Butcher: A novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the nineteenth century, and a terrifying doctor who wants to change the world

In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,” as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation. As he begins to establish himself as a pioneer of nineteenth-century surgery, Weir’s ambition is fueled by his obsessive fascination with a young Irish indentured servant named Brigit, who becomes not only Weir’s primary experimental subject, but also the agent of his destruction.

Narrated by Silas Weir’s eldest son, who has repudiated his father’s brutal legacy, Butcher is a unique blend of fiction and fact, a nightmare voyage through the darkest regions of the American psyche conjoined, in its startling conclusion, with unexpected romance. Once again, Joyce Carol Oates has written a spellbinding novel confirming her position as one of our celebrated American visionaries of the imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593537787
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/21/2024
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	77,966
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Prix Femina, and the Cino Del Duca World Prize. She has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and the New York Times best seller The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

03/25/2024

Oates (Zero-Sum) delivers a deliciously arch and relentlessly gloomy fictional biography of Dr. Silas Aloysius Weir, a character based on two 19th-century doctors. Weir, known during his time as the “Father of Modern Gyno-Psychiatry,” was also called the “Red-Handed Butcher” for his gruesome experiments on women during his 35-year stint at the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics in Trenton. The bulk of the novel is presented as a Nabokovian manuscript composed of accounts by Weir’s colleagues, family members, and patients, which have been assembled and annotated by his oldest son, Jonathan. Banished from a Pennsylvania hospital after a failed cranial surgery on an infant, Weir applies his “colossal egotism” to his new patients at the asylum, asserting that “mental illness in females is a consequence of infection, particularly of the female genitals.” To that end, he turns a tablespoon into a speculum and introduces sadistic treatments with misleading names like the “Chair of Tranquility.” The recipient of many of his surgeries is Brigit Kenealy, a young, indentured albino Irish servant who becomes his romantic obsession and assistant. Oates’s scathing indictment of the physical and psychological treatment of women by the medical establishment makes for compulsive but challenging reading. Unlike the ghastly procedures depicted, Oates’s inventive gothic novel pays off. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Oates’ daring tale of grotesque medical experiments and other injustices is unnerving, illuminating, suspenseful, mythic, and, thankfully, tempered by transcendence and love.”
—Booklist, starred

“A creepy, circuitous tale—one based on actual history . . . Vintage Oates: splendidly written, and a useful warning to choose your doctors wisely.”
—Kirkus

“Deliciously arch . . . Oates’s scathing indictment of the physical and psychological treatment of women by the medical establishment makes for compulsive but challenging reading. Unlike the ghastly procedures depicted, Oates’s inventive gothic novel pays off.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[Oates] takes this very real nightmare of [the ‘father of gyno-psychiatry’] and knits together a story about a young Irish servant who becomes Weir’s ‘subject,’ but also the object of his downfall. Sounds like the perfect American novel, delving deep into the horrors of invention.”
—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”

From the Publisher

2024-02-17
New Jersey history meets Oates at her most gothic.

Exhibit A: a bumbling fellow, Silas Weir, who can’t quite get anything right, a disappointment to his parents for not making it into Harvard even as a legacy, a man horrified at the thought of women’s private parts (“loathsome in design, function, & aesthetics”)—which makes his determination to become “the father of gyno-psychiatry” all the odder. “His head was overlarge upon his stooped & spindly shoulders; his stiff-tufted hair of no discernible hue, neither dark nor fair, needed a more expert trimming; his eyes rather deep-set in their sockets, like a rodent’s eyes, damp & quick-shifting.” He cuts not much of a figure himself, but in Oates’ grim yarn, narrated in the stiff Victorian prose of the era, Weir does plenty of cutting: As the director of the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics, he has plenty of captive subjects from whom to remove uteruses and repair fistulae, with which he has a particular fascination. One inmate is a young, deaf-mute Irish woman named Brigit Kinealy, who, in a Stockholm syndrome exercise, becomes Weir’s assistant “before she had fully recovered her physical strength,” a recovery made all the less complete because, Weir realizes, he left a sponge sewn up inside her. Brigit, enslaved in all but name, proves to have inner resources of her own, ways of dealing with the “butcher of girls & women” that Weir, ever more obsessed, becomes, as he’s bent on proving the notion (and thereby winning Papa’s approval at last) that in his campaign advocating “the removal of infected female organs” lay the cure for any psychiatric disorder a woman might endure. It all makes for a creepy, circuitous tale—one based on actual history—made all the more sinister by the putatively good intentions of Weir’s son, an abolitionist and advocate for the freedom of everyone but poor Brigit.

Vintage Oates: splendidly written, and a useful warning to choose your doctors wisely.

Kirkus Reviews