SOURCE: “Professional Ethics and Professional Erotics in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' Doctor Zay,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 2, Autumn 1993, pp. 141-52.

In the following essay, Morris argues that the elements of erotic fantasy in Doctor Zay are intended to teach readers to respect professional women.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911) was best known in her lifetime for Christian Utopian novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), Beyond the Gates (1883), and The Gates Between (1887). She is best known today for her secular masterpiece, The Story of Avis (1877), a study of Victorian courtship and marriage. But to her contemporary readers, Doctor Zay (1882) must have seemed like a secular Utopia. In Doctor Zay, a Boston gentleman falls into the care of a lady doctor in rural Maine, after an accident. The class distinction is crucial: her patients have been almost exclusively lower-class women and children, and never upper-class men; he has never entrusted his...