Associate Professor Emily E. VanDette has written a chapter, "Twain’s Critique of Human Exceptionalism: ‘The Descent of Man’ and the Anti-Vivisection Movement" for the new book "Mark Twain and Philosophy."
Dr. VanDette's essay examines the ways in which Twain anticipated modern animal rights and posthumanist philosophies. In several of his late-career writings, Twain depicted animal subjectivity and consciousness, and he challenged the presumption of human superiority over other animals. In the final decade of his life, he particularly supported the campaign to abolish vivisection, or the use of live animals in scientific experimentation. Twain rejected outright any scientific progress that depended upon painful experiments on non-consenting animals, regardless of the prospective benefit to humans.
In her essay, VanDette notes that, "(w)hether investing animal characters with voices and empowering them to tell their own stories, or satirically questioning the supreme place of humans in relation to other species, Twain’s animal writing poses a philosophical challenge, 'a grim suggestion,' as he puts it in one instance: 'we are not as important, perhaps, as we had all along supposed we were.'"
VanDette's research about Twain's animal rights writing has been the subject of two recent invited lectures and is a part of her current monograph-in-progress, "Voices of the Voiceless: Animal Advocacy Literature in the U.S., 1866-1918." She conducted research about Twain's anti-vivisection writing at a recent residency at Quarry Farm, the Elmira summer home where Twain wrote many of his major works.
