Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction

In Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction, Thalia Field uses the dysfunctional marriage of Claude and Fanny Bernard to reveal the wider cultural disruptions in 19th-century (especially 2nd Empire) France—both through his role as a founder of experimental medicine and her role as an early anti-vivisection agitator and activist.


At its heart, Experimental Animals is a book about humans and how we treat animals, how modern science made the controversial decision at a certain moment to base itself on the bodies of animals. Field uses primary research, drawing on letters, books, and pamphlets of the time, to put into play the wide array of characters who began to align themselves with this growing controversy: Anna Kingsford, Charles Darwin, Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, Frances Cobbe, and many literary and cultural critics. The polyphony of this vast argument reveals this episode of history as a repository of echoes and stories we still hear today. That many of these characters have been lost to the official history of science is one of the main cornerstones of this novel, as is the profound relationship between experimentalism and the arts and the sciences.


Thalia Field is a professor at Brown University. Experimental Animals is her sixth book. She has published three collections with New Directions: Point and Line (2000), Incarnate: Story Material (2004), and Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010). Her performance novel, Ululu (Clown Shrapnel), was published with Coffee House Press, and she has two collaborations with French author Abigail Lang: A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, 2010) and the forthcoming Leave to Remain.