@jayjayjayjayjayjayjayjayjaye explained this way better than I could, but I feel like this idea deserves its own post, so here we are;
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.
Now, this may be a personal opinion of mine, but I feel that making Veil sickness directly analogous to hysteria (in that it was not a real diagnosis and it was just shorthand for “crazy bitch we can’t marry off and forget about”) was a poor decision that harmed the story. If Veil sickness is not a real illness that actually harms its sufferers, then it makes no sense for George to be willing to kill his own brother just to help his wife, when she’s perfectly sane aside from the fact she’s grieving a miscarriage, and that he should know that it’s not a real illness given that both Silas and Elsie are perfectly sane. It also would make the vivisections unjustified; obviously, there are very few valid reasons to play around in someone’s body, so real life vivisections were inherently frivolous in the first place, but hysteria to my knowledge was not commonly treated with surgical means, or at the very least IRL there weren’t many cases of people being outright gutted to find a cure for it, simply because it just wasn’t that serious and they had other methods to try and treat hysteria. The real life medical abuses of enslaved Black women that Andrew Joseph White intentionally whitewashed were likely in regard to gynecological issues or other more agonizing medical conditions experienced by white women, so in a fictional context, using hysteria as a reason to kill a bunch of little white girls just…. doesn’t make as much sense. In order to justify a plot involving slicing up women, especially upper class white Victorian girls, I feel like it would have made more sense for Veil sickness to actually have serious consequences beyond just emotional outbursts or causing trouble for people, but something like that would require AJW to do actual worldbuilding. I don’t know, this part is just my personal opinion, I’m mainly irritated about the blatant whitewashing of history thing.
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