Celestial Timepiece

By Joyce Carol Oates

New York: Knopf, 2024
352 Pages

From one of our most accomplished storytellers, an extraordinary and arresting novel about a women’s asylum in the 19th 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In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr.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, “The Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,” as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a disastrous procedure, 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 19th-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.

Contents

Dedication
Epigraph
Editor’s Note

Prologue

• Part I: Young Doctor Weir
• Editor’s Note
• Exile: Morris County, New Jersey

Part II: New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics

• Destiny
• The Vow
• Fistula
• Miracle (March 11, 1852)
• Miracle (Postscript)
• Misfortune
• Reversal of Fortune

Part III: The Pioneer Reformer

• Sacred Monomania
• Esther C__
• Christian Burial
• The Chair of Tranquility
• Halcyon Years
• The Humbling
• Slander
• Nurse-Assistant
• The Laboratory: The Experiment
• Fever
• Day of Triumph
• The Gift

Part IV: Red-Handed Butcher

• God’s Chosen
• Wilhelmina S__: The Twins
• “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child…”
• The Penitent
• God’s Blessing, God’s Wrath.

Part V: The insurrection

• Lost Girl, Found: An Orphan’s True Story Told by Herself

Part VI: Epilogue: Afterlife

• The Promise
• The Pledge

Working Notes

I am immersed in a short novel about J. Marion Sims, the famous/infamous “father of modern gynecology,” who experimented on enslaved Black women and children in the 1840s in Montgomery, Alabama, allowing him to discover a way to repair fistulas in afflicted girls and women following difficult childbirths. My character both is and isn’t the historic Sims—his name is Syms. Sims’s most exploited subject, Anarcha Westcott, appears in my narrative as Arelia. Though the novel is based for the most part on actual events, the tone is rather more a hallucinatory sort of realism than strict realism. The title is, appropriately, Butcher.

We see from Sims’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, published posthumously in 1884, how an individual of more than average intelligence and vision—seen by himself and others of his acquaintance as a “good” Christian husband and father—could, at the same time, function as an absolute racist, as indifferent to his subjects’ suffering as presumably Descartes would have been to the suffering of animals, since Descartes believed that animals were just machines, without sensation. Yet Sims was widely honored in his own time, and a controversial and quite ugly statue of him was only just recently removed from Central Park.

—JCO, New York Review of Books, February 19, 2022

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2024

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

Donna Seaman, Booklist, April 15, 2024, page 21

Through the alleged writings of Weir, his eldest son, and other intriguing chroniclers, we witness brutal and gruesome procedures in close-up detail, pushing this antebellum novel into the realm of horror, even as Oates sticks to the chilling facts about the time’s vehement misogyny and appalling crimes routinely perpetuated against women. Other revelations include the harsh plight of indentured Irish immigrants such as Brigit and midwife Gretel, whose servitude parallels the enslavement of Africans. Oates’ daring tale of grotesque medical experiments and other injustices is unnerving, illuminating, suspenseful, mythic, and, thankfully, tempered by transcendence and love.

Fiona Sturges, i: The Paper For Today, May 17, 2024, page 46

Oates, a giant of American literature …  has long been interested in themes of class, power and the dark side of human nature, and this one is up there among the most brutal …. Nonetheless, as a study of a monstrous misogynist operating in the belief that he is a pioneer acting for the greater good and helping to ease female suffering, Butcher is vividly and compellingly drawn, its prose scalpel-sharp …. Just as Babysitter arrived in the aftermath of #MeToo, when the grey areas around sexual abuse came under the microscope, it can be no coincidence that Butcher, in which women are stripped of bodily autonomy, arrives after the overturning of Roe v Wade. After 60 years in the business, Oates remains a master storyteller with her finger on the pulse of humanity, forever alive to its moral failures and flaws.

Publishers Weekly, March 25, 2024, page 33

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.