Devour Feculence, Respectfully

Andrew Joseph White taking the racial context out of the medical abuses depicted in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth actively harmed the plot and made it make less sense.

You can make the excuse that Braxton’s and the Speakers do not care about the wellbeing of the girls there, but whether the girls are happy or safe is irrelevant to the fact that their institution needs to produce successful “students”. If they cannot actually claim that they have produced successful Speaker wives for their upper class society, then what would be the point of sending their girls there? Yet, Agnes appears to be the only “success” Braxton’s produced prior to its downfall; Frances, Ellen and Isabella died there, and there’s multiple other girls that Isabella mentions that we never hear the fate of. In addition, Isabella is stated to have been at Braxton’s for a significantly long period of time, so why exactly was she not married off yet?

Even in a misogynistic society, parents still care about their daughters. A rich man with a misogynistic outlook for his daughter might not care about her wellbeing enough to avoid marrying her off, but that does not mean he would be okay with his daughter dying. Worst case scenario, even for characters with abusive families like Silas or (presumably) Mary, they still stand to benefit from marrying their children off to raise their own social class, so why exactly would they be okay with their meal ticket dying? All of this information is to establish one thing; the girls at Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium are not disposable, because their society needs them. Regardless of the ethics behind it, Braxton’s needs to produce usable wives, and the Speakers need those wives. They are wealthy enough that they would be considered valuable to their families and society. So, logically, if this Veil sickness phenomenon is stated to also affect enslaved Black people in America, as well as Indians in the British colonies, the Speakers would experiment on racialized people who were considered disposable. They wouldn’t just jump to vivisecting people that were considered valuable, and AJW acknowledging the racial context at the end of his book is a poor attempt for him to try and escape criticism for him blatantly whitewashing the real history behind the medical experimentation depicted in TSBIT.