continual advances, and overall, her characteristic independence. Yorke, on the other hand, is not a New Man until Dr. Zay cures him.

Early Yorke fits a male stereotype of his time: he is an elite urban male, out touring rural Maine because he has nothing better to do: he is unambitious and directionless. [I wonder too if Phelps’s uses the name “Waldo” to draw on the reputation of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his high-minded, abstract appreciation of nature to critique Yorke’s lack of touch with the material world. After all, it’s when Yorke is out appreciating nature’s loftiness that he realizes he’s hungry and falls off his horse.] Yorke is aware of his own shortfalls, and diagnoses himself for Dr Zay, describing his “[i]nherited inertia” and how he has “[s]uccumbed to his environment. Corrosion of Beacon Street…Native indolence, developed by acquired habit. Hopeless correlation of predestined forces. Atrophied ambition. Paralyzed aspiration. No struggle for existence” (166). To which Dr. Zay responds, “I should rather call it [a case] of hyperaesthensia…Superfluous, and therefore injurious, sensitiveness. You experience a certain scorn of the best into which you know yourself capable of resulting” (167-8). Thus, it’s clear part of Phelps’s work is to critique, and cure, his particular social-cultural construction of maleness through a the homeopathy provided by a New Woman.

Yorke, in the early sections, is what 19C readers would have recognized as “over-civilized.” At the time, people worried that nervous disorders were the cultural product of the nation’s “evolved superiority,” but ultimately threatening to future generations. It’s not difficult here to see the logic of degeneracy and eugenics. Before healing, Yorke is described as lacking energy and vitality, which plays into the late 19C fear that illnesses like Yorke’s could threaten the “future race.” It makes sense, too, that Phelps invokes this rhetoric, in bolstering her call for the ultimate union between the New Woman and the New Man.

Instead of prescribing large doses of strong medicines, which allopaths practice, Dr Zay’s homeopathy involves providing subtle remedies derived from natural sources, such as chamomile, aconite, and carbo. The occasional tablespoon of brandy and nightly conversation are what cause Yorke to begin to fall in love. In this way, as Yorke’s body begins to mend itself, he also becomes more and more susceptible to Dr. Zay’s politics and way of life. Slowly, over time, romance becomes part of Dr. Zay’s remedy.

Overall, the novel is one of the first to depict 1) a female doctor, 2) the feminist conflict of career versus marriage, while also offering 3) a romantic view of the rural, homeopathic physician, at a time when modern medicine was taking shape and becoming more standardized and clinical in urban settings. In this way, the novel has often been compared with Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884).

Swenson, Kiristine. “Doctor Zay and Dr. Mitchell: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Feminist Response to Mainstream Neurology.” Nuerology and Literature, 1860-1920, Ed. Anne Stiles, 2007.

[Chrissie]

Said to be comparable to A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett