Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Costerus NS 160)

INTRODUCTION

MARTIN WILLIS and CATHERINE WYNNE

Elliotson has written to me to go and see some experiments on Okey at his house at 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. (Charles Dickens to George Cruikshank, 1838) When my brain says “Come!” to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding. (Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897)

On 24 November 1838, Charles Dickens sent a note to George Cruikshank to invite him to accompany him to John Elliotson’s mesmeric experimentations.1 The friendship between Elliotson, the professor of practical medicine at University College London, and the popular writer was created through their shared interest in mesmeric phenomena. The mesmeric and the literary converge in the careers of the Victorian period’s most famous proponents of their respective practices. However, by the end of 1838 Elliotson’s orthodox medical career was in ruins – he suffered devastating attacks by the Lancet for his experiments on the O’Key sisters and when University College Hospital, which he helped to found, prevented him from continuing mesmeric treatments there, he resigned on 12 December 1838.2 That evening he dined with Dickens whose literary career was beginning to flourish.3 In many ways, the relationship between Dickens and Elliotson sets the precedent for the engagement of the mesmeric and the literary 1

Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, eds Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols, Oxford, 1965, I, 461. 2 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 98-100. 3 Dickens, The Letters, I, 480.

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throughout the nineteenth century. In the opening number of the Zoist – the monthly periodical founded by Elliotson in April 1843 to promote his new scientific interests – Elliotson invokes the literary and seizes on Dickens’ observations on Nancy’s humanity in Oliver Twist in a reprint of his November 1842 address to the Phrenological Society. In a tribute to Dickens’ stature, Elliotson asks the society to “pardon” him for “the vanity of saying my friend Charles Dickens”.4 The scientist and the writer are also united in their concern with the discovery of truth. The Zoist’s attestation of 1843 proclaimed the “discovery of a new truth … the science of MESMERISM is a new physiological truth of incalculable value and importance”. This truth “presents the only avenue through which is discernible a ray of hope that the more intricate phenomena of the nervous system, – of Life, – will ever be revealed to man”.5 For Dickens, Nancy’s humanity is equally a truth: “It involves the best and worst shades of our common nature; much of its ugliest hues, and something of its most beautiful; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility, but it is a Truth.”6 The Zoist pursued scientific truth and pronounced mesmerism a “triumph” that “quicken[s] the pulse in the bosom of humanity”.7 Oliver Twist exposes social truth through its examination of power. The text is suffused with corrupt state authority, sexual power, psychological domination and the imposition of will. Dickens’ influence on Elliotson is registered in the doctor’s comments that “those who feel a joy and a duty in assisting to improve mankind” must understand the “absolute necessity of improving the qualities of the brain”.8 Elliotson equally captivated Dickens. The author had, Fred Kaplan notes, by the late 1830s absorbed mesmerism into his “creative consciousness”. The science was concomitant with the

4 “Phrenological Society”, The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare, I/1 (April 1843), 49. 5 “Prospectus”, Zoist, I/1, 2. 6 Charles Dickens, “The Author’s Introduction to the Third Edition”, in Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, 3 vols, London, 1841, I, xi-xii. 7 “Prospectus”, Zoist, I/1, 2-3. 8 Elliotson, “Dr Elliotson’s Address to the Phrenological Association”, Zoist, I/3 (October 1843), 229.

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discovery of the “great resources of energy and will within himself” that were so essential to his art.9 Dickens, the artist, was also Dickens the mesmerist. He first practised mesmerism on his wife Catherine in Pittsburgh in 1842 during a lecture tour of America.10 However, his mesmeric treatment of Madame de la Rue in Genoa in 1844 was more controversial. It demonstrated the mutual need in the operator-patient relationship – a need that helped to destabilize Dickens’ marriage and tapped into one of the central debates surrounding mesmeric controversy in the nineteenth century – sexual morality. Although Dickens’ clinical deployment of the science substantiated his credence in its therapeutic possibilities, his final and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) explores the malevolent mesmerist, John Jasper, who penetrates Rosa Bud’s mind to impose his sexual desire: He has made a slave of me with his looks …. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes but he forces me to see them without looking at them.11

The incomplete novel is Dickens’ finest exposition of altered states of consciousness in which mesmerism’s potential remains undisclosed, anticipating the science’s ambiguous position in medicine and fiction in the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century when Bram Stoker published his vampire novel, mesmerism was already medically marginalized in Britain. In his fiction, Stoker, a science graduate of Trinity College Dublin, allied himself to the school of Jean-Marie Charcot. In Dracula, the French scientist, and early mentor of Freud, is referred to as “the great Charcot – alas that he is no more”.12 Frantz Anton Mesmer appears in Stoker’s Famous Impostors (1910). Here Stoker endorses mesmerism but attributes its creator with imposture for 9

Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Princeton, 1975, 145, 138. 10 Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis, Basingstoke, 2002, 190. 11 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell, Oxford, 1972, 53-54. 12 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson, Oxford, 1983, 191.

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imbuing the science he created with bizarre and unnecessary ritualism and “parting the ways between earnest science and charlatanism”.13 However, mesmerism’s ambiguity and its peripheral status are most famously explored in Dracula. The narrative’s centrality to an understanding of the literary deployment of mesmerism incorporates the scientific and the sexual. The Count deploys mesmeric powers to satisfy his lust for blood but the occultist predisposition is scientifically reclaimed by a Dutch doctor, Van Helsing, and mesmerism becomes central in the struggle to defeat the vampire. Through an unwilling exchange of blood with the Count in the perverse marital ceremony that is conducted in her bedroom while her husband lies sleeping by her side, Mina Harker becomes, as Dracula promises, “flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin” (288). Mina’s quasi-bigamous union with the Count underlines the sexual affinities of the mesmeric trance. However, her psychic connection with Dracula allows each to gain access to the other’s mind. Dracula informs her: “When my brain says “Come!” to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding” (288). Under the hypnotic guidance of Van Helsing, Mina is simultaneously able to read the Count’s mind as he flees England for Transylvania and this allows the vampire hunters to track his movements, trap him at his Castle and destroy him. In many ways, the Elliotson/O’Key narrative is paralleled in the relationship between Van Helsing (who is, early in the novel, suspected of being “mad”) and Mina, but with one significant difference – in the fiction mesmerism triumphs and Mina and Van Helsing save family, nation and race from the vampiric disease (204). Like Dickens, Stoker also explores the ambiguity of mesmerism in his final novel. The Lair of the White Worm (1911) focuses on Edgar Caswall whose ancestor inherited Mesmer’s trunk. The trunk, according to an old retainer, “probably contains secrets which Dr Mesmer told my master. Told them to his ruin!”14 Edgar’s eyes exhibit a “remarkable will power” and one that “seems to take away from eyes that meet them all power of resistance” (18). Like Jasper, Caswall preys on a young female. For Dickens and Stoker – writers who frame the Victorian period – mesmerism simultaneously emerges as an enabling and disabling discourse. Both endorse its scientific potential and, more importantly, both deploy its ambiguous 13 14

Bram Stoker, Famous Impostors, London, 1910, 155. Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm, London, 1911, 112.

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connotations in their fictions. In this study of nineteenth-century writing, we see how mesmerism’s power lies in its ability to invigorate and often dominate debates on the scientific and social order and the fraught relationship between the two. Literature and science How, though, do we begin to register the connections between literature and science in a phenomenon such as mesmerism? How do scholars interested in analysing the ambiguous connotations of mesmeric practices traverse the difficult no-mans-land between separate disciplines and map them both as they go? Moreover, what critical apparatus has been, and still is available to aid our understanding of the connectedness of literature and science in the nineteenth century? Literature and science had a close relationship long before the Victorian period: early modern poets set mathematics in verse while eighteenth-century natural philosophers put rhyme to natural history. Yet in the twentieth century, in the face of disciplinary specialization and the science/culture debate, critics and historians have felt the need to reinvestigate the congruences between literature and science. Since the 1970s, then, various scholars have attempted to reveal their connections and to find the vestiges of original partnerships that existed between these two forms of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the nineteenth century has proved fertile ground for such work; here, after all, was “science” first named and institutionalized and here too was the great age of fiction. Through the 1970s and early 1980s the spotlight fell on language: literature and science were connected by “common vocabulary and … literary techniques” and consumed by a “common readership”.15 Tied together by discourse, proponents of literature and science were involved in a limited “cultural exchange” that was formed in the bodies of their texts.16 By the end of the 1980s, a period increasingly influenced by the cultural turn in literary and historical study, the purely textual was inadequate in describing both “the common and divergent patterns” in literature and science.17 The focus shifted, therefore, towards a more contextual comparative model that privileged culture over specific 15 Laura Otis, Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, Oxford, 2002, xxv; J. A. V. Chapple, Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1986, 13. 16 Chapple, 18. 17 Otis, xix.

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disciplinary concerns. Both literature and science in the 1990s, then, could be compared by their common contribution to “an understanding of Victorian culture”.18 It is this view that holds sway in contemporary criticism: the connections between literature and science are best explored through their interventions in broader cultural themes and events. Recent work on fiction and mesmerism derives from this interdisciplinary perspective on literature and science: imaginative uses of mesmerism, as Alison Winter argues, are excellent examples of the Victorians “carrying out experiments on their own society”.19 Yet the critical consensus has not always given mesmerism such a productive position within the history of science or literary studies. Critical interest in mesmerism has two distinct phases; one from the late 1960s to the late 1970s and another from the late 1990s that continues today. (If the previous period of its modishness is anything to go by, the present interest in mesmerism will wane in 2008.) Robert Darnton’s historical study of mesmerism, published in 1968, can be seen as a catalyst for the first period of interest, and Robert Lee Wolff Fred Kaplan, Christina Hill and Maria Tatar followed him.20 The overriding paradigm of a great number of these works is of mesmerism as an occult science or pseudoscience that only enters the scientific arena when it becomes a more respectable form of hypnotism in the later nineteenth century. Mesmerism has a stable position in the work of these critics as a marginal form of knowledge more metaphysical than scientific, and is interesting for what it reveals about the history of ideas as they seeped into fictional form. The 1990s, led by the work of Alison Winter and followed by Daniel Pick and others, reconfigured mesmerism’s place in fiction and culture to more firmly parallel the prevailing critical 18

Bernard Lightman, Introduction, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman, Chicago, 1997, 3. 19 Winter, 4. 20 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Cambridge: MA, 1968; Robert Lee Wolff, Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction, Boston, 1971; Fred Kaplan, “‘The Mesmeric Mania’: The Early Victorians and Animal Magnetism”, The Journal of the History of Ideas, XXV/4 (1974), 691-702; Kaplan; Christina Hill, A Study of Mesmerism and the Literature of the Nineteenth Century, with Specific Reference to Harriet Martineau, unpublished thesis, University of Birmingham, 1975; Maria Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature, Princeton, 1978.

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consensus on literary and scientific connection.21 Mesmerism was brought back from its place on the margins to play a more pivotal (though not central) role in Victorian science, and consequently in culture and society. Recent scholarly interest in Victorian literary mesmerism, then, considers mesmerism as an important form of cultural self-expression; one that interrogates the most influential constructions of society, from gender to class and through economics and law. Mesmerism’s formulation in literary fiction should not be seen as marginal or heterodox in either scientific or literary terms. Scientific orthodoxy and literary authority were constantly in flux throughout the nineteenth century and it is only retrospectively – as science creates contemporary paradigms and literature an historical canon – that their importance can be undermined. To investigate literary mesmerism is to unveil the reactions and responses, the interventions and influences of one of the key forms of knowledge that the Victorians used to define their sense of self and society. Class If mesmerism challenged boundaries, one of those most often impugned was the boundary between the classes. From its beginnings mesmerism was always associated with radical class politics. Indeed its comfortable coexistence with revolutionary France was one of the key reasons it did not flourish in either Britain or the United States until the 1830s. When its impetus did bring it to those shores, mesmerism remained progressive and reformist, most especially in the United States where it also remained free from British pragmatism. Certainly by the 1840s, however, mesmeric practice was confronting accepted notions of class hierarchy and interaction in ways that would not have been acceptable in other fields of cultural inquiry. If mesmerism was a higher form of knowledge then its enactment by working class mesmerists surely said something about the natural order of nineteenth-century society, if not about the supposed superiority of both mind and body as one moved from the lower to the higher classes? Mesmerism was important and also dangerous in so 21 Winter; Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture, New Haven: CT, 2000; Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance, Tuscaloosa: AL, 2000; Waterfield.

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radically highlighting democracy through scientific investigation. Of course, the principles of mesmerism could also be used to support the status quo: the power of the medical practitioner’s mesmerism over his working-class patients, for example, went a long way towards reinforcing the existing hierarchies. Whether radical or reactionary, reformist or conservative, mesmerism undoubtedly brought the ideologies of class into the public consciousness. Gender Just as mesmerism questioned the boundaries of class it also challenged gender and sexual roles. Mesmer’s quasi-sexual ritualism detracted from the science’s attempt to establish itself as a scientific principle but was responsible for fuelling its literary possibilities.22 Much of the literary interpretation of nineteenth-century mesmerism envisaged a male mesmerizer, invariably insidious and foreign, making passes over the body and manipulating the mind of a young and passive female. Nonetheless, the Svengali narrative is not comprehensive and the mesmeric transaction was certainly not straightforward. The O’Keys, for example, embody the fluid interaction of both class and gender. Whilst in mesmeric trance the working-class sisters were particularly voluble. Elizabeth told stories, mimicked the manipulations of her mesmerizer, Baron Dupotet, and called him a “dirty beast”.23 Harriet Martineau became mesmerism’s most inspired advocate. She records in her Letters on Mesmerism how she instructed her female servant to mesmerize her. Martineau, though, is keen to maintain class, though not gender, division: “my maid did for me whatever, under my own instruction, good-will and affection could do” but what was required was “an educated person, so familiar with the practice of Mesmerism as to be able to keep a steady eye on the end”.24 Her difficulty is resolved when she discovers a lady, the widow of a clergyman, who possessed the requisite powers and class affiliation. Although, mesmerism, as an unorthodox science and one that could be deployed as Martineau’s maid demonstrates, by the 22

Chauncy Hare Townshend, Facts in Mesmerism, With Reasons For a Dispassionate Inquiry Into It, London, 1840, 6. 23 John Elliotson, Human Physiology, 5th edn, London, 1835, 628. 24 Harriet Martineau, Letters on Mesmerism, 2nd edn, London, 1845, 11.

Introduction

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uneducated, offered the potential for a female movement beyond the limitations of prescribed gender roles and domestic duties, the reverse was also true. Misogyny permeates much of the mesmeric literature, particularly as female mesmeric knowledge was often perceived as emasculating. In addition, the conception of the female as passive agent tended to reinforce gender hierarchies while many mesmeric experiments on females (and males) involved the unnecessary infliction of bodily pain in order to test the validity of the trance state. Whether liberating or confining, mesmerism certainly ensured that gender issues remained at the forefront of public debate. Crime and the criminal Mesmerism’s transgression of gendered and classed boundaries has always given it the stigma of impropriety, but its associations with crime and the criminal have made it not only improper but also significantly nefarious. From Mesmer’s first salon experiments in the late eighteenth century through the whole of the nineteenth century mesmeric practices have been tarnished by accusations of fakery, villainy and corruption. The second half of the nineteenth century was to bring these various charges to a focus around the power relationship between mesmerizer and subject. After all, if mesmerizers could suggest a variety of activities to their powerless subjects who could deny the possibility that some of these suggestions might involve illegal action. Indeed the legal symbolism of mesmerism had always suggested a phenomenon on trial, always already criminalized. Mesmeric exhibitions were often attended by a select group of observers acting as judges and jury for the events laid out before them. Mesmerism’s defenders – perhaps defendants – often used personal testimony as evidence of the truth of mesmerism. The language and practice of the courtroom, then, thoroughly pervades the discourse and performance of mesmerism, combining with its “politically transgressive” nature to suggest a tacit connection with crime and the criminal.25 §

25

Pick, 53.

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Ilana Kurshan’s opening essay examines the significant role that literature played in the propagation of phrenology and mesmerism in the early Victorian period. Both sciences, as Kurshan demonstrates, converge not only in historical terms but also in the way in which both were publicized and practised and which often culminated into a union of the two – phreno-mesmerism. In an inversion of traditional examinations of the interface between science and literature, this essay analyses the ways in which the rhetoric and practice of these sciences came to rely on literary culture. As phrenologists and mesmerists created a literary forum for proving and popularizing their claims to validity, the authority of literature was invoked in the service of science and head reading and mind reading were presented as literary endeavours to a Victorian audience. Kurshan’s wide-ranging study of British mesmeric and phrenological journals in the period up to 1850 explores some of the literary allusions and quotations that were presented in the service of these sciences. Debates in these journals centred on phreno-mesmeric exhibitions in which subjects recited Shakespeare in a trance-state. Classical literature, Shakespeare’s plays, and examinations of the skulls of dead poets were central to the establishment of phrenological and mesmeric legitimacy. However, the relationship between science and culture, Kurshan warns, was both complex and fraught. Literary allusions might generate authority but they could also be perilous for phrenologists and mesmerists, as literary invocations reinforced notions of creativity and theatricality that could just as easily undermine the sciences’ claims for legitimacy. While Kurshan’s thesis suggests that the discourse of mesmerism relies on literary culture, Gavin Budge concentrates rather on the influence of scientific discourse on literary mesmerism. For Budge, investigations of mesmeric phenomena are closely related to medical theories of vitality. Taking Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novels Zanoni and A Strange Story, published in the period from 1842-1862, Budge examines the connections between the use of mesmeric tropes in these novels and current medical discourses about the nature of the vital principle. Bulwer-Lytton, he argues, understood the cause and effects of mesmerism as particularly cognate with the philosophies of midnineteenth-century physiology that drew a connection between mental activity and sensorial experience. Both mesmerism and the physiological effects of sustained brain vitality produce imaginative sensitivity that can be powerfully used to influence others. Such

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influence, Budge contends, is markedly reactionary in BulwerLytton’s work, especially with regard to gender politics. Indeed Bulwer-Lytton’s medically-oriented mesmerism denies women access to artistic, scientific or academic genius by suggesting that imaginative vitality is the preserve of masculine character. While Budge delves into mid-century science, Anthony Enns looks forward to the coming sciences of modernity. Mesmerism’s application as a communication technology is the focus of Enns’ essay on Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Edison. Beginning with electromagnetism Enns posits a line of connection between mesmeric rapport, the electric telegraph and the telephone, and contemporary information technologies. Placing mesmerism within a continuity of communications that can occur outside the physical space occupied by the body allows Enns to investigate the disembodiment of mesmeric phenomena with a view to tracing the reconfiguration of the divisions between mind and body and materiality and immateriality. In Poe’s short mesmeric fictions, as well as in Edison’s work on the electric valve that can speak with the dead, these questions of corporeality and Cartesian dualism are foregrounded. Enns argues that both Poe and Edison characterize mesmerism and electricity as simultaneously material and immaterial, both physically present and spiritually absent. This leads them both to regard their communication technologies (be they valves or mesmeric trances) as a reconstituted form of embodiment appropriate to the electrical age. Louise Henson’s essay on Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the first to deal with mesmeric themes in her work, due, as Henson shows, to a dearth of critical analysis of Gaskell’s mental philosophy. Situating mesmerism within the broader context of mental health and cultivation associated with educational reform, Henson reveals how Gaskell’s sceptical reading of mesmerism placed it alongside ordinary mental phenomena such as epidemic illusions and susceptible temperaments. Focused initially on Gaskell’s Cranford, published in 1853, mesmeric effects are perceived as delusionary mental incapacity brought about by a form of community hysteria, a phenomenon reproduced in “Lois the Witch” some six years later. Similar to Budge’s reading of Bulwer-Lytton’s work, Henson highlights the important role played by imagination in constituting physiological effects. For Gaskell, then, susceptibility to mesmerism was the consequence of mental weakness that allowed other mental

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phenomena to intrude upon individual consciousness. Such mental weakness, as Gaskell articulates it, is a product of deficiencies in national education provision that stunt the development of mental character. Aligning herself with those sceptical of mesmeric claims, Gaskell ultimately denounces mesmerism’s uniqueness, rendering it little more than another characteristic of the breakdown in society’s mental fabric. Contrary to Gaskell’s stance, in shifting the focus to mid-century Australia, Tiffany Donnelly demonstrates how mesmerism becomes an enabling practice, as the colonial mesmeric plays with and against British conceptions of the same phenomena. Drawing primarily on the work of British emigrant to Australia, Caroline Harper Dexter, Donnelly offers a feminist dimension to the colonial reconfiguration of mesmerism that presented an engagement with and, at the same time, a departure from British constructions of the same phenomena. Donnelly examines in detail Harper Dexter’s private papers and journalism to explore the role that this former Bloomerite played in the propagation of mesmerism and medicinal practices in mid-century Australia. This essay argues that Harper Dexter fused a feminist agenda to the tradition of female healing power and revised the role of the feminine civilizing mission. Harper Dexter’s Mesmeric Institution in which she treated female maladies and complaints fuelled Harper Dexter’s movement beyond the confines of the domestic sphere while her journalism cultivated the propagation of female healing and occult power. Harper Dexter’s colonial mesmeric, Donnelly posits, assured the centrality of the female in the creation of new social structures and cultural practices in mid-century Australia. The pivotal role of the female in the mesmeric exchange reemerges with a different slant in Angelic Rodgers’ essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rodgers informs us that in an October 1841 letter to his then fiancée, Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne declared: “love is the true magnetism.”26 The letter was written, Rodgers reveals, in an attempt to prevent Sophia from continuing mesmeric treatment, as he feared that her psychological autonomy would be compromised. Hawthorne’s anxieties concerning mesmeric enslavement re-surface in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) in which various individuals 26 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Letter to Sophia Peabody (18 October 1841)”, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, eds William Charvat et al., Columbus: OH, 1984, 590.

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experience mesmeric entrapment. Rodgers re-examines the role of mesmerism in the work by demonstrating how mesmeric states of consciousness serve as an interrogation of class, domestic and gender hierarchies. Hawthorne’s social critique, this essay argues, centres on the illusory nature of the power of gender, race and lineage. Entrapped individuals must break with the enslavement to old world values and dismiss surface values in order to forge their own identities independent of class hierarchies and family allegiance. Love, not power, is the true magnetism as individuals create new bonds that are devoid of manipulation and false ideological enslavement. Mesmeric clairvoyance is the subject of Martin Willis’ essay on George Eliot’s 1859 short story “The Lifted Veil”. Willis argues that George Eliot sees the scientific practices of mesmeric clairvoyance as inextricably linked with the new capitalist economy of mid-Victorian Britain. Much like Rodgers work on Hawthorne, Willis shows how George Eliot’s narrator, Latimer, struggles to come to terms with the impact of mesmeric clairvoyance on his economic and family relationships. Comparing contemporary accounts of the clairvoyant type with documents on financial speculation, Willis highlights the similarities between the clairvoyant narrator and his financier father. Their comparable attempts to gain and maintain status in a culture that partially views both the science of mesmerism and financial speculations as marginal and immoral practices leads to a denouement that interrogates the position and authority of mesmerism and capitalist economics within Victorian society. Willis proposes that mesmeric clairvoyance remains marginalized by its difficulties in finding a material basis for its orthodoxy, whereas mainstream science (against which it is fighting) and capitalist economics are able to provide material evidence of their power and performance. Preoccupations with family politics in mid-century Britain reemerge in Sharrona Pearl’s examination of gender relations in the work of a central figure of the period, Wilkie Collins. Collins explores mesmerism’s relationship with criminality at the heart of the Victorian family. Mesmerism may foster conscious or unconscious criminal behaviour but it also can also provide an authoritative instrument of detection in the case of The Moonstone (1858) and becomes implicated in sexual desire in The Woman in White (1868). This essay interrogates Collins’ position as an unconventional Victorian thinker whose works reinforce mesmerism’s claims to scientific legitimacy. In

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an exploration of Collins’ deployment of mesmerism in these texts, Pearl demonstrates how science is power and how mesmeric power, in particular, becomes a contested terrain where gender and family politics collide as unconventional women challenge male scientific authority. Yet women are denied scientific authority just as those women who know too much are ultimately chastened. Gender ideologies, Pearl argues, are simultaneously contested and re-inscribed in Collins’ work as he vacillates between a radical re-evaluation and a conservative re-establishment of prescribed gender roles in the Victorian family. Alisha Siebers shifts the focus to an artistic context by examining the connection between creativity and the trance-state in the writing of best-selling late Victorian novelist, Marie Corelli. The essay traces a dialogue between the romantic image of the trance-inspired author and the mesmeric promises of vital fluid. In A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) Corelli revises hypnotism’s physiological dimensions and develops a spiritual variation of the trance in her electric creed which posits that depleted creativity and neurasthenia can be healed by a renunciation of the body. Literary inspiration can be found, then, by embracing the ideal realm of the trance-state. Siebers argues that Corelli’s creed parallels Jean-Philippe Francois Deleuze’s theories of the highest form of the magnetic trance in which the subject is released into ascetic freedom. However, Corelli departs from conventional mesmeric thinking by infusing her creed with a Christian and spiritual impetus. Freed from their physicality, Corelli’s artists, through the guidance of Heliobas, commune with spirits and become conduits of a higher aesthetics. But is this mentor offering transcendence or entrapment? And although Corelli embraces the power of inspired writing, the novel, similar to Collins’ work, is suffused with gothic thematics as the trance-state threatens the self’s autonomy. Corelli’s electric creed also reinforced Victorian notions of the separate spheres by sustaining the link between femininity and spirituality. At the same time, Corelli’s focus on her asceticism is an enabling one that masks her very real and successful participation in a male sphere – the literary marketplace. Mary Elizabeth Leighton uses a number of sensational mesmeric crimes of the late nineteenth century to access a series of noncanonical narratives of the fin de siècle that deal explicitly with the criminality of mesmeric influence. Criminal acts perpetrated by

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hypnotic suggestion threw into confusion the medical authority that mesmerism, through its therapeutic use as hypnosis, had gained by the last two decades of the nineteenth century. On trial at the fin de siècle, she argues, was not only those criminals who had used hypnotic influence for criminal purposes, but also the very practice of hypnotism within the medical establishment. Central to the anxieties that criminal hypnosis registered was the powerless position of the hypnotic subject. More often female than male, this disequilibrium of power relations was exacerbated by the potential for criminal exploitation. Yet this in itself also raised a medico-legal problem: who was responsible for criminal acts perpetrated under the influence of hypnotic suggestion? In an analysis of four fin-de-siècle fictions that deal with situations of criminal hypnosis, Leighton shows that it is the male hypnotizer who is characterized as the exploiter of the vulnerable female and that the cultural authority of these narratives made impossible a recuperation of hypnosis’ authority by the medical community. In a climate of increased disapprobation in the late nineteenth century, the science came under the scrutiny of the Society for Psychical Research which had been established in 1882 by a group of Cambridge dons to explore the phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism and thought-transference. Arthur Conan Doyle became a member in 1891 and was commissioned by the society to examine a reputedly haunted house in 1894. Doyle also published his mesmeric novel, The Parasite, in the same year. In a gendered departure from the accounts presented by Leighton, the parasite of the title is a female mesmerist who exerts control over a young male scientist with near fatal consequences. Catherine Wynne locates the late-Victorian home as a site of disturbance and dis-ease and shows how mesmeric fictions explore these anxious spaces of desire and danger in which females endowed with mesmeric knowledge threaten to undermine domestic harmony and scientific legitimacy. Troubled by the dangerous women of his fin-de-siècle mesmeric fictions, Doyle’s later spiritualist writing seeks to desexualize the female medium and revise her position in the home and in the scientific order. The mesmeric femme fatale is replaced by the angel in the house but the substitution is an uneasy one that betrays Doyle’s anxieties concerning female knowledge and sexuality. Ultimately, Wynne argues, his writing attempts to establish a benign patriarchal order.

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Victorian Literary Mesmerism examines the engagement between literature and mesmerism in Victorian writing, reflecting the burgeoning interest in interdisciplinary studies. By placing a range of texts and authors in dialogue with each other the essays produce a dynamic intervention in the correlations between literature and science. More specifically, the essays gathered together here form a cohesive body of research focused upon common conceptual themes such as the centrality and marginalization of knowledge, the interrogation of hierarchies of gender and class, the politics of the family, criminality and technology. In so doing, the contributors to this collection reveal a common commitment to the fluid nature of literary and scientific interactions.

MIND READING: LITERATURE IN THE DISCOURSE OF EARLY VICTORIAN PHRENOLOGY AND MESMERISM

ILANA KURSHAN

The phreno-mesmeric lecturer concluded his explanation of phrenology before a large audience packed tightly inside Victorian London’s County Assembly Room. He then announced that he would provide an exhibition of mesmerism, and summoned a young woman from the audience to serve as his subject. When the woman was seated in full view of the audience, the lecturer began squeezing her thumbs between his forefingers to establish a magnetic connection. He next released her thumbs and proceeded to make magnetic passes at her by drawing back his hands and tracing the contours of her arms and legs. When he was convinced that he had induced a trance state, he began holding up various cards over the head of the subject, each of which bore the name of a phrenological organ. First, he held up a card marked IDEALITY and pushed his hand on the side of the patient’s head, approximately two inches above her left ear. To the audience’s delight, stimulation of this organ, thought to be responsible for imagination and the poetic faculty immediately induced the mesmerized subject to begin reciting the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. When he probed her organ of Tune, the subject began to sing these words to a familiar melody. Similar results were obtained for each of the phrenological organs stimulated by the lecturer.1 When he concluded his presentation, the audience members left arguing with one another about the meaning of the theatrical display they had witnessed. Was phrenology valid? Could mesmerism be considered a science? Such displays by itinerant phreno-mesmerists and debates on these exhibitions were noted in the Phrenological 1

This account of a phreno-mesmeric experiment is a synthesis of several accounts reported in the journals of phrenology and mesmerism. For reports of actual experiments, see John Potchett, “Phreno-Magnetic Notes”, Phreno-Magnet, I/3 (April 1843), 91-95; John Elliotson, “Mesmeric Phrenology”, People’s Phrenological Journal, I/2 (11 February 1843), 22-23.

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Journal, amidst articles about subjects’ recitations in the trance state or scholars who unearthed the skull of a famous poet to measure the size of his poetic faculty. The debates about the authenticity of phrenology and mesmerism would thus be documented in various serial publications along with frequent allusions to Shakespeare, Homer, and other well-known literary authors and characters. Literature played an important role in the controversy surrounding phrenology and mesmerism in the early Victorian period. Between 1820 and 1850, several of the proponents of these new sciences founded journals to prove and popularize their claims. As part of their rhetoric, these journals invoked literary ideas, quotations, and phrases. They also reported on experiments in which literary texts and acts of reading played a key role, as in the example above. In their journal articles and public demonstrations, phrenologists and mesmerists defended their ideas as scientific by borrowing examples, evidence, and stylistic approaches from literary texts. This essay demonstrates the ways in which literary allusions, quotations, and activities were used as evidence for the authenticity of phrenology and mesmerism and argues that these new sciences of head reading and mind reading were presented as literary activities to a Victorian audience. Through a study of the metaphors and rhetorical strategies employed in the phrenological and mesmeric journals, I also examine how the authority of literature was invoked to garner support for these new and controversial sciences in early Victorian Britain. The conjunction of phrenology and mesmerism reflects both their historical overlap and the way in which these sciences were popularized, promulgated, and practised in their heyday. Both were theories regarding the relationship between mind and matter. Many of the supporters of phrenology were also supporters of mesmerism, and vice versa, but public opinion varied. A popular mesmerist noted in 1843: “There are those who deny Phrenology and Mesmerism …. there are those who believe in one or the other, but not both; and others, again, believing in both, but not in the application of one as a test of the other; whilst a third class believe in the union of the two.”2 The “union of the two” refers to the hybrid phreno-magnetism which was more of a practice than a theory, involving the activation of the individual phrenological organs of a mesmerized subject to elicit 2

Spencer T. Hall, “Retrospect”, Phreno-Magnet, I/7 (August 1843), 195-96.

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certain corresponding responses. First popularized in 1842, when the itinerant lecturer and mesmerist Spencer T. Hall publicly demonstrated its principles at the Sheffield Mechanical Institute, it spread like wildfire throughout Britain.3 Typical phreno-magnetic experiments were staged performances intended for large crowds and were publicized by elaborate advertisements. Although most advertisements labelled the displays as lectures, the individual components of the lectures were described as stages; the pun betrays the theatricality of the phreno-mesmeric session. Like an advertisement for a theatre performance, posters for phreno-mesmeric lectures listed the prices of the various seats and included short blurbs from well-known public figures who could affirm the quality of the performers. The publicity for these displays attests to the belief of the phrenologists and mesmerists that to gain widespread acceptance as a science, phreno-magnetism first had to market itself as a popular phenomenon. Thus, phrenology and mesmerism were historically conjoined in an attempt to popularize both sciences. Moreover, both practices were popularized in novels as well as in theatrical displays. References to phrenology and mesmerism in Victorian literature have long been a favourite subject among historians of science because they represent a curious blending of the outdated and the transhistorical in which old scientific ideas that were later falsified or debunked became embedded in contemporaneous literary works. These ideas, commonly dismissed as pseudo-sciences, call attention to an important distinction between certain theoretical positions in science and literature: science is valued most when it is current, whereas literature is valued most when it has withstood the test of time. Since scientific inquiry is largely focused on novelty, modern scientists are rarely interested in poring over Franz Joseph Gall’s lengthy treatise on phrenology. There is a sense, arising in part from Thomas Kuhn’s depiction of scientific history, that scientific ideas replace and improve upon one another, such that we have no reason to trouble ourselves with outdated theories.4 In literature, however, the opposite is often true. As Edward Bulwer-Lytton quipped: “In science,

3 4

Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge, 1992, 204. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1996.

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read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest.”5 When science becomes embedded in literature, the result is a fascinating melding of old and new: an outdated scientific idea becomes fossilized in a trans-historical work of literature. Like a calcified skeleton preserved long after the extinction of the species, these vestiges of science are encountered again and again even after they have been falsified or debunked. The study of these vestiges of science in this essay inverts the traditional approach to the interface between literature and science. Rather than examining the downstream process whereby scientific ideas are incorporated into contemporaneous literature, I focus on the upstream process whereby scientific writing is informed by trends in literary scholarship and culture. Instead of looking at novels and poems about bumps on the skull and magnetic trances, I investigate the journals devoted exclusively to the popularization of phrenology and mesmerism in Britain between 1820 and 1850 to demonstrate how the phrenologists and mesmerists relied on literature in the rhetoric and practice of these sciences. Such journals emerged as a genre that shared the dual goals of popularizing and proving the legitimacy of phrenology and mesmerism. At least five phrenological and mesmeric journals were published in this period.6 The longest running of the five, The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (1823-47), began as a quarterly modelled after the proceedings of elite scientific assemblies such as the Royal Society of London. In contrast, The Phrenological Almanac (1842-45) was a lengthy annual volume, each issue of which included both articles on phrenology and mesmerism as well as information on celestial phenomena, weather, lecture schedules, and university terms. The Phreno-Magnet and Mirror of Nature: A Record of Facts, Experiments, and Discoveries in Phrenology, Magnetism, etc. was another monthly that ran for eleven volumes in 1843. According to Hall, who founded and edited The Phreno-Magnet, this journal was “started avidly as an Advocate as well as a Repository of Mesmerism”, intended to supplement the preponderance of

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Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “Essay X: Hints on Mental Culture”, in Caxtonia, London, 1875, 107. 6 Roger Cooter, Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge, 1984, 394-95.

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phrenological publications.7 Next, The People’s Phrenological Journal and Compendium of Mental and Moral Science (1843-44) was founded by members of the Exeter and London Phrenological Societies as an introduction to the elementary principles of phrenology, with instructions for the practical applications of phrenology and mesmerism and reviews of relevant works and lectures. Finally, John Elliotson and William Engledue founded a monthly journal entitled The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Application to Human Welfare (1843-56). This publication announced its goal to “collect and diffuse information connected with … cerebral physiology and mesmerism” and to “furnish a medium for the freest expression of thought on questions of social, moral, and intellectual progress”.8 These five journals were united by a shared intention of proving and popularizing phrenology and mesmerism and by the invocation of literature to achieve this end. Arguing from the ancients One way in which the writers and editors of the phrenological and mesmeric journals invoked literature was by appealing to the rhetorical language of powerful literary passages to persuade their readers of the validity of their claims. They incorporated literary metaphors and images into their writing to present their arguments more compellingly and to denounce their most vituperative opponents. In the Zoist, Elliotson quoted from Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad to express his disapproval of Dr Hawkins, a well-known antimesmerist. Elliotson commented on Hawkins’ harsh critique of mesmerism, claiming that: Surely the doctor [Hawkins] required “A thousand tongues A throat of brass and adamantine lungs” to thus publicly proclaim every man and woman, whether aristocratic or plebeian, religious or irreligious – educated or ignorant – every subscriber to the mesmeric hospital – every physician, surgeon,

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Spencer T. Hall, “Advertisement”, Phreno-Magnet, I/1 (February 1843), xi. “Prospectus”, The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare, I/1 (April 1843), 1-2.

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Here, Elliotson attacks Hawkins for his public denunciation of phrenology and mesmerism. Instead of merely criticizing Hawkins in the same way that Hawkins criticized the phrenologists and mesmerists, Elliotson invokes a metaphor from Homer to add weight to his own words. He could thus distinguish his own denunciation with rhetorical flourish. In addition to enriching his language, Elliotson’s quotation from Pope also implies that he was backed by strong voices of authority. He did not claim that Homer or Pope would have agreed with his defence of these sciences, but in invoking their poetry he allies himself with them. Furthermore, the passage also suggests that he was supported by other voices, since he had nearly a “thousand tongues” behind him. Elliotson did not bother to attribute the “thousand tongues” to Homer or Pope; presumably, he believed that if he left the quotation anonymous, his readers would recognize the famous lines or at least assume that they were written by a literary authority. In invoking the voice of a poet, even a poet whose name he never mentions, Elliotson could convey to his readers the sense that his own denunciation was well supported. In so doing, he also makes a claim about the authority of literature as an arbiter of scientific legitimacy: mesmerism must be as legitimate as Homeric tragedy if the latter is invoked in assessing the former. However, ancient poets such as Homer were not just quoted for the power of their rhetoric but also for the nature of their claims about the mind. The writers and editors of the phrenological and mesmeric journals would try to establish the legitimacy of their disciplines by claiming that the principles of their sciences were known to the great writers and poets of ancient history. As a Zoist writer proclaimed: “There is hardly a mesmeric phenomenon of modern times that does not appear in Greek antiquity.”10 Similarly, in an article in the People’s Phrenological Journal introduced as a “humble attempt to popularize what has hitherto been considered as an abstract study, 9

John Elliotson, “Remarks of a Female Mesmerist in Reply to the Scurrilous Insinuations of Dr F. Hawkins, Dr Mayo, and Mr Wakley”, Zoist, VII/25 (April 1849), 46. 10 L.L.D., “Allusions to Mesmerism in the Classics”, Zoist, III/10 (July 1845), 158.

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above the comprehension of many”, the writer argues that great artists and writers of previous centuries were well aware of the core principles of phrenology: All ancient artists and sculptors must have been aware of the existence of a plurality of organs, producing a difference in the shape of the head .... The poets too had the same ideas. Homer, in speaking of the basest fellow who went to Troy describes his conical head, which shape indicates a miserable development of the moral sentiments.11

Unlike Elliotson, who supported himself with “a thousand tongues”,12 the writer of this article was not interested in Homer’s rhetorical style but in proving that Homer’s poetry contained phrenological ideas. Homer’s explicit reference to a “conical head” served as an implicit “confirmation” of phrenology, and as a form of evidence readily available and comprehensible to “those who desire to investigate the matter closely”.13 The journal editors also mined works of literature for descriptions of mental characteristics that corresponded to the various phrenological organs. An early article in the Phrenological Journal, “Phrenology Illustrated by Quotations from the Poets”, declared that the depiction of characters in poetry and plays written before the science was discovered provide independent confirmation of phrenology’s transhistorical truth. In the opening paragraph, the author of this article explains his rationale: We have frequently endeavoured to turn the attention of our readers to the very accurate delineations of the primary faculties of man, recognized in the system of Phrenology, which are sometimes to be met with in our best authors, who wrote before Phrenology was heard of. This is just what is to be looked for, if Phrenology is a true system of mind; and the correctness of many such delineations is just an additional proof, if any was wanted, that it is so.14

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“A Complete System of Phrenology”, People’s Phrenological Journal, I/4 (25 February 1843), 39. 12 Elliotson, “Remarks of a Female Mesmerist in Reply . . .”, 46. 13 “A Complete System of Phrenology”, People’s Phrenological Journal, 39. 14 “Phrenology Illustrated by Quotations From the Poets”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, I/4 (December 1823-August 1824), 636-67.

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The author proceeds to quote from Cowper to demonstrate “Benevolence”, from Crabbe to illustrate “Love of Approbation”, and from Shakespeare to show the type of character that would result from “Wit, Self-esteem, and Combativeness, with moderate Benevolence, Veneration, and Conscientiousness”. The writer justifies his appeal to these poets on the grounds that they provided an accurate depiction of human character – after all, their poetic talent stemmed from their extraordinary descriptive power. He does not distinguish between fictional characters and measurable human skulls because “the poets drew, as we do, from nature and observation; and wherever their delineations are correct, they are found to harmonize with the phrenological system”.15 The convergence of literary and scientific evidence is seen as a consequence of the shared goal of writers and scientists to observe and delineate human nature. In arguing from the ancients, the phrenologists sought to demonstrate that phrenology, like literature, was based on observing and describing character. Thus, they not only cited evidence from literature; they also highlighted the similarities between phrenologists and writers and between scientific systems and literary texts. The bard on the brain Shakespeare was thought to furnish the most abundant evidence for the accuracy and legitimacy of phrenological and mesmeric principles and was paraphrased in an effort to explain the basic principles of these sciences to the uninitiated. In one instance, a subscriber to the Phrenological Journal rewrote the entire Queen Mab passage in Romeo and Juliet in phrenomagnetic terms, employing Shakespeare’s metaphor to provide a creative explanation of phreno-magnetism. This writer related that he was inspired to undertake this project when he returned from a lecture by a prominent popularizer of phrenology and “happened to take up the play of Romeo and Juliet”: Coming upon the well-known description of Queen Mab, it struck me, that in writing it, Shakespeare must have had present to his mind a theory of dreams very similar to that which is afforded by Phrenology. To try this more accurately, I immediately sat down, and endeavoured to translate the passage into phrenological language, a species of exercise which I have of late become very fond of. 15

Ibid., 637-39.

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The Phrenological Journal printed this translation in full, demonstrating how Queen Mab resembled the phreno-magnetist engaged in making magnetic passes over the various phrenological organs to measure their effects. Thus, instead of galloping “over men’s noses as they fall asleep”, the phreno-mesmeric Mab galloped “athwart the organs of the sleeping brain”.16 She travelled over lawyers’ Organs of Acquisitiveness (instead of their fingers); she drove over a soldier’s Organ of Destructiveness (instead of his neck); and she galloped over a lady’s Organ of Adhesiveness (instead of her lips).17 In Romeo and Juliet, the figure of Queen Mab was invoked by Mercutio to account for the dreams people experience; but this phrenological author invokes Queen Mab to illustrate Combe’s view of dreams as the activation of various combinations of phrenological organs to produce images and sensations in the sleeping brain. The author used Shakespeare’s metaphor to familiarize his readers with the phrenological system. He thus presented to his readers a science couched in literary metaphor. One of the most commonly cited literary passages in the discourse about phrenology and mesmerism was a speech from the final scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this passage, Theseus, the Duke of Athens, informs his wife Hippolyta that he distrusts the words of lunatics and lovers because they are misled by their imaginations. Theseus compares the lunatic and the lover to the poet who creates worlds out of words, conjuring visions and forms that have no basis in reality: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.18

Theseus’ awe at the power of the imagination to give rise to the poet’s constructions was invoked by critics of phrenology and mesmerism who sought to dismiss these sciences as imaginative constructs. As the 16 “Shakespeare’s Queen Mab”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, II/6 (August 1824-October 1825), 289. 17 Ibid., 290. 18 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland, Oxford, 1998, V. i. 14-17.

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staunchly anti-mesmerist journal, the Medico-Chirurgical Review, asserted in its unfavourable review of the Zoist: If the Zoist hugs himself with the fond idea that his science and himself will be famous by and-bye, well and good. It is a comfortable hallucination, and probably all he will ever get; and it were a pity to deprive him of them. But, like his “science”, they are imagination, and one airy nothing will dissolve away with the other.19

This reviewer alludes to Theseus’ speech in referring to mesmerism as an “airy nothing” and as a “comfortable hallucination” reminiscent of the “seething brains” (V. i. 4) and “fine frenzy” (V. i. 12) that Shakespeare attributes to the lunatic, lover, and poet. Yet this Shakespearean passage was also invoked by the supporters of phrenology and mesmerism to defend their legitimacy and to prove their science. In the opening article of the first issue of the Phrenological Almanac, Alexander Falkner, a member of the Phrenological Association, substituted “phrenology” for “imagination” to praise the achievements of the new science: “To each throb of the heart, – to each perception of the mind, – to every attribute of the soul, – to what was formerly airy nothing – 20 PHRENOLOGY hath given a local habitation and a name!” Falkner refers to Shakespeare to argue that phrenology’s localization of brain functions in specific cerebral regions converts “airy nothing” – an immaterial soul – into an organized system in which each organ is named and positioned on the skull. Just as poets create shapes and worlds out of their own imaginations, phrenologists create an organized system of mental properties out of a confused mass of perceptions and attributes. Falkner thus paraphrased the same passage used in the Medico-Chirurgical Review’s attack to applaud the order and structure conferred by the system of phrenology. Both the Medico-Chirurgical Review and the Zoist reflect a growing distrust among scientists of the imagination in the early part of the nineteenth century. Whereas eighteenth-century philosophers such as Hume and Kant had contended that all perception and intelligible thought were dependent upon the imagination, nineteenth19

“The Zoist”, Medico-Chirurgical Review, II/3 (1 July 1848), 266. Alexander Falkner, “Introduction to the Study of Phrenology”, Phrenological Almanac; Or, Annual Journal of Mental and Moral Science, I/1 (1842), 16.

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century thinkers were more sceptical of this faculty.21 According to the new conceptual scheme, science had to remain uncorrupted by the personal idiosyncrasies associated with the imagination. A rift developed between objective science, in which the imagination was to play no role, and subjective art, in which imagination was necessary for creativity and genius.22 Since science and imagination were increasingly considered antithetical to one another, the Lancet could discredit the phrenologists and mesmerists as unscientific by insisting that they were “misled by vain imaginings”.23 Equally distrustful of the imagination were the phrenologists and mesmerists, who quite literally dismissed imagination and replaced it with phrenology in rewriting Theseus’ speech to Hippolyta. The phrenologists and mesmerists invoked Shakespeare not because they valued his imaginative capacity, but because they thought his work was the least imaginative and the most objective in the literary canon. They contended that Shakespeare’s characters were so true to human nature that they could not really be considered fictional imaginings. As the editor of the Phrenological Journal explained: We shall choose our first example from Shakespeare himself. We do this for two reasons; first, because the characters of that incomparable master are invariably drawn with such a force and breadth, that it is impossible to mistake the lines by which they are portrayed; and, secondly, because it is admitted, on all hands, that he possessed a knowledge of human nature the most profound and accurate of any man who ever wrote, insomuch that it has been observed, that studying Shakespeare is studying nature.24

Accordingly, the accuracy of Shakespeare’s depictions rendered his characters ideally suitable for scientific analysis. To support this claim, estimates were made of the measurements of each of the phrenological organs of Othello’s Iago based on Shakespeare’s description. The article’s authors then gave this list of measurements 21

Lorraine Daston, “Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science”, Daedalus CXXVI/1 (Winter 1998), 78-79; Mary Warnock, Imagination, Berkeley, 1976, 33. 22 Daston, 81. 23 John Wakley, “The College Mesmerizer”, Lancet (4 July 1846), 16. 24 “Application of Phrenology to Criticism”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, I/1(December 1823-August 1824), 94.

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to a phrenologist without attributing them to Iago and instructed him to describe the personality of an individual with those phrenological dimensions. Finally, they compared the phrenologist’s reconstruction with Shakespeare’s original depiction and concluded that the similarities between both descriptions served as evidence for the science’s precision. Thus they used Shakespeare’s characters as phrenological subjects to validate their science.25 Shakespeare was also used in the public demonstrations recorded in the journals. In a common phreno-magnetic exhibition, Shakespeare’s plays functioned as a controlled variable against which phrenological organs were tested in mesmerized subjects. The subject would be handed a copy of a well-known Shakespearean play to read aloud as his or her phrenological organs were stimulated, so that the operator could observe changes in tone as his hands moved across the subject’s skull. In the first volume of the Phreno-Magnet, for example, R. Dale Owen reported on an experiment in which he provided the subject with Coriolanus and noted his changes in affect and tone as the organs of aggressiveness, tune, memory, language, and imitation were stimulated in turn.26 In other experiments, mesmerized subjects were found to recite passages of Shakespeare spontaneously upon the stimulation of specific organs. When an operator mesmerized a “young gentleman” at a private house in Cheshire, he found that “on Language, Ideality, and Cautiousness being touched, he [the gentleman] gave the dagger scene in Macbeth in a most excellent style”.27 Similarly, in a report by a different operator on another patient, stimulation of the organ of Ideality induced the recitation of Juliet’s soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet. The subject’s ability to quote Shakespeare upon stimulation of her organs of Language and Ideality in a mesmeric trance was interpreted as evidence for the correspondence between specific mental faculties and specific brain regions.28 These examples only begin to suggest Shakespeare’s popularity for the phrenologists and mesmerists. Indeed, Shakespeare was referenced 25

“Shakespeare’s Iago”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, I/3 (December 1823-August 1824), 402-22. 26 R. Dale Owen, “Neurology”, Phreno-Magnet, I/1 (February 1843), 11. 27 R. Jones, “Interesting Experiments in Cheshire”, Phreno-Magnet, I/6 (July 1843), 189. 28 Potchett, “Phreno-Magnetic Notes”, Phreno-Magnet, 93.

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so frequently that the 1835 volume of the Phrenological Journal contained in its index the entry “Shakespeare, quoted”, followed by a listing of nine page numbers.29 Shakespeare, though exceedingly prolific, obviously never mentioned phrenology or mesmerism in his works; why, therefore, was he continuously invoked in the disputes about these new sciences? In Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Marjorie Garber argues that Shakespearean allusions abound in literary, historical, psychoanalytical, philosophical, and political discourse because Shakespeare is the “superego of literature” who haunts every thinker and writer since his own day: “He is the one who comes as a revenant, belatedly instated, regarded as originally authoritative, rather than retrospectively and retroactively canonized, and deriving increased authority from this very instatement of authority backward, over time.”30 Shakespeare was cited so frequently in the phrenological and mesmeric journals because he was considered supremely authoritative. A quotation from Shakespeare could impose a stamp of legitimacy even on claims about the localization of brain function and the distribution of magnetic fluids in the human body. However, the invocation of Shakespeare also had its dangers because it reinforced the theatricality of the phreno-magnetic displays. This problematic implication of the appeal to Shakespeare was reflected, for example, in the Phrenological Journal’s quotation from Macbeth to demonstrate the influence of Self-esteem and Destructiveness on the mind of a mesmerized subject: Thus Macduff, in the first eagerness to revenge against Macbeth, prays to heaven to: Cut short all intermission. Front to front Set [sic] thou this fiend of Scotland and myself. Within my sword’s length set him; if he ’scape me, Heaven forgive him too.31

This quotation recalls the theatricality of the staged demonstrations since these very lines are intended for performance; the very first 29

“Index”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, IX (September 1834-March 1836), 671. 30 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality, London, 1987, 176. 31 “On the Combinations in Phrenology”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, I/3 (December 1823-August 1824), 386.

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speech act cited is Macbeth’s “cut short all intermission”, as if the actor himself is calling for the show to resume.32 Yet invoking the “sword’s length” of Macbeth and other dramatic allusions functioned as a double-edged dagger, for the theatrical element rendered the phreno-mesmerists even more susceptible to accusations of faking and feigning. The Medico-Chirurgical Review commented that “the showman certainly may complain of plagiarism” when he realizes the extent to which phreno-magnetic “lectures” resemble his own performances.33 Even the phrenological journals themselves distinguished between professional phrenologists and the “abominable practices of manipulating impostors, who make a prey of the ignorant and unsuspecting, swindle them of their money, and prostitute the noble science of Phrenology”.34 Thus, literature was invoked to confer authority upon science but it also emphasized the theatricality that risked delegitimizing it. Literature was often most useful in the very activities that weakened the credibility of the phrenologists and mesmerists. Once this occurred, it became increasingly necessary to seek the authority of cultural icons like Shakespeare, further entangling the discourses of science and literature. Famous foreheads Phrenologists and mesmerists were also interested to show how works of literature were associated with their authors’ phrenological properties and mesmeric states. They maintained that the content of a literary text could be assessed based on the contours of its author’s skull, and that mesmerized subjects could compose poetry while entranced. By linking literary creativity to underlying phrenological traits and mesmeric conditions, the sciences’ proponents showed how the production of literature was dependent upon the principles of phrenology and mesmerism. Phrenologists argued that the excellence of great works of literature could be attributed to their authors’ phrenological traits. To illustrate the connection between bumps and books, the first issue of the Phrenological Journal contained sketches of the heads of Locke, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rousseau, and Cobbett, 32

James Ellis and Joseph Donohue, “The London Stage 1800-1900: A Proposal for a Calendar of Performances”, Victorian Studies, XVI/4 (June 1973), 463-65. 33 “The Zoist”, Medico-Chirurgical Review, 266. 34 Falkner, “Introduction to the Study of Phrenology”, Phrenological Almanac, 12n.

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with arrows identifying their organs of Ideality.35 According to George Combe, the chief popularizer of phrenology in Britain, this organ “gives what is called inspiration to the poet … it desires to elevate, and to endow with a splendid excellence every object presented to the mind”.36 The prominent organs of Ideality of these five writers provided evidence for the correspondence between phrenological organs and their functions. A writer’s talent was thus attributed to the shape of his skull to furnish proof for phrenology. No wonder, then, that the Phrenological Journal was so intent on recording the precise measurements of Byron’s skull for future literary critics.37 The method of analysing the contours of a poet’s skull was taken to the extreme in the twenty-two-page “Essay on the Character and Cerebral Development of Robert Burns”, read before the Edinburgh Ethical Society for the Study and Practical Application of Phrenology in 1834 and subsequently published in the Phrenological Journal. The author of this article, Robert Cox, reported that he and several others descended into the vault of a mausoleum to procure a cast of Burns’ skull. Upon obtaining it, Cox proceeded to compare the development of the individual brain organs with the strength of the mental faculties as exhibited in the poetry and letters of the popular Scottish Romantic. He argues that Burns’ poetic genius could be attributed to his extraordinary cerebral developments: “With a small or lymphatic brain, such things would have been altogether impossible.” Cox traced specific lines of Burns’ poetry to the cerebral organs that inspired them: “It was Benevolence which made Burns, in the stormy nights of winter, bethink him on ‘the owrie cattle and silly sheep;’ and lament the cheerless condition of the little birds which in milder seasons delighted him with their song.” By the end of the article, Cox’s interest in literary analysis becomes inseparable from his goal of proving phrenology’s validity. He concludes with his “hope that the candid reader will agree with me in regarding the skull of Burns as a striking and valuable confirmation of the truth of Phrenology”.38 35

Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, I/1 (December 1823-August 1824), cover. George Combe, Essays on Phrenology, ed. John Bell, Philadelphia, 1822, 240. 37 “Lord Byron”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, I/4 (1824), 629-31. 38 Robert Cox, “An Essay on the Character and Cerebral Development of Robert Burns”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, IX/41 (September 1834-March 1836), 58, 68, 74. 36

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Again, a writer’s phrenological traits were employed as evidence for scientific principles. Since phrenologists claimed that literary excellence depended on an author’s phrenological attributes, the phrenological journals would often refer to specific poets whose works revealed the activity of an especially prominent phrenological organ. By citing several of these poets’ verses, the journal writers could demonstrate the effects of that particular organ on the poet’s craft. For instance, in “On the Organ of Sympathy”, published in the Zoist, Thomas Symes Prideaux argued that “this portion of the head is also largely developed in all the dramatic writers whose portraits I have had an opportunity of examining ... in the prominence of this tendency in his writings, Shelley surpasses all poets, either ancient or modern, and exhibits examples of it in nearly every page”.39 Prideaux proceeds to cite several works of literature that demonstrate their authors’ organ of Sympathy, including Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He emphasizes that his purpose is to demonstrate a particular literary style rather than a phrenological principle; his avowed goal was to engage in literary criticism through a phrenological lens. The notion that literature could serve phrenology well was reiterated in all the phrenological and mesmeric journals, and then became the thesis of a critical study published in 1848 by John Ollivier. Phrenology: In Relation to the Novel, the Criticism, and the Drama identifies the way in which the literature of each of these genres could substantiate phrenology. Above all, Ollivier proclaims to his readers that: It is in the interest as well as the duty of science to welcome literary excellence; for its facts (the crania of remarkable men) contribute to the edifice which science rears to truth – its facts are the title-deeds which authenticate the creed of science – its facts become the controversial sword and shield with which science combats error and guards truth!40

39

T. S. Symes Prideaux, “On an Organ of Sympathy, Seated Between Comparison and Benevolence”, Zoist, VI/21 (April 1848), 79. 40 John Ollivier, Phrenology in Relation to the Novel, the Criticism, and the Drama, London, 1848, 62.

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The facts of literature were invoked to guard the truth of phrenology in the phrenological and mesmeric journals as well. Articles were devoted to reviews of recently published novels using phrenological terms and categories. In a discussion of Charles Dibdin’s The Waterman (1806), one writer remarked that the “spirit of contradiction” exhibited by Mr and Mrs Bundle in this play was clearly a product of prominent organs of Self-Esteem and Combativeness.41 By studying literature through a phrenological lens, the writer assumed implicitly that phrenology was a legitimate mode of inquiry. This assumption was, in itself, a subtle argument for phrenology’s validity. The assessment of literature based on mental characteristics provided an important argument for the mesmerists as well. Mesmerists associated literary talent with mesmeric states. They argued that the magnetic influence was so powerful that it could inspire the composition of poetry. The 1845 volume of the Phrenological Journal reported a case in which a mesmerized subject began to write poetry. The subject, Felix Bodin, was identified as a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a historian who had never before written verse. During an attack of brain fever, his doctors called in a mesmeric practitioner and Bodin was “most instantly calmed by the passes of Animal Magnetism”, whereupon he suddenly became a poet: He soon fell into the mesmeric sleep. While under its influence, he suddenly started upright on his couch of suffering, and imperatively called for pen, ink, and paper, all of which were immediately procured. To the astonishment of all present, he then, as if under the power of inspiration, rapidly composed and wrote down, though his eyes were sealed in deepest sleep, the exquisite stanzas and music which, unaltered, he afterwards published under the title of “La Langueur”.42

Although Bodin had been almost at “the point of death” before his mesmeric treatment, the article focused on his creative composition. Bodin’s recovery was not even mentioned; the article instead related 41

“On the Combinations in Phrenology”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 385. 42 “Recent Works on Mesmerism”, Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, XVIII/83 (1845), 186.

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the astonishment of all those present upon reading his poetry. One woman in particular, Miss Crumpe, had initially doubted the power of mesmerism but interpreted Bodin’s burst of genius as evidence for the new science. Bodin’s poetic composition and the reaction it elicited demonstrates the way in which a literary activity was interpreted by the Victorians as compelling evidence for the science of mesmerism. A sort of monomania The practice of these sciences was also described in literary terms, most obviously in the presentation of phrenologizing and mesmerizing as acts of reading. Phrenologizing was popularly referred to as head reading with the skull serving as a legible text.43 The phrenologist’s role was to read the surface of the skull by measuring the size and shape of the brain organs beneath. Those organs that were most active in a particular individual would be largest, because they were more copiously supplied with blood. By measuring the size of organs with his fingers or calipers, the phrenologist could thus read the traits of his subject. Given the similarities between the practices of reading and phrenologizing, it should come as no surprise that phrenology was described as the process of “reading human nature as it is”.44 Furthermore, the whole of nature itself was compared to an open book in the various journals. Thus, the Phreno-Magnet referred to “that age on which our existence itself is written – in the book Nature, the language of which is facts”.45 The metaphor of reading was also employed to describe mesmeric clairvoyance. The individual in the mesmeric state was sometimes found to possess the power of thought reading. Clairvoyant knowledge involved a direct transmission of thoughts from one mind to another. Another person’s thoughts, it was said, would suddenly appear in the mind of the clairvoyant like words on a page. In a Zoist article, “On 43

Cooter, 4. Spencer T. Hall, “Retrospect”, Phreno-Magnet, I/8 (September 1843), 228. 45 Spencer T. Hall, “Extraordinary Sympathetic Phenomena”, Phreno-Magnet, I/7 (August 1843), 201. The metaphor of the book of nature is a scientific trope that dates back at least as early as Galileo’s 1615 letter defending himself to the Grand Duchess Christina (see The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, ed. Maurice A. Finocchario, Berkeley, 1989, 87-118). For earlier uses of this metaphor, see James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, Madison, 1995. I am indebted to Michael Gordin for bringing these references to my attention. 44

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35

the Silent Power of the Will”, H. S. Thompson celebrated the “power of thought-reading” that became possible during the mesmeric trance.46 Mesmerism resembled reading because the subject, like a reader absorbed in a book, was transported to another spatial and temporal reality. Subjects in a state of magnetic sleep lost all awareness of their surroundings and often claimed to see distant lands or future events. To emphasize mesmerism’s power to transport the individual, Alison Winter appeals to the satiric Victorian image of the “island of Mesmeria”, a distant and enchanted land where everything is managed along mesmeric principles.47 Victorian popularizers of mesmerism repeatedly suggested that mesmerism’s power to transport the individual on a mental voyage resembles the experience of becoming subsumed in the world of a book. The mesmeric state could transport the subject to another time and place much like an absorbing work of literature, so that the subject lost all consciousness of his immediate physical surroundings. As one subject wrote after awakening from a trance, “mesmerism imperfectly frees us from the tie, and by consequence from the laws of time and space imperfectly”.48 Hall compared the “melting and ecstatic flow” of mesmerism to the “clearness and expansiveness yet subjection of spirit ... which I have sometimes experienced too when communing deeply with great poets”.49 Another writer compared the mesmeric state to the act of reading by emphasizing that both may lead to a distorted sense of the passage of time – time seems to flow more quickly for the individual in the mesmeric trance, as it does for a reader immersed in a good book.50 Both phrenology and mesmerism, then, were particularly well suited to popularization through literature because their very acts were comparable to the act of reading. Indeed, in several phreno-mesmeric experiments, reading was not just invoked metaphorically, but also played a role in the scientific proceedings.

46

H. S. Thompson, “On the Silent Power of the Will of One Person Over Another”, Zoist, V/19 (October 1847), 256. 47 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 3. 48 “A Yorkshire Clergyman’s Opinion of Mesmerism”, Phreno-Magnet, I/7 (August 1843), 202. 49 Hall, “Extraordinary Sympathetic Phenomena”, Phreno-Magnet, 199. 50 Charles Pembrook, “Experiments by Mr. Pembrook”, Phreno-Magnet, I/7 (August 1843), 220.

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In some phreno-mesmeric experiments, the mesmerized subject was asked to read aloud from a printed text that was concealed both from the subject and the mesmerizer. The subject had to make out the words on the page in spite of intervening physical barriers. As Alphonse Teste wrote in his 1843 Practical Manual of Animal Magnetism: “Vision through the closed eyelids and through opaque bodies is not only a real fact, but a very frequent fact ... the fact of reading under the same conditions, a fact which, on the whole, is just the same, is met with much more seldom, which may be readily conceived; this is the phenomenon in all its perfection.”51 The journals reported on several mesmeric reading experiments to demonstrate the power of animal magnetism. In “Facts in Clairvoyance”, John Ashburner recounted one such experiment conducted in his “little library”. Ashburner purchased a dozen walnut shells containing caraway comfits and printed mottos. He invited two young women famous for their clairvoyance to read the mottos through the closed walnut shells. As each girl read the motto through the walnut shell, Ashburner wrote down her words. He then opened the shells to check the accuracy of the readings. In every instance, the girls succeeded in reading the motto through the closed shells. Ashburner reported: I asked this lady to give me an account of how she managed to read the words on a piece of paper folded up, as these mottos are known to be in the shell. She said the paper appeared before her in space unfolded, and she had only to read on as in a book.52

Mesmerism is thus compared to reading to emphasize the ease with which subjects were able to achieve clairvoyance. Reading also played a role in mesmeric experiments in other ways: clairvoyants read letters in the mail that had not yet arrived at their destinations, composed poetry in a trance state, and identified the titles of books in a library while blindfolded. In his 1844 treatise on mesmerism, Opie Staite argued that the science would one day transform literary scholarship such that “the lurking places of all the missing works of the ancients that are still extant will be found out”. Ironically, in spite of the important role of reading and literature in the 51 52

Alphonse Teste, A Practical Manual of Animal Magnetism, London, 1843, 75. John Ashburner, “Facts in Clairvoyance”, Zoist, VI/21 (April 1848), 100, 108.

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practice of mesmerism, Staite claimed that mesmerism would ultimately render books obsolete: “Let the sober-minded reader glance at the exploits of mind as exhibited in the various cases in point – let him thoroughly satisfy himself that thought is legible by the mind’s eye – and then let him ask himself, whether, when science shall have permeated the world, printed books will be of any use whatsoever?”53 In any case, the early Victorian journals of phrenology and mesmerism and the contemporaneous treatises furnish ample evidence that the ability to read printed texts played an essential role in the mesmeric endeavour. As one exasperated clairvoyant remarked upon being asked to read aloud in a trance state: “Again! ever wanting to make me read. It is a sort of monomania.”54

Such connections in the phrenological and mesmeric journals demonstrate the interdependence of science and literature in Victorian culture. In an effort to prove their scientific principles, writers and editors used the rhetorical strategies of great writers to persuade their readers of the validity of their claims. They also mined literary texts that predated the discovery of phrenology and mesmerism for evidence of the eternal truth of these sciences and invoked the authority of famous writers to establish their own legitimacy. That phrenology and mesmerism were presented as literary activities to a Victorian audience should come as no surprise, given that these practices engaged variously with the phrenologists reading the skulls of their subjects, with the subjects in turn reading books through blindfolds, and with the mesmeric clairvoyants reading their minds.

53 54

Opie Staite, Mesmerism, London, 1844, 59-60. Teste, 87.

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MESMERISM AND MEDICINE IN BULWER-LYTTON’S NOVELS OF THE OCCULT

GAVIN BUDGE

Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s two occult novels, Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862), more or less bracket popular interest in mesmerism in England. Zanoni was published only three years after Elliotson’s high-profile resignation from University College Hospital1 and, it has been suggested, was inspired by Chauncy Hare Townshend’s defence of Elliotson in his 1840 pamphlet Facts on Mesmerism (Bulwer-Lytton was a personal friend of Townshend2). At the same time, the muted critical reception A Strange Story met with3 suggests that by the time of its publication general interest in mesmerism was on the wane, a decline probably linked with the development of the new scientific paradigm of Darwinism and reflex psychology.4 However, it is difficult to link Zanoni and A Strange Story in a direct causal manner to the rise and fall of the English mesmeric mania.5 Bulwer-Lytton’s use of mesmeric themes in his fiction predates the 1840s by some years,6 appearing most obviously in the character of Arbaces the Egyptian magician in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Arbaces, whose “magic” is explained by BulwerLytton in Enlightenment fashion as consisting in a superior knowledge of the laws of Nature,7 is portrayed as maintaining his influence over 1

Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 100. 2 Robert Lee Wolff, Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction, Boston, 1971, 235-36. 3 Wolff, 304. 4 Winter, 308-309. 5 Fred Kaplan uses the phrase “mesmeric mania”, which he borrows from the title of a lecture by John Hughes Bennett, in Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Princeton, 1975, 5. 6 Wolff, 149. 7 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, The New Knebworth Edition, London, 1896, 174.

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the weak-willed, Shelleyan figure of Apaecides (77) by means of a Bacchanalian initiation ceremony which puts him into a suggestible state (103-115). This echoes Mesmer’s own practice, which was often described as aiming to put subjects in a state of “sensuous intoxication” before the ministrations of the mesmerist himself,8 and it is possible Bulwer-Lytton had in mind Shelley’s own experiments with mesmerism.9 Zanoni and A Strange Story do not contain any straightforward depictions of mesmerism as a practice. Although Bulwer-Lytton emphasizes the brilliant or “penetrating” quality of the eyes of the two immortal illuminati, Zanoni and Mejnour, and although we learn that the healing process which Zanoni is capable of inducing in the sick is usually preceded by a “deep sleep”, Bulwer-Lytton’s characters do not engage in any of the passes or stroking of the skin typical of mesmeric practice.10 Similarly, in A Strange Story the soulless and immortal Margrave simply exerts a fascination which is not linked with any particular behaviour, but merely with his bodily presence; although Sir Philip Derval, the mystic student of oriental lore, does take away the “power of will” from the narrator, Fenwick, by laying his hand on his head, the ensuing vision of Margrave’s loss of soul is produced by the “strange intoxicating effect” of the powder which he sprinkles on the lamp’s flame.11 The presence of these tropes in Zanoni and A Strange Story indicates, however, the affinity of these novels with the work of Balzac, whose penchant for introducing mysteriously fascinating characters with piercing eyes has been noted by Maria Tatar. This is a resemblance that goes far beyond superficial descriptive details. Tatar has analysed extensively the connection between Balzac’s mesmeric interests and his thematic preoccupation with vitality or the “life-

8

Sidney Barwise, Mesmerism (Hypnotism), Its Possibilities, Its Uses and Abuses, Birmingham 1888, 4-5; see also Maria M Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature, Princeton, 1978, 14-15. 9 Cf. Nigel Leask, “Shelley’s ‘Magnetic Ladies’: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body”, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780-1832, eds Stephen Copley and John Whale, London, 1992, 53-78. 10 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni, The New Knebworth Edition, London, 1897, 202, 113-114. 11 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story, The New Knebworth Edition, London, 1897, 122, 183-84.

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force”.12 Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni and A Strange Story connects mesmerism with medical theories of vitality in a very similar way, something which his few modern critical commentators have failed to recognize. Bulwer-Lytton’s use of mesmeric topics reflects medical discourses that were widely current in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the possibility that he had read some of Balzac’s work cannot be ruled out.13 In this respect, A Strange Story is exemplary, since the circumstances of its first publication in Dickens’ Household Words made Bulwer-Lytton more than usually anxious to ensure that the popular audience appreciated the philosophical and medical aspects of his narrative,14 to the extent of including footnotes to the sources from which he drew. It is therefore possible to use A Strange Story as a key to the somewhat more enigmatic narrative of Zanoni. In both cases, Bulwer-Lytton understands mesmeric phenomena as an aspect of the more general questions about the nature of the vital principle that were preoccupying early nineteenth-century medicine, in a way that allows him to use mesmerism as a figure for questions of sexuality and gender. A relatively minor incident in A Strange Story furnishes a starting point for examining the relationship between medicine, philosophy and the supernatural. Fenwick, the doctor who is the narrator of A Strange Story, sits down at a medical treatise he is writing, as “the sole occupation that had power and charm enough to rouse me from the aching sense of void and loss” after the departure of Lilian, with whom he has recently fallen in love: The very night of the day she went, I reopened my MS. I had left off at the commencement of a chapter “Upon Knowledge as derived from our Senses.” As my convictions on this head were founded on the well-known arguments of Locke and Condillac against innate ideas, and the reasonings by which Hume has resolved the combination of sensations into a general idea to an impulse arising merely out of habit, so I set myself to oppose, as a dangerous concession to the sentimentalities or mysticism of a pseudo-philosophy, the doctrine favoured by most of our recent physiologists, and of which some of 12

Tatar, 166-73. Wolff, 228, 315-22. 14 Andrew Brown, “The ‘Supplementary Chapter’ to Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story”, Victorian Literature and Culture, XXVI/1 (March 1998), 159. 13

42

Gavin Budge the most eminent of German metaphysicians have accepted the substance, though refining into a subtlety its positive form .... Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh – a compassionate, mournful sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat, looked round, amazed to discover no one – no living thing! The windows were closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the wind. But there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A silvery whiteness – vaguely shaped as a human form – receding, fading, gone! Why, I know not – for no face was visible, no form, if form it were, more distinct than colourless outline; – why, I know not, but I cried aloud, “Lilian! Lilian!” My voice came strangely back to my ear – I paused, then smiled and blushed at my folly. “So I, too, have learned what is superstition,” I muttered to myself. “And here is an anecdote at my own expense (as Müller frankly tells us anecdotes of the illusions which would haunt his eyes, shut or open) – an anecdote I may quote when I come to my chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms.” (104-106)

This incident announces one of the major themes in A Strange Story, Fenwick’s materialism (indicated by the references to Hume and Condillac) and his consequent doubts about the existence of the soul. The apparition of Lilian could be understood as the kind of mesmeric clairvoyance that Bulwer-Lytton employs at the end of Zanoni, where Viola in prison “sees” the guillotining of her husband Zanoni (462-64), or that Dickens employs in Oliver Twist.15 The close affinity between the mesmeric discourse of magnetism and discourses of sexuality, particularly as expressed in the idea that animate bodies permeated each other with an invisible fluid which was responsible for affinities and attractions between them,16 seems to have encouraged Bulwer-Lytton to use this apparently melodramatic plot device, which also appears later in A Strange Story when Lilian’s apparition saves Fenwick from his subjection to Margrave’s enchantment (327, 33536). This sexually charged mesmeric discourse of “sympathy” is also used to explain the fact that Lilian and Fenwick have both simultaneously seen the apparition of Margrave (437). The “compassionate, mournful sigh” (105) over Fenwick’s materialism reflects Lilian’s status as representative of the soul: towards the end of 15 16

Kaplan, 153. Ibid., 34; Winter, 117.

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A Strange Story, Julius Faber, Fenwick’s medical mentor, explains that Lilian, in the state of mental alienation to which she has by that point succumbed, can be understood by himself and his young daughter Amy, when she cannot be understood by Fenwick because they “believe in spirit”, which enables them to “through soul guess a soul” (440) in a way that Fenwick, who cannot separate soul from the (materially conditioned) mind, cannot. Faber, who usually acts as an authorial mouthpiece, later suggests a typological interpretation in which Lilian represents the soul and Fenwick the mind, so that their union in marriage will result in the health of both (499). What may seem less readily explicable to the modern reader of Bulwer-Lytton’s narrative is Fenwick’s ability confidently to dismiss the reality of the apparition, a point which is underscored in a subsequent chapter when he goes to treat a rustic who has been struck down with an apoplectic fit because he has seen an apparition of his master, Sir Philip Derval, with the face of a corpse. Riding home, Fenwick muses on “the difference that education makes, even pathologically, between man and man” which has enabled him to dismiss an apparition as a “nervous phenomenon” when “fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which has impressed me the night before with a moment’s belief in a sound and a spectre” has stricken the rustic, “not conscious of the faculty we call imagination ... down almost to Death’s door” (110). There is a certain irony to Fenwick’s confidence here, since the rustic’s vision is in fact prophetic – Sir Philip Derval is about to return unexpectedly from the East, and will shortly be murdered. Bulwer-Lytton’s nineteenth-century readers, however, would almost certainly have been familiar with Fenwick’s reasons for dismissing the apparition of Lilian, since the circumstances under which it appears to him form a scenario that had been endlessly repeated in a popular nineteenth-century genre of writing about supernatural phenomena, many examples of which were penned by medical men. Bulwer-Lytton indicates that the medical treatise on which Fenwick himself is at work is one such example of this genre, something shown by Fenwick’s intention to include a description of the incident in the “chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms” (106). In this respect, what is significant is that Fenwick sees the apparition while he is engaged in writing his treatise: in terms of nineteenth-century medical thought, this implies that his brain is in

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a hyperstimulated state which is responsible for producing the apparition, and this is clearly the explanation to which Fenwick, as a doctor, subscribes. This well-known diagnosis is exemplified in a late eighteenthcentury medical treatise by Alexander Crichton: In every action of the mental faculties, the action of the arteries of the brain is increased ... the irritability of the blood-vessels of the brain ... are preternaturally stimulated ... by this increased quantity of blood, and a state of indirect debility of the brain follows .... As all mental perceptions, and their corresponding sensorial impressions become more vivid by repetition, and as all sensorial impressions capable of being transmitted to the irritable parts of the body are to be considered as stimuli to those parts; and further, as all irritable parts also become more disposed to action by repetition, and as action necessarily exhausts a great deal of the vital principle, we see the reason why all exertions of the mental faculties, when too long continued, or too violent, produce fatigue, and debilitate the corporeal part of the animal ... hence ... all the consequences of a debilitated fibre, and disordered state of nerves ensue .... This very dangerous state of mind is always increased, caeteris paribus, in proportion as the objects of study are few in number .... To many people it appears to be an inexplicable mystery how a person believes any thing to have a real existence which is not present to the external senses. This is in a considerable degree explained ... thus: that the figure of the impression which the vivid ideas produce on the brain is ... conveyed to the extremities of those nerves of external sense by which the object, had it been a real one, would have been naturally received. But when any impression is made upon that part of our nervous system, we always refer it, by a species of judgment derived from our experience, to something without us.17

I have deliberately quoted an example written at the end of the eighteenth century, partly because this explanation of apparitions became so well known that nineteenth-century writers tended to refer to it in passing without explaining the medical grounds on which it was based, but also because the date shows that this kind of medical explanation of the supernatural would have been as familiar to Bulwer-Lytton in the early 1840s, when he wrote Zanoni, as it was in 17

Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, 2 vols, London, 1798, II, 29-38.

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the early 1860s, when he wrote A Strange Story. What Crichton’s account illustrates is the close connection in nineteenth-century medical thought between the topic of apparitions (or hallucinations) and the circulation of the blood, particularly in relation to questions about the function of the blood in conveying appropriate nourishment to the different parts of the body. Crichton emphasizes the way in which intense and concentrated mental activity, of the sort involved in writing, leads to an increased flow of blood to the brain. This stimulates the brain’s “irritability”, or the strength and sensitivity of its nervous impulses, in a way which leads to an increase in the vividness of its ideas. Crichton points out that this process whereby the brain develops a propensity for greater activity is encouraged by repetition, which is why it is more likely to occur when “the objects of study are few in number”. This intense scrutiny of a limited topic, such as Fenwick is involved in when he composes his medical treatise, is dangerous to mental health, because the focussed activity involved exhausts the brain’s nervous strength (what Crichton refers to as “the vital principle”). The intense labour of writing makes the brain liable to a kind of repetitive strain injury which is manifested in a mental failure of control over ideas. One manifestation of this state is that it becomes impossible to stop thinking about the topic, a process which leads to a spiral of addiction, since the continued mental activity simply exhausts the brain’s strength even further and makes it even more impossible for it to resist the predominance of these ideas. That this is Fenwick’s state in relation to his materialistic physiological hypotheses is hinted at by Bulwer-Lytton in the introductory comment that composition of the treatise was “the sole occupation that had power and charm enough” to distract Fenwick from “the aching sense of void and loss” (103), and in the detail that after seeing the apparition, Fenwick goes on to write “till the lights waned in the grey of the dawn” (106). The other symptom of a “degree of excitement nearly approaching to phrenitis”,18 according to this medical account, are hallucinations. It is clear that Fenwick understands the apparition of Lilian in these terms, as a manifestation of an idea which has become so vivid, owing to the hyperstimulated state of the brain, that the mind mistakenly attributes external existence to it, confusing it 18

Ibid., 35.

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with those external impressions which would, in a normal physical state, be characterized by this superior vividness. Fenwick’s condition of over-stimulation of the brain contrasts with the condition of under-stimulation of the brain from which Lilian suffers as a result of the onset of puberty. Bulwer-Lytton implies that the visions which both characters experience are due to this disturbance in the circulation of blood to the brain. It is also possible to link the mesmeric fascination exercised on both Fenwick and Lilian by the uncanny figure of Margrave to this underlying medical cause. Margrave is characterized above all by his extraordinarily manifest health (122), and this suggests that we are meant to understand his mesmeric influence as consisting in the transmission of his vitality to others. This certainly seems to be the case for Fenwick, who finds his contacts with Margrave strangely reinvigorating (138), and whose later use of Margrave’s wand is clearly linked with an experience of vitality (371). The scene where Margrave throws a drawing room into uproar through his mesmerizing music also appears to indicate a connection between mesmeric influence and vitality (143-44), since it was widely accepted that the debilitating nature of life in modern society was responsible for sapping the vitality which members of primitive societies displayed19 and Margrave’s music is consistently described as “barbaric” or “savage” (137). The connection between mesmerism and vitality which is evident in A Strange Story helps to explain the narrative’s prominent refusal to clarify the status of its apparently supernatural events. This refusal parallels the ambiguity of mesmeric agency itself, poised between explanation in terms of a quasi-physical magnetic fluid and a psychosomatic explanation in terms of the effects of imagination. The medical context in which Bulwer-Lytton locates A Strange Story allows him to avoid committing himself to either one of these alternatives, because it suggests that they may be fundamentally identical: imagination cannot be simply opposed to physical causes as a source of mesmeric influence, in the way supporters of the rival hypotheses of Elliotson and Braid assumed, because imagination itself is a physical cause, or at least capable of being one. In terms of medical thinking at the time about the circulation of blood through 19 Charles Turner Thackrah, The Effects of Arts, Trades and Professions (1832), in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, eds Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, Oxford, 1998, 294.

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brain-tissues, undue activity of imagination would lead to a physical condition of congestion in the brain which the soothing influence of the mesmerist could ease, an explanation to which the known efficaciousness of mesmerism in cases of indigestion and menstrual problems would have lent support.20 The medical context makes it possible to interpret the mesmeric theme in A Strange Story and Zanoni as a figure for the development, and right use, of genius, since both mesmerism and genius consist in the ability of the imagination to exercise power over others. Great activity of imagination is closely connected to mental derangement in the medical account of obsession and hallucination that we have been examining in a way which echoes commonplaces about the nearness of genius to madness. Since imagination is the faculty that imparts vividness to the ideas it entertains, the price one pays for a strong imagination is liability to hallucination. Crichton makes this clear when he comments slightly later that “it is not wonderful that men of genius, who often confine their attention to one branch of study, should be more exposed to such illusions than any other class of people”.21 This connection becomes a commonplace in later writers such as John Abercrombie,22 whom Bulwer-Lytton cites in the footnotes to A Strange Story, and is also to be found in the lengthy account of Luther’s vision of the devil which Coleridge offers in The Friend.23 An equally frequent commonplace in these writers is the qualification that it is not seeing a hallucination that is indicative of insanity, but believing it to be real.24 Fenwick’s confident dismissal of the apparition’s reality is, in terms of this medical discourse, evidence of the strength of his will. Later on in the narrative, however, when it has become impossible for Fenwick not to believe in the supernatural, 20

John Elliotson, Numerous Cases of Surgical Operations without Pain in the Mesmeric State; with Remarks upon the Opposition of Many Members of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society and Others to the Reception of the Inestimable Blessings of Mesmerism, London, 1843, 13. 21 Crichton, II, 65. 22 John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth, 12th edn, London, 1846, 100-101; Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery, London, 1841, 80; Robert MacNish, The Philosophy of Sleep, Glasgow, 1830, 143. 23 S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E Rooke, Princeton, 1969, II, 115-20. 24 Abercrombie, 46-47.

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Bulwer-Lytton uses his mouthpiece, Faber, to question whether believing in apparitions can straightforwardly be equated with insanity (295-96). The role played by medical theories of “the vital principle” to which Alexander Crichton alludes, is also crucial to an understanding of A Strange Story. Vitalism, the dominant early nineteenth-century biological account of the nature of life, represents a common ground between mesmerism and the account of hallucination and mental excitement which we have been examining; it also constitutes the shared field of reference of A Strange Story and Zanoni, as is shown by the centrality of the elixir of life to the plots of both novels. There are important parallels between the mesmeric controversy and the early nineteenth-century vitalism debate which have only been glancingly referred to by commentators.25 The politics both of mesmerism and of vitalism turn on the question of what exact status is to be accorded to a force that is conceptualized as a “fluid” – the “magnetic fluid” in the case of mesmerism, in the case of vitalism the eponymous “vitality” or “vital principle”, which John Abernethy compared to electricity.26 In both cases, the conceptualization in terms of a “fluid” could imply the material nature of the phenomenon, and the debate is about whether the inference of materiality is justified or not. In the case of mesmerism, for example, it is evident that the experiments which were conducted by John Elliotson had the aim of demonstrating the material nature of the “magnetic fluid”. Elliotson was discredited when the metals he was using to induce mesmeric phenomena in his star patients were substituted without his knowledge, and without making any difference to the phenomena being induced, something which showed that the phenomena could not have had a material cause.27 One reason for the popularity of James Braid’s redescription of mesmeric phenomena in terms of the new concept of hypnotism was probably the way it avoided quasimaterial explanations of the magnetic fluid kind.28 Bulwer-Lytton himself seems to have preferred Braid’s account, since he stresses the role played by “imagination” in the mesmeric phenomena described in 25 Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, Cambridge, 2001, 35-36. 26 John Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, London, 1825, 40-44. 27 Winter, 98. 28 Ibid., 184-85.

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A Strange Story (420-21). The parallel between debates about mesmerism and vitalism informs A Strange Story on a structural level, in that the novel exploits the persistent ambiguity about whether these forces can truly be said to be immaterial (and hence, evidence for the existence of the soul) or whether they are, ultimately, material in nature. This sort of hesitation between material and supernatural modes of explanation is present to a very marked degree in one of the sources on biology cited by Bulwer-Lytton in the footnotes to A Strange Story, Müller’s Physiology of the Senses. Müller presents his reader with a very full description of the alternative hypotheses of immaterialism and pantheistic materialism, while refusing to indicate a preference, in effect inviting his reader to choose between them. This strategy could be compared to the open-ended and unresolved quality of the dialogues between Fenwick and Faber.29 In addition to this striking similarity on a formal level, there was also, I would suggest, a very substantial overlap in content between the vitalism and mesmerism debates. This can be seen, for example, in Elliotson’s experiments in using mesmeric subjects to diagnose patients: what Elliotson seems to have expected is that those in a “magnetized” state would be especially attuned to variations in the “vital force” of other patients.30 The overlap between vitalism and mesmerism is also expressed in the widespread tendency, noted by Winter, to identify electricity and magnetism with each other even before Faraday’s discovery of electro-magnetism.31 This identification (apparent also in the popularity of electro-biology) seems to express a belief that the vital force (identified, as we have seen, with electricity) is the same as the magnetic force. This was certainly true of Balzac, whose ideas about the “vital force”, as Maria Tatar notes, were closely linked to his belief in “magnetism”.32 This equation between the power of mesmerism and the power of the vital principle is evident in Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. The fascination which in A Strange Story the character of Margrave exerts on all who come near him is attributed by Fenwick to “the contagious 29

J. Müller, The Physiology of the Senses, Voice, and Muscular Motion, trans. William Baly, London, 1848, 1338-340. 30 Winter, 99-100. 31 Ibid., 120. 32 Tatar, 168-70.

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vitality of that rarest of all gifts in highly-civilized circles – perfect health” (122), a vitality which, according to Sir Philip Derval, is owing to Margrave’s consumption of the elixir of life (243). Similarly, in Zanoni supernatural powers are also associated with drinking the elixir of life. When, at different points in the novel, Glyndon and Viola inhale the fumes of the elixir, they become endowed with the kind of preternaturally heightened senses which Elliotson expected to find in his mesmerized subjects,33 and they both become mesmerically aware, through sympathy, of events that are occurring elsewhere (25556; 262-63; 355-57). There is yet a further overlap between the theoretical bases of early nineteenth-century medicine and mesmerism, which, as we shall see, is important in Zanoni. We have already noted in Crichton’s account of over stimulation of the brain his use of the term “irritability” to refer to a state of physical responsiveness whose provocation exhausts “the vital principle”. Crichton’s use of this term alludes to the medical theory known as Brunonianism, according to which the cause of all diseases could be referred to a condition either of over- or understimulation of the nerves, and treated accordingly with stimulants of varying degrees of strength. Although Brunonianism was a radical position in the 1780s and 1790s, during the early nineteenth century it became widely influential in mainstream medical practice.34 Both mesmerism and Brunonianism reduced the causes of disease to a single dimension, the presence or absence either of the magnetic fluid or of excitement. Some of the practices associated with mesmerism, such as stroking the body,35 could also be interpreted from a Brunonian perspective as inducing “excitement”. Conversely, the favourite Brunonian “stimulants” of opium or alcohol36 would also have increased the mesmeric “suggestibility” of subjects,37 who were in any case thought to belong to a particular physical type who would have corresponded to a Brunonian diagnosis of nervous debility brought on by over-stimulation.38 There is some evidence of a 33 34

Winter, 99-100. Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats, New York, 1991, 70-

71.

35 36 37 38

Winter, 2. Richardson, 50-54. Ibid., 142-44. Winter, 64, 67.

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connection between mesmerism and Brunonian thinking in Elliotson’s comment that mesmerism could aid not only the “female functions” but also “digestion”.39 Elliotson appears to regard mesmerism in Brunonian terms, as a “stimulant” to bodily organs. A connection between Brunonianism and ideas about mesmeric trance is also perhaps apparent in the later nineteenth-century view that chronic constipation was an occupational hazard for mediums,40 and in the accusation levelled against Elliotson that mesmerism was “a perverse manipulation of men’s appetites for intellectual excitement”.41 The identification of mesmerism with vitalism and Brunonianism I am proposing furnishes a perspective from which the preoccupations of Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni can be seen to be remarkably similar to those he expressed twenty years later in A Strange Story. A central subject of both novels, in line with Bulwer-Lytton’s general predilection for the Bildungsroman, is the education of genius. Mesmeric qualities or attributes function as a kind of synecdoche for genius in both novels, because Bulwer-Lytton understands both genius and mesmerism as manifestations of the vital principle. The reasons for Bulwer-Lytton’s identification of genius and mesmerism may become clearer if we remember it was widely believed in the nineteenth century that abstract thinking sapped the body’s resistance to such a degree that large reserves of physical strength were required to accomplish any very extended piece of intellectual work. We have already seen an example of this kind of attitude in Crichton’s concern that the physical exertions which writing requires of the brain have the potential to induce a state of “debility” which can lead to madness. Genius, then, no less than mesmerism, is closely related in nineteenth-century thought to the quantity of vital force possessed by the body. From this perspective, the episode we have already examined in which Fenwick sees the apparition of Lilian becomes central to the interpretation not only of A Strange Story but also of Zanoni. The fact that Fenwick sees the apparition is one of the things that establishes his status as a man of genius, given that it was a commonplace in the popular medical literature to which we have referred that geniuses 39

Elliotson, 13. Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society, Basingstoke, 1992, 115. 41 Winter, 101. 40

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were peculiarly subject to this kind of hallucination. The episode shows that despite his materialism, Fenwick’s character is distinguished by that “power of the mind over the senses” in which Bulwer-Lytton found the characteristic preoccupation of nineteenthcentury philosophy to consist.42 The bodily vigour which Fenwick, as a man, possesses (and which enables him, for example, to continue writing his treatise long into the night) is thus established by Bulwer-Lytton as subservient to Fenwick’s mind, and not existing for its own sake only. This contrasts with the soulless Margrave, who, as Faber comments in the first of his dialogues with Fenwick, is an image of what Fenwick himself would be were his materialistic medical theory true (295). We learn early on in the novel that despite Fenwick’s “rare muscular force” his health is kept “below the par of keen enjoyment” by his “mental labours, and the anxiety which is inseparable from the conscientious responsibilities of the medical profession” (20). Margrave, on the other hand, enjoys “that health which is in itself the most exquisite luxury”, health of a kind which “cannot be enjoyed by those who overwork the brain” (122), but this is accompanied by what Fenwick perceives as a deficiency in Margrave of “that mysterious something which is needed to keep our faculties, however severally brilliant, harmoniously linked together” (135-36). The desultory nature of Margrave’s conversation indicates the absence of a soul which, as Fenwick perceives slightly later in the mesmeric vision induced by Sir Philip Derval, “the future impels onward” (189). This is contrasted with the “concentrated will” displayed by Margrave’s earlier mortal incarnation as Louis Grayle (236). As the Eastern sage Haroun of Aleppo comments in the manuscript by Sir Philip Derval that Fenwick reads after his murder, such a creature as Margrave has become “of itself could not design, invent, complete” (241), which is why Margrave seeks Fenwick’s help in discovering how to make the elixir of life (he has already consumed Haroun’s store, and does not know the recipe). What Margrave lacks is the kind of will which Fenwick displays, and of which his medical treatise is a manifestation (308). This is signalled by Margrave’s recurrent gesture of passing his hand over his forehead (148), and by his inability to “argue long at a stretch” (130) 42

Bulwer-Lytton, in Brown, 167.

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because his “brain is fatigued” (148). This shows his incapacity for the kind of willed intellectual effort of which we have seen Fenwick capable. Margrave himself seems half-aware of this deficiency when he comments at one point, having “swept his hand over his brow”, “I wonder what it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a dim reminiscence” (163-64). It is made clear by Sir Philip Derval’s manuscript that although Margrave’s soullessness renders his nature merely “animal”, he still benefits from “the fragmentary memories of a pristine intelligence which no mind, unaided by the presence of soul, could have originally compassed” (244), so that the will to knowledge which Fenwick displays can be regarded, as Julius Faber suggests, as evidence of his soul (423-24). The connection Bulwer-Lytton establishes between mental cultivation and that power of the immaterial soul over the material faculties of the mind which is expressed in will reflects common Victorian attitudes towards the will, as set out in the account of education in John Abercrombie’s Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, which Bulwer-Lytton gives a reference to (and praises highly) in a footnote. Abercrombie lays great stress on “the cultivation of habits of attention, or of intense application of the mind to whatever is at the time its more immediate object of pursuit”.43 The implication of Abercrombie’s remarks is that the exercise of will is all-important in studying, in that the powers of the mind require to be directed: Abercrombie contrasts this with “habits of irregular and desultory application, which even intellectual persons are apt to fall into”, exactly the kind of desultoriness which Margrave displays. The benefit of willed application to study for Abercrombie is the development of an accurate memory, gained through “the habits of correct association” gained through “the constant practice of tracing the relation between new facts and others with which we are previously acquainted; and of referring facts to principles which they are calculated to illustrate”.44 Margrave, predictably, lacks this kind of systematic memory. Fenwick comments, “his power of memory in some things seemed prodigious, but when examined it was seldom accurate; it could apprehend, but did not hold together with a binding grasp what metaphysicians call ‘complex ideas’” (138). The contrast between Margrave and Fenwick, then, can be 43 44

Abercrombie, 102. Ibid., 103.

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regarded as making a point about the nature of education: Fenwick is a man of genius, despite his materialism, because of his exemplary power of will. A similar argument can be made about the character of Lilian in A Strange Story, who, as Fenwick comments in a dialogue with Faber late in the novel, is herself a kind of genius (426). This is evidenced in her Wordsworthian ability to draw forth “from outward forms of beauty ... the covert types, lending to things the most familiar exquisite meanings unconceived before” (370).45 Bulwer-Lytton’s portrayal of Lilian reflects the Victorian assumption that women do not possess the bodily strength which would enable them to withstand the physical demands of intellectual exertion.46 Lilian spends most of the novel in a physically feeble or mentally alienated condition because of her proneness to daydreaming, and related tendency to mesmeric visionary states. This reflects attitudes to mesmerism, which was thought to “weaken the intellect”,47 presumably because it involved an abdication of will on the part of the mesmeric subject. Tellingly, Lilian develops the same gesture as Margrave, of passing her hand over her brow, when she is under his mesmeric influence (274). Lilian’s dreaminess also reflects the medical explanation of hallucination which we have examined: Crichton comments that “men who are too much addicted to the exercise of that kind of fiction which is necessary in the composition of what are called works of the imagination, often pass altogether from the real world into an ideal one, where they take the inspirations of fancy for existing form, and illusions for real substance”.48 Lilian’s propensity to reverie seems to have weakened her physical stamina in the same kind of way – Margrave comments that the mesmeric visions of the ancient Delphic “Pythonesses”, or seeresses (a type with which Lilian is identified) quickly wore out their physical strength and killed them (147-48). Lilian, according to Faber, should have resisted her propensity to daydreaming through an act of will, and directed her attention to practical household affairs (425-26).49 Diana Basham has drawn attention to the link between mesmerism and Victorian ideas about menstruation, apparent in the importance 45 46 47 48 49

Cf. Sarah Ellis, The Women of England, London, 1839, 28-32. Cf. Basham, 114 Winter, 131; Kaplan, 17-20. Crichton, II, 37. Cf. B. L. K. “Imagination”, The Monthly Packet, I (1866), 469-74; 472-73.

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that was attached to the fact that the O’Keys, Elliotson’s chief mesmeric subjects, had never menstruated.50 As Basham points out, menstruation forms the subtext for Bulwer-Lytton’s portrayal of Lilian, given that she is portrayed during the novel as developing from girlhood to womanhood, and that daydreaming was seen by Victorians as a characteristically menstrual malady.51 The medical context to ideas about hallucination and mesmerism can help to explain this connection: Liebig’s Organic Chemistry, another of Bulwer-Lytton’s footnoted sources in A Strange Story, highlights the “peculiar condition of a more intense vegetative life” which enables reproduction in the female, an “excess of production” which menstruation discharges until pregnancy, when “every drop of the superabundant blood goes to produce an organism like that of the mother”.52 As Liebig’s reference to blood indicates, he conceives of the process of menstruation as concentrating the “vital principle” in the womb: this excess of “vital force” is what enables the mother to confer vitality on the embryo.53 Given that early nineteenth-century doctors conceived of the vital principle as subject to a restricted economy (as illustrated by Crichton’s remarks about its exhaustion through mental activity), Lilian’s increased proneness to reverie at the time the novel begins (97-98) can be explained as the effect of her approach to menstruation. The “vital principle” is beginning to be concentrated in her womb in a way that leads to a Brunonian state of nervous debility (her body has less vitality to spare for her brain) which makes her less able to control her daydreaming and results in a vicious spiral of mental exhaustion, since this species of mental abstraction is also peculiarly taxing on the brain. The connection I have been suggesting between vitalism, mesmerism and ideas about the relationship of genius to bodily strength enables us to interpret A Strange Story as a kind of Bildungsroman in which the development of the characters of Fenwick and Lilian during the narrative leads to an ideal marriage which is characterized by a quasi-mesmeric attraction and

50

Winter, 69. Basham, 7-8; 50. 52 Justus Liebig, Animal Chemistry, or Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Physiology and Pathology, trans. William Gregory, London, 1842, 39. 53 Ibid., 40. 51

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complementarity between the partners (499).54 The same kind of interpretation can be applied to Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (with the difference, of course, that the ending is tragic, as husband and wife, Zanoni and Viola, end up dying simultaneously as a result of the mysterious mesmeric affinity between them) (462-66). Although Zanoni, like Margrave, is an immortal who has drunk the elixir of life, he chooses to sacrifice his immortality, and eventually his life, for love of Viola. Just as Fenwick’s (wrongly-directed) genius must be tamed, by his acceptance of the existence of the soul, in order for him to become a fit partner for Lilian, so too Zanoni is led into a everdeeper loving union with his wife in which genius, as represented by the immortality which is its concomitant in Bulwer-Lytton’s narrative, comes to seem an unattractive prospect. One indication that Zanoni can be read as a novel about the development and, perhaps, necessary renunciation of genius comes in the first dialogue between Zanoni and his immortal and passionless mentor, Mejnour. Although members of the occult order to which Zanoni and Mejnour belong postpone death by drinking the elixir of life, they can also voluntarily choose to die. Zanoni and Mejnour are the last surviving members of the order, because all the others have already made this choice, as Zanoni eventually does (441-42). Zanoni calls into question Mejnour’s continued attempts to recruit new members, such as the artist Glyndon: “And still, then, Mejnour, you cherish the desire to recreate our order, limited now to ourselves alone, by new converts and allies; surely – surely – thy experience might have taught thee, that scarcely once in a thousand years is born the being who can pass through the horrible gates that lead into the worlds beyond. Is not thy path already strewed with thy victims? ....” “Nay,” answered Mejnour; “have I not had success to counterbalance failure? And can I forego this lofty and august hope, worthy alone of our high condition – the hope to form a mighty and numerous race with a force and power sufficient to permit them to acknowledge to mankind their majestic conquests and dominion ... a race that may proceed, in their deathless destinies, from stage to stage of celestial glory, and rank at last amongst the nearest ministrants and agents gathered round the Throne of Thrones? What matter a thousand victims for one convert to our band?” (209-10) 54

Cf. Winter, 194.

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Mejnour’s claim that success in recruiting others to their immortal race would benefit the whole of humanity, coupled with an authorial insistence on “Nature’s first and imperishable, and most lovely, and most noble Law – THE INEQUALITY BETWEEN MAN AND MAN!” (453), parallels Coleridge’s account in the Biographia Literaria of the elevating and educative effects of individual genius on the national community of which it is part.55 This suggests that the fantastic narrative of Zanoni can be read typologically, in a similar way to A Strange Story, as a kind of allegory of the education and right use of genius. The link is reinforced by Zanoni’s description of the horrors that await the aspirant for initiation. The reason Zanoni emphasizes to Mejnour the potentially damaging effects of attempted initiation into their occult order is because consumption of the elixir of life, which that initiation involves, exposes the aspirant to a confrontation with “the Dweller of the Threshold”, which is described as quasi-material in nature (262-63). The malign influence of this being, however, consists almost entirely in the horror it inspires: Glyndon, who is exposed to it as a consequence of his premature attempt to become an initiate, eventually learns that if he can face it without fear, the Dweller fades away (421-22). Crichton’s physiological account of mental processes can help to explain the role played by this fearsome “Dweller of the Threshold”. The contexts in which Bulwer-Lytton introduces discussions of the nature of the “Dweller of the Threshold” indicate, to a reader familiar with the medical account of the nature of apparitions we have been examining in this essay, that it can be interpreted as an apparition. Mejnour, for example, explicitly links it to “belief in apparitions and spectres” (261), and part of Glyndon’s “initiatory labours” for confronting it consists in familiarizing himself with “the simple means by which the wildest cheats of the imagination can be formed” (263). When Glyndon later asks Zanoni why he has been exposed to the horrors of the Dweller, Zanoni replies: Vain man! look to the commonest elements of the common learning. Can every tyro at his mere wish and will become the master? – can the student, when he has bought his Euclid, become a Newton? (419) 55

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds James Engell and W Jackson Bate, 2 vols, Princeton, 1983, I, 86n.

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The response which, though it may seem off the point, in fact alludes to the kind of account we have seen in Crichton, of how intense study can produce hallucinations. Glyndon is saved from the Dweller by his ability to face it without fear, in a way which parallels the point repeatedly made in the popular medical literature, that apparitions can be contemplated without ill effects, provided they are not believed to be real (since a belief in their reality simply reinforces the already excessive ideational vividness which causes hallucination and enables it to continue to dominate the mind, in a process which leads eventually to mental derangement).56 The significance of the “Dweller of the Threshold”, as standing for the kind of corporeally induced apparitions that Crichton and other medical writers had discussed, is also apparent from the circumstances in which it appears to the characters. Glyndon’s first sight of it comes while, inspired by his inhalation of the elixir of life, he is sketching on a wall a design which “promises renown to genius”. The scenario recalls the usual descriptions of hallucination due to mental overstrain, since the narrator tells us “hour after hour has gone ... night sees thee yet at thy labour” (312). In this episode we also see the intimate connection in Zanoni between the vital principle and genius, since Glyndon’s sketching echoes a previous bout of painting before he inhaled the elixir, which he had to abandon owing to fatigue (153-54). The Dweller continues to appear to Glyndon “whenever the soul would aspire, whenever the imagination kindled to the loftier ends”, and he can only escape from it by immersing himself in “that animal existence which we share with the brutes” (326), a Byronic pattern of behaviour which leads to a comic episode with Mervale, who is the incarnation of “common sense” (124). When Glyndon confides to his sister Adela that he is continually haunted by the Dweller, she too begins to see it and dies of nervous debility brought on by her lively imagination – something which reflects her greater physical weakness as a woman (330-33). Viola too sees the Dweller of the Threshold at one point, both when she is in a mesmeric trance brought about by inhaling the elixir of life and, horrifyingly, just after she wakens from this trance, when she finds herself by her child’s cradle, as she had dreamt herself to be, with “all as that trance had seen it, and, vanishing into air, even that dark formless Thing!” (357). Bulwer-Lytton’s 56

Crichton, II, 35-39.

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description here echoes remarks by Coleridge about how nightmare images acquire the status of “reality” through association with external objects.57 Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, then, consistently alludes to the medical discussions of the causes of hallucination which are explicitly referenced in A Strange Story, and shares that novel’s identification of mesmerism with vitalism. This medical context forms the basis for the fairly conservative gender politics of both novels, in a way that anticipates Bulwer-Lytton’s late work of science fiction, The Coming Race (1871). Robert Wolff has drawn attention to the fact that the name of the mysterious quasi-electrical power wielded by the race of Amazonian women which the narrator encounters, “vril”, alludes to virility.58 In the context of the vitalist power wielded by the male magicians of Zanoni and A Strange Story we can see that this is yet another version of the equation between mesmerism and a mystified, essentially masculine force of character which underlies the gender typology of both novels. Mesmeric influence, like genius, is attained in Zanoni by those characters who learn not to fear the Dweller of the Threshold, and the examples of Viola and Adela show that this is something of which women are incapable. Margrave in A Strange Story, on the other hand, is an example of this mesmeric masculine power gone wrong: as the character of the Foreign Professor sardonically comments, in Bulwer-Lytton’s unpublished supplementary chapter, Margrave, far from being a supernatural “prodigy”, is entirely representative of the soulless nature of contemporary manhood.59

57 The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols, Princeton, 1957, III, 4046. 58 Wolff, 328-31. 59 Brown, 171.

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MESMERISM AND THE ELECTRIC AGE: FROM POE TO EDISON

ANTHONY ENNS

With the rapid growth of information technologies and new developments in brain science in the late twentieth century, scientists and engineers have suggested that our models for human consciousness are quickly merging with those of machines, which has resulted in various predictions concerning the possibility of artificial intelligence or the potential to download human personalities into computers.1 This climate of prediction, which ranges from the utopian claims of bodily liberation and immortality to fatalistic visions of the end of humanity, seems to have resulted in a renewed interest among academics to historicize the cultural impact of electric media technologies and examine the ways in which earlier medial shifts affected our notions of consciousness and the body. The contemporary crisis of embodiment, therefore, can be seen as an attempt to resituate and re-emphasize bodily presence and individual autonomy at a time when the concept of the liberal humanist subject no longer seems feasible and the body itself appears to be increasingly displaced by pure information.2 Mesmerism is rarely included in these discussions because its practice is typically dated as being prior to the rise of electric media, and perhaps it appears to us today as a marginalized movement within medical history rather than part of the development of communications technologies and cybernetics. The philosophical foundations of mesmerism are so dated that they may also seem far removed from the modern age – Mesmer’s notion of animal magnetism, for example, seems to have more in common with Paracelsus than Benjamin Franklin. John Durham Peters argues, 1 See, for example, Hans P. Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Cambridge: MA, 1988. 2 For an extended discussion, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago, 1999.

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however, that mesmerism and modern communication technologies are both part of “a common cultural project: electric connection between distant individuals”.3 While the rapport between mesmerists and patients may be more familiar to modern readers as a precursor to hypnotism, it is important to remember that this connection was inspired by the mysterious force of electricity itself, and it was not necessary for the mesmerist and the patient to be in physical proximity to one another. In a discussion of “distant healing”, for example, Alex Owen notes that one mesmeric healer in London was even capable of exercising her influence as far away as Australia.4 Peters thus claims that the “telegraph … fits precisely into the lineage of Augustine, the angels, and Mesmer: communication without embodiment, contact achieved by the sharing of spiritual (electric) fluids”.5 Although the philosophical foundations of mesmerism may seem fantastic and implausible by today’s standards, the telegraph seemed equally as fantastic in 1842, when a congressman from Tennessee mockingly voted that half of the funds allocated for Morse’s invention be spent instead on research in mesmerism.6 Mesmerism was thus clearly linked to the invention of telegraphy in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century, as they were both part of a more widespread fantasy of pure communication between minds. This fantasy was based on a desire to transcend the physical body, which was increasingly seen as flawed, limited, and spatially confined, and mesmerism is therefore particularly relevant to current debates about the disembodying effects of contemporary information technologies, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, which claim to enable the meeting of minds in cyberspace. Alison Winter similarly argues that mesmerism was the language through which people attempted to understand the effects of modernity and the rapid transformations taking place during the nineteenth century: “However people chose to characterize and to value the ‘new and might power’ drawing them into the ‘new state,’ 3

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: The History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago, 2000, 94. 4 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, Philadelphia, 1990, 119. 5 Peters, 139. 6 Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in NineteenthCentury America, Boston, 1989, 4-5.

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the language of visions, mental forces, dreams, and somnambulism provided a medium to express it.”7 Winter adds that the practice of mesmerism “likened the mind and brain to an electric machine”, and thus it illustrates the transformation of the body itself into a media technology. This transformation became most vivid when the practice of mesmerism was combined with the science of phrenology: Phrenological examinations involved tactile contact, as trained individuals felt the contours of the skull to “read” social attributes. Mesmerists manipulated the skull, too, but with more ambitious intent. They wanted to “excite” particular organs. When mesmerists touched the place on a subject’s skull corresponding to a particular phrenological organ, the entranced person manifested the appropriate sentiments.

This practice, which was known as “phreno-mesmerism”, thus employed the skull as a device for storing information in discrete units, which could be accessed by the mesmerist just as one accesses a phonograph recording.8 Mesmerism also introduced new modes of visual perception, which illustrate the relationship between optical technologies and the emergence of modernity. Jonathan Crary, for example, argues that mesmerism and hypnotism were indicative of modernist modes of perception because they were based on the importance of attention: “Attention implied an inevitable fragmentation of a visual field in which the unified and homogeneous coherence of classical models of vision was impossible.” In contrast to Frankfurt School critics, who conceived of the modernist spectator as essentially distracted, Crary adds that distraction was actually a product of attention: “modern distraction was not a disruption of stable or ‘natural’ kinds of sustained, value-laden perception that had existed for centuries but was an effect, and in many cases a constituent element, of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects.”9 James Braid’s discovery that people fall into a trance state after concentrating on the same point for an extended period of time provides Crary with a 7

Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998,

19.

8

Ibid., 117. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge: MA, 1999, 24, 49. 9

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perfect illustration of this interplay between attention and distraction, and notion of the mesmerized patient as passive and attentive to the controlling gaze of the mesmerizer similarly illustrates his claim that “the perceiving body was deployed and made productive and orderly” through “the new imperatives of attentiveness”. Mesmerism’s emphasis on visuality is thus also related to the development of optical media, such as film and television, which control and distract the masses by grabbing and holding their attention, which once again suggests the potential dissolution of the subject: Attention within modernity is constituted by ... forms of exteriority, not the intentionality of an autonomous subject. Rather than a faculty of some already formed subject, it is a sign, not so much of the subject’s disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality.10

By illustrating the dream of pure communication between minds across vast distances, the merging of consciousness and electric machines, and the questioning of individual autonomy, mesmerism was clearly engaged in a radical reconfiguration of the divisions between mind and body, human and machine, and materiality and immateriality. This historical shift has typically been described as a product of the electric media environment, but this essay argues that mesmerism actually prefigured the effects of electric media. The paradox of this shift is that while it was based on a discorporative fantasy of pure communication, it also expressed a simultaneous fantasy of corporeality, in which previously immaterial phenomena, such as spirits and “sentiments” were endowed with a material, physical presence. In other words, rather than conceiving of consciousness and the body in terms of the Cartesian mind/body split, mesmerism introduced a new conception of materiality, which suggested that the body and consciousness were both bound together and material. Mesmerism provides an ideal starting point for understanding the emergence of a strange new kind of embodiment in the electric age. I have chosen to focus my discussion primarily on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Alva Edison. Although these two figures had radically different careers, and their writings on this 10

Ibid., 22-23, 45.

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subject were separated by more than seventy-five years, they both constructed narratives of pure communication founded on similar notions of materiality and consciousness, and these similarities illustrate the persistence of a mesmeric logic well into the twentieth century. Although Poe’s mesmeric tales were essentially literary, it is also significant that these works were written in the style of scientific texts and published in scientific journals, such as the London Popular Record of Modern Science and The American Phrenological Journal. Poe even referred to one of these tales, “Mesmeric Revelation”, as an “essay” or “article” rather than a story.11 Although Poe’s intentions remain somewhat ambiguous, leading some critics to suggest that he may have actually attempted to perpetrate a literary hoax, it is important to acknowledge that these works were published and received as legitimate contributions to the field of science, and thus they offer insight into the assumptions and expectations of the scientific community. Poe’s work also provides a perfect illustration of the logic of mesmerism because he was one of the few American writers to employ Mesmer’s original notion of animal magnetism instead of the more common practice of hypnotism. As Doris Falk points out, Poe did not conceive of mesmerism as “a force of attraction between minds and wills”, but rather he saw it “as an amoral force operating within the mind and body, linking consciousness and ‘physique,’ animating both”.12 The basis of this merging of mind and body was a theory that the soul survives death in the form of “unparticled matter”,13 or particles which are material yet invisible. This theory bears a striking resemblance to Edison’s notion that personality is composed of infinitesimally small “director” particles,14 which was the basis for his attempts to build a machine to speak with the dead in the early 1920s. The similarities between these two theories show that Poe and Edison both conceived of the mind and body as inextricably bound together and material. 11 Thomas Ollive Mabbott, “Mesmeric Revelation”, in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols, Cambridge: MA, 1969-1978, III, 1025. 12 Doris V. Falk, “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism”, PMLA, LXXXIV (1969), 537. 13 Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation”, in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols, New York, 1902, V, 251. 14 A. D. Rothman, “Mr Edison’s ‘Life Units’”, New York Times, 23 January 1921, see 7, 1.

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Poe featured mesmerism in three stories written between 1844 and 1845. The first, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844),15 concerns a man named Augustus Bedloe, the patient of a mesmerist named Dr Templeton. According to the narrator, the mesmeric rapport between them is so potent that “sleep was brought about almost instantaneously by the mere volition of the operator, even when the invalid was unaware of his presence” (165). At the beginning of the story, Bedloe returns from one of his daily walks in the mountains outside Charlottesville and tells the narrator and Templeton a remarkable story in which he was somehow transported to “an Eastern-looking city” (169), where he was caught in a skirmish between British soldiers and a group of Indians. Bedloe then reports something impossible: he claims that he was struck by an arrow and killed. At this point, he pauses, unable to explain how it was that he experienced death. He can only remember that “there seemed to pass a violent and sudden shock through my soul, as if of electricity”. Bedloe then describes an out-of-body experience, in which he saw his own corpse lying dead on the ground before him and felt himself floating through the air: “Volition I had none, but appeared to be impelled into motion.” Bedloe eventually floated back to the mountains from which he had begun and felt another electric shock, “as of a galvanic battery” (173). He then became his old self and returned home to tell his story. Templeton responds to this amazing tale by revealing that while Bedloe was on his walk, he was writing a description of precisely the same events Bedloe described, which was an account of how his old friend, Mr Oldeb, was killed. In the end, however, the mesmerist cannot explain what happened; he merely states enigmatically that the “soul of the man of to-day is upon the verge of some stupendous psychal discoveries” (174). The mesmeric principles Poe employed in this story would have been considered entirely accurate at the time, including the close mesmeric bond between Bedloe and Templeton and the practice of mesmerism at a distance. The repetition of electric shocks also emphasizes the connection between mesmerism and the dream of electrical communication: electricity promised to enable the pure communication between minds across vast distances, just as Bedloe’s 15

Poe, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, in The Complete Works, V.

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and Templeton’s minds were joined and could communicate without bodily exertion. This dream was based on the notion that electricity and consciousness were inextricably linked, which is a recurring motif in Poe’s work. In his prose poem “Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe”, for example, Poe offers the following explanation for the connection between electricity and consciousness: “To electricity ... we may not be wrong in referring the various physical appearances of light, heat and magnetism; but far less shall we be liable to err in attributing to this strictly spiritual principle the more important phaenomena of vitality, consciousness and Thought.”16 This concept is clearly illustrated in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, where the transfer of thoughts from mesmerist to patient is manifest in the form of electricity, and where the patient’s own transitions into different states of consciousness are generated by a series of electric shocks. Poe emphasizes the power of electrical communication between minds by contrasting it with Bedloe’s inability to articulate his experience verbally. Bedloe attempts to describe the feeling of death, for example, but all he can say is: “I struggled – I gasped – I died” (172), after which he “hesitated, trembled, became fearfully pallid, and remained silent” (173). At the same time, the mesmeric rapport between Templeton and Bedloe allows Templeton to communicate the full sensory experience of Oldeb’s death to Bedloe, and this communication is so vivid that Bedloe is unable to distinguish the sensations of his own body from those of Oldeb’s. Mesmerism thus functions here as a precursor to multimedia technologies and virtual reality, which promise to transform all sensory experience into recordable bits of information. Poe further emphasizes the power of electrical communication by contrasting mesmerism to various essentially ineffectual writing technologies. Oldeb’s death is conveyed far more vividly to Bedloe, for example, than it would be to Templeton’s readers, and it is this distinction between the electrical and the typographical which seems to be emphasized in the story’s conclusion, when the narrator reads Bedloe’s obituary in the paper. According to the obituary, Bedloe was suffering from a fever, for which leeches were applied to his temple, but he was killed when a “venomous vermicular sangsue” (176) was 16

Poe, “Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe”, in The Complete Works, XVI, 213.

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applied by mistake. Falk points out that this explanation suggests the possibility that Bedloe was actually killed by one of the arrows that killed Oldeb, which he had earlier described as resembling “the body of a creeping serpent” (172).17 In other words, the rapport between Templeton and Bedloe was so powerful that it was not only able to communicate the experience of death, but it was also able to kill. The obituary also contains a typographical error, however, because Bedloe’s name is mistakenly spelled “Bedlo” (175). This error not only transforms Bedloe’s name into a more perfect anagram of Oldeb, but it also draws attention to the newspaper itself as essentially flawed and limited. Not only is the newspaper capable of printing false information, but its ability to merge the characters of Bedloe and Oldeb is shown to be limited to the arrangement of letters on the page, whereas mesmerism enables a complete merging of consciousness. Therefore, in contrast to these flawed writing technologies, Templeton seems to have found a more perfect medium in the form of Bedloe himself, whose body – like an electrical machine – provides a more accurate method of receiving and storing information. Poe’s story thus illustrates Winter’s claim that mesmerism transforms the subject into a media technology by blurring the line between body and consciousness. The second story, “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), provides more background information about mesmerism and its effects. The narrator explains that the state of being mesmerized is very close to the state of death, and that “while in this state, the person so impressed ... perceives, with keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs” (241). The narrator also reports that he has been mesmerizing a patient named Mr Vankirk in order to help him control the pain of his illness, and that Vankirk has asked to be mesmerized in order to discover the truth about the immortality of the soul. Vankirk reports that he has been sceptical about this subject for some time, and his studies have failed to convince him that the soul is immortal:

17

Falk, 543.

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I need not tell you how sceptical I have hitherto been on the topic of the soul’s immortality .… All attempts at logical inquiry resulted, indeed, in leaving me more sceptical than before. (242-43)

Vankirk adds, however, that he hopes to find the answer while mesmerized because in this state his powers of “ratiocination” (243) are enhanced. The narrator agrees to assist him, and what follows is an interview during which the narrator asks Vankirk a series of questions about the soul, the universe, death, and the body. At the end of the story, however, the narrator notices a “singular expression” on Vankirk’s face, and after reviving him the narrator discovers that Vankirk has died. By examining the state of his corpse, the narrator concludes that Vankirk must have been dead for some time already, which prompts him to ask the question which is the conclusion of the story: “Had the sleep-waker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of the shadows?” (254). This story was the first of Poe’s mesmeric tales to be presented as a legitimate scientific study, and thus it replaced a more traditional plot with a question-and-answer structure. These types of mesmeric experiments were not uncommon at the time. One of the most famous records of mesmeric revelations, for example, was Justinus Kerner’s book on Friederike Hauffe, a woman known as “The Seeress of Prevorst”.18 Like Vankirk, Hauffe remained in a deathlike state while mesmerized, and she claimed to have special powers of perception that enabled her to discover remarkable truths about the nature of the universe and the spirit world, which Kerner faithfully transcribed. Although this type of mesmeric rapport closely resembles the act of taking dictation, the twist at the end of the story does suggest the dramatic powers of mesmerism to allow for communication at a distance. Rather than simply communicating with each other from across town, Vankirk effectively communicates to the narrator from beyond the grave. And like Bedloe, Vankirk’s state of suspended animation transforms his body into a communication device for the reception and transmission of information. The story’s structure seems to emphasize this transformation by presenting the mesmerist as a researcher scanning for data. Vankirk’s disappointment with books 18

Justinus Kerner, Die Seherin von Prevorst, Eröffnungen über das innere Leben des Menschen und über das Hereinragen einer Geisterwelt in die unsere, Stuttgart, 1829.

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also emphasizes the ineffectuality of writing technologies, and by enhancing his powers of ratiocination through mesmerism he ultimately becomes a virtual library or databank, capable of accessing and processing a greater amount of information. “Mesmeric Revelation” thus represents the mesmeric rapport as an interface between an operator and an electric machine, and it illustrates the sheer ephemerality and invisibility of information in the electric age. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this story represents mesmerism as a form of disembodied communication. Indeed, the main point that Vankirk’s attempts to convey during the course of this interview is his discovery that the spirit or soul is equally as material as the body, although it is invisible and intangible. The story contains an extended explanation of this new concept of materiality, which is based on the division of the body into two parts: the “rudimental” or earthly body and the “complete” or “whole” body. Vankirk explains this division using the metaphor of the worm and the butterfly: There are two bodies – the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death”, is but the painful metamorphosis. (250)

The “rudimental body” refers to the physical body itself, which relies on sensory organs for communication; its connection to the “external world” is thus “limited, through the idiosyncrasy of its organs”. The complete body, on the other hand, is able to communicate “with no other intervention than that of an infinitely rarer ether than even the luminiferous; and to this ether – in unison with it – the whole body vibrates, setting in motion the unparticled matter which permeates it” (251). It is precisely this form of heightened perception which the mesmerized subject is able to experience, just as Bedloe experienced the transfer of consciousness and the transformation of his body into another state of being, and thus mesmerism functions as a mediator between these two levels of matter. Vankirk also claims that people “will never be bodiless” (250) – they will always have a material presence – because “the whole of the unparticled matter is substance; that is to say, the whole of what we term ‘space’, is ... the truest substantiality” (253-54). While critics remain divided as to the precise origin of this theory – some attributing it to Locke’s speculation “that

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God could endow matter with the power of thought”,19 others to Epicurus’ claim that the soul was “a bodily substance composed of slight particles diffused over all members of the body”20 – Vankirk’s statements clearly show how mesmerism was challenging the divisions between body and mind, materiality and immateriality. Mesmerism effectively allows the subject to occupy a liminal position between these categories, in which the body is neither fully concrete nor fully ephemeral. It is capable of expanding the subject’s consciousness and extending the mind beyond the limitations of the body, but it also embodies consciousness and thought firmly in the physical world. By providing an explicit description of this new concept of materiality as “mesmeric revelation”, this story draws a direct connection between mesmerism and a new notion of embodiment emerging in the electric age. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845)21 also depicts a mesmerized patient on the verge of death. At the beginning of this story the narrator conceives of an experiment in which he will mesmerize Valdemar “in articulo mortis” (155) in an attempt to prolong his life. When he hears that Valdemar is dying, the narrator rushes to his patient and successfully mesmerizes him. Over the next day he watches Valdemar slowly wither and asks repeatedly if he is asleep. At first the patient cannot answer, but eventually he replies: “Yes – asleep now. Do not wake me! – let me die so!” The next time the narrator asks if he is sleeping, Valdemar answers, “Yes; still asleep – dying” (161). Valdemar’s body continues to wither away, losing colour and muscle control, until the narrator reports a “strong vibratory motion” emanating from his tongue, which sounds “unearthly” (162) and seems to come “from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth”. The narrator notes that the sound also possesses a palpable presence, and it impresses him “as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch”. Valdemar then speaks again, although his voice is produced entirely by his tongue while his lips and jaws remain motionless: “Yes! – no; – I have been sleeping – and now – now – I am dead” (163). After Valdemar makes this statement, he stops breathing entirely. The narrator keeps 19

John Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction, New York, 1987, 16. Kenneth Alan Hovey, “Poe’s Materialist Metaphysics of Man”, in A Companion to Poe Studies, ed. Eric W. Carlson, Westport: CT, 1996, 355. 21 Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, in The Complete Works, VI. 20

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Valdemar alive in this state of suspended animation for another seven months, until finally he decides to awaken him, at which point Valdemar speaks again: “For God’s sake! – quick! – quick! – put me to sleep – or, quick! – waken me! – quick! – I say to you that I am dead!” (165). After making this final statement, the narrator completely awakens Valdemar from the mesmeric trance, and Valdemar’s body, like the body of Vankirk’s, rapidly decomposes into “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity” (166). Like Bedloe’s perplexing statement, “I died”, a statement which Bedloe himself cannot reconcile or explain, Valdemar’s statement, “I am dead”, is an enigma, what Roland Barthes has called “an impossible uttering”.22 But such utterings became commonplace after the invention of the media technologies like the phonograph. By allowing the voice to be separated from the body and preserved over time, the phonograph was effectively capable of receiving and broadcasting voices of the dead. Edison himself originally conceived of this device as a kind of acoustic scrapbook for preserving “the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family”23 rather than a medium for the recording and transmission of music. Nineteenth-century writers, like Count Theodore Du Moncel, also noted that the voices emanating from this machine seemed otherwordly: It is startling to hear this voice – somewhat shrill, it may be admitted – which seems to utter its sentences from beyond the grave. If this intervention had taken place in the Middle Ages, it certainly would have been applied to ghostly apparitions, and it would have been invaluable to miracle-mongers.24

Peters concludes that one of “the founding dreams of phonography” was the “overcoming of time and death”, and therefore it “seemed like a door to the spirit world”.25 The overcoming of time and death was also clearly one of the founding dreams of mesmerism, as is evident in 22

Roland Barthes, “Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe”, Poe Studies, X/1 (June 1977), 10. 23 Thomas Edison, “The Phonograph and Its Future”, North American Review, CXXVI (May-June 1878), 533. 24 Théodore Du Moncel, The Telephone, the Microphone and the Phonograph, New York, 1879, 243. 25 Peters, 160-61.

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“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, and the use of mesmerism in this story to preserve Valdemar’s voice and allow him to continue speaking after death reveals a similar media logic. The story illustrates the voice as pure vibration, independent of the mouth and thus separate from the body, yet still grounded in the physical world, as it possesses a definite material presence. Valdemar thus occupies a liminal position between presence and absence, which prefigures the vocal manifestations of the phonograph, and the fact that the “unearthly” voice seems to emanate “from some deep cavern within the earth” further emphasizes the notion that he is speaking from beyond the grave. It is also important to note that this new concept of materiality was not an idiosyncratic invention of the author himself, but rather it was considered quite plausible in the 1840s. Shortly after “Mesmeric Revelation” was published, Rev. George Bush similarly employed mesmerism to “abolish the distinction, as usually conceived, between soul and body” by arguing that the soul was also composed of matter.26 “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” was even based on an actual case history that Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend reported in a “Notice” that was added to the 1844 edition of his book Facts in Mesmerism: I have watched the effects of mesmeric treatment upon a suffering friend .… I have no hesitation in saying, that, under God, the life of my friend, R. T. was prolonged, at least, two months by the action of Mesmerism.27

Many readers were also convinced that this story was true. Thomas South, for example, claimed that these events were “well and publicly attested, yet few even of the faithful will believe, though one spoke from the dead”.28 And Robert Collyer – mesmerist, phrenologist, father of psychography, and a personal friend of Poe’s – submitted the following letter to Poe’s Broadway Journal:

26

Rev. George Bush, Anastasis: Or the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, New York, 1845, 66. 27 Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend, Facts in Mesmerism: With Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry Into It, 2nd edn, London, 1844, xvi. 28 Thomas South [Thuos Mathos], Early Magnetism in Its Higher Relations to Humanity, as Veiled in the Poets and the Prophets, London, 1846, 116.

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Anthony Enns Your account of M. Valdemar’s Case had been universally copied in this city, and has created a great sensation. It requires from me no apology, in stating, that I have not the least doubt of the possibility of such a phenomenon; for, I did actually restore to active animation a person who died from excessive drinking of ardent spirits.29

Winter notes that this story was also widely accepted in Britain: “Readers were willing to consider the possibility that mesmerism could redraw the line between life and death.”30 Andrew Jackson Davis – the clairvoyant “Seer of Poughkeepsie” who gave speeches in a hypnotic trance – claimed that even though “Mesmeric Revelation” was a work of fiction, Poe’s account was essentially true.31 Poe, however, was highly critical of Davis,32 and he seemed to take pleasure in the fact that so many mesmerists and spiritualists had been fooled: The Swedenborgians inform me that they have discovered all that I said in a magazine article entitled “Mesmeric Revelation,” to be absolutely true although at first they were strongly inclined to doubt my veracity – a fact which, in this particular instance, I never dreamed of not doing myself. The story is a pure fiction from beginning to end.33

Such comments have encouraged critics to interpret these tales as literary hoaxes designed to ridicule mesmerism and the scientific establishment that legitimized it. Taylor Stoehr argues that readers in the mid-1800s “were so eager to swallow whatever wonders a pseudoscientist might dangle in front of them that many took Poe’s bold fabrication hook, line, and sinker”, and Poe “was gratified by such reactions”.34 Shawn Rosenheim also claims that Poe would have been amused by the fact that these stories “were sometimes read not as

29

Robert Collyer, “Letter to Edgar Allan Poe”, Broadway Journal, II/25 (27 December 1845), 390. 30 Winter, 121. 31 Andrew Jackson Davis, Answers to Ever-Recurring Questions from the People: A Sequel to the Penetralia, Boston, 1868, 63. 32 Poe, The Complete Works, XIV, 173. 33 Poe, “Marginal Notes”, Godey’s Lady’s Book, August 1845, 50. 34 Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters, Hamden: CT, 1978, 33.

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satires on mesmerism but as case histories”.35 Although Poe admitted that these stories were fictional, however, he always maintained their plausibility. In response to Collyer, for example, Poe admitted that “there was a very small modicum of truth in the case of M. Valdemar”, but he also added that “if the story was not true … it should have been”.36 And when a reviewer for the New-York Daily Tribune claimed that this story strained credulity, Poe replied: Why cannot a man talk after he is dead? Why? – Why? – that is the question; and as soon as the Tribune has answered it to our satisfaction we will talk to it further.37

Sidney Lind thus concludes that Poe maintained “a certain ambiguity regarding their authenticity”,38 and Maria Tatar similarly argues that “Poe refused to entertain fanciful psychological or spiritual interpretations of mesmeric views” because he wanted “to report ‘authentic’ case histories documenting the power of animal magnetism to provide moments of cosmic insight”.39 Despite the derogatory remarks concerning Davis and the Swedenborgians, therefore, Poe remained convinced that mesmerism could be employed to reveal empirical truths about the nature of the universe. This commitment is evident in a letter written to James Russell Lowell on 2 July 1844, in which Poe described Vankirk’s “revelation” as his own philosophy: We think spirit different; for spirit, we say, is unparticled, and therefore is not matter. But it is clear that if we proceed sufficiently far in our ideas of rarefaction, we shall arrive at a point where the particles coalesce; for, although the particles be infinite, the infinity of littleness in the spaces between them, is an absurdity …. Man, and other thinking beings, are individualizations of the unparticled matter.

Poe also employed the metaphor of the worm and the butterfly: “At death, the worm is the butterfly – still material, but of a matter 35

Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Poe to the Internet, Baltimore, 1997, 120. 36 Poe, “Editorial Miscellany”, Broadway Journal, II/25 (27 December 1845), 391. 37 Ibid., II/23 (13 December 1845), 359. 38 Sidney E. Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism”, PMLA, LXII (1947), 1094. 39 Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature, Princeton, 1978, 198.

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unrecognized by our organs – recognized occasionally, perhaps, by the sleep-walker, directly – without organs – through the mesmeric medium.” The “complete” body, then, is not the immaterial soul, but rather it is equally as material as the physical body, although this materiality is of a kind that cannot be perceived with rudimental sensory organs. Poe restated his theory the following week in a letter to Dr Thomas H. Chivers: Man and other beings … are portions of this unparticled matter, individualized by being incorporated in the ordinary or particled matter. They exist rudimentally. Death is the painful metamorphosis. The worm becomes the butterfly – but the butterfly is still material – of a matter, however, which cannot be recognized by our rudimental organs.40

Poe, therefore, clearly believed in the theory of unparticled matter outlined in these stories, and Rosenheim, along with several other critics, seems to make the mistake of claiming that Poe used electricity as a metaphor for a “newly disembodied consciousness” rather than actually believing the notion of materiality which his tales repeatedly describe. Rosenheim argues, for example, that “Poe comes to think of the body not as a necessary component of being but as a shell or husk, indifferently organic, designed to house an immaterial self”.41 But Poe’s theory of unparticled matter threatens the division of mind and body by suggesting that they are inextricably bound because they are both material. As Stuart Levine points out, Poe believed that “all things physical and spiritual are inextricably related, and the relationship can be understood physically”.42 The key difference between particled matter and unparticled matter – the difference which marks the transition into the electric age – is that the complete, unparticled body cannot be seen. This notion of the body as having invisible yet material extensions is considered a key feature of the electric age, when machines “began to do things that no quantity of men could do, becoming not only extensions of the finer muscles but of the eye, ear, and even the brain 40

Edgar Allan Poe, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom, 2 vols, Cambridge: MA, 1948, I, 257, 260. 41 Rosenheim, 93, 100. 42 Stuart Levine, Edgar Poe: Seer and Craftsman, Deland: FL, 1972, 155.

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itself”.43 This shift was due in no small part to Edison’s various contributions to telegraphy, telephony, phonography, and motion picture technology, the incandescent light, direct current, and the storage battery. Edison was also popularly known as the inventor of a device to speak with the dead, a device he referred to simply as his “valve”.44 Like Poe, therefore, Edison was also convinced that electricity might be employed to establish a link with the spirit world, and thus they both possessed a mutual awareness that the discovery of electricity necessarily reconfigured the relationship between mind and body. This reconfiguration introduced a new kind of embodiment, in which the physical body was dispersed across space and time while previously immaterial phenomena, such as thought or “personality”, simultaneously acquired a physical presence. Both Poe and Edison rejected the notion of the soul or mind as a spiritual, immaterial substance, and sought ways to rethink materiality itself in order to construct a scientific rationale that would explain this new kind of embodiment. Edison first discussed his theories in 1910, at the time of William James’ death. Newspapers were reporting alleged reappearances of James’ spirit on earth, and this renewed interest in spiritualism prompted journalist Edward Marshall to ask Edison about the “scientific question” of the existence of the soul. Edison firmly answered that “all there has been, all there ever will be, can or will, soon or late, be explained along material lines”. According to Edison’s biographer, this comment created a minor scandal: “Within a month the Edison interview had been reprinted in half a dozen languages, attacked in pamphlets, and commented on so extensively in the press that Marshall himself declared the reading of the clippings ‘a task impossible.’”45 In 1920 Edison once again criticized spiritualists in an interview for American Magazine: A great deal is being said and written about spiritualism these days .… But the methods and apparatus commonly used and discussed are a lot of unscientific nonsense .… If we ever do succeed in establishing 43

Wyn Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth, Cambridge: MA, 1981,

22. 44

Austin C. Lescarboura, “Edison’s Views on Life and Death”, Scientific American, CXXIII/18 (30 October 1920), 446. 45 Wachhorst, 122, 123.

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Anthony Enns communication with personalities which have left this present life, it certainly won’t be through any of the childish contraptions which seem so silly to the scientist.46

Scientific American published a similar interview that year, in which Edison was even more emphatic: I cannot conceive such a thing as a spirit .… I cannot be a party to the belief that spirits exist and can be seen under certain circumstances and can be made to tilt tables and rap and do other things of a similar unimportant nature. The whole thing is so absurd.47

In each of these interviews, however, Edison claimed that there may be a legitimate, scientific approach to communicating with the dead, a project he had been working on himself: I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us .… If this is ever accomplished it will be accomplished, not by any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, such as are employed by so-called “mediums,” but by scientific methods.48

Although he had yet to establish contact, Edison believed he would soon be successful, as “a collaborator in this work died only the other day”, and because “he knew exactly what I am after in this work, I believe he ought to be the first one to use it if he is able to do so”.49 How is this joint belief in materialism and communication with the dead possible? Edison’s approach was based on his notion that human beings are “composed of myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life”. He also believed that these units work in squads – or swarms, as I prefer to call them – and ... these infinitesimally small units live forever. When we “die” these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere, and go on functioning in some other form or environment.

46 B. C. Forbes, “Edison Working on How to Communicate with the Next World”, American Magazine, XC (October 1920), 10. 47 Lescarboura, 446. 48 Forbes, 10. 49 Lescarboura, 446.

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Communication with the dead is therefore possible, according to Edison, because “if the units of life which compose an individual’s memory hold together after that individual’s ‘death,’ is it not within range of possibility ... that these memory swarms could retain ... what we call the individual’s personality after ‘dissolution’ of the body?”50 Edison’s notion of infinitesimally small “life units” bears a striking resemblance to Poe’s theory of “unparticled matter”, and this similarity was even more pronounced the following year when Edison employed the metaphor of the butterfly to describe the displacement of life units after death: The grub, when it “dies,” splits open. A remarkable change occurs, a butterfly comes forth. I’m investigating the butterfly existence of human life.51

Edison’s theory was not inspired by mesmerism, however, but rather by the development of modern electrical machinery, which was capable of magnifying physical force. In the Scientific American interview, for example, Edison compared his “life units” to workers in a power plant: In our bodies these entities constantly rebuild our tissues to replace those which are constantly wearing out. They watch after the functions of the various organs, just as the engineers in a power house see that the machinery is kept in order.

He also employed the metaphor of the power plant to describe the function of his “valve”: This apparatus, let me explain, is in the nature of a valve .… The slightest conceivable effort is made to exert many times its initial power for indicative purposes. It is similar to a modern power house, where man, with his relatively puny one-eighth horse-power, turns a valve which starts a 50,000-horse-power steam turbine.52

So like the human body the valve has the ability to focus or magnify the efforts of a swarm of infinitesimally small units. Edison 50 51 52

Forbes, 11, 85, 11. Rothman, 6. Lescarboura, 459, 446.

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added that “the degree of material or physical power possessed by those in the next life must be extremely slight … therefore, any instrument designed to be used to communicate with us must be super-delicate – as fine and responsive as human ingenuity can make it”.53 This statement clearly shows how Edison’s theory was linked to the development of new sound technologies, like his carbon button transmitter, which seemed capable of almost unlimited sound amplification. Douglas Kahn even draws a connection between Edison’s “life units” and the static produced by this device: The carbon button … emitted what Edison called “molecular music” after it was pressured slightly by the movements of the telephone handle into which it was situated. This music played on the same scale as the personified society of life units.54

Edison’s theories thus illustrate the easy translation of Poe’s mesmeric principles into the modern era. Edison’s description of the body as a “power house” in which units of life are stored clearly resembles mesmerism’s transformation of the body into an electrical machine for the storage and transmission of information. The amplification of physical force was also an important part of the mesmeric rapport, as the patient’s powers of perception were augmented and enhanced. Mesmerism also revealed that the human body was capable of performing work without the expenditure of energy, and some mesmerists even described the body as an electrical battery.55 The dream of pure communication without the limitations of the body also informed Edison’s notion that consciousness could travel across space in the form of invisible particles also employs the dream of pure communication without the limitations of the human body. Therefore Edison’s valve performed the same function that Peters attributes to the phonograph: it is “a medium that preserves ghosts”.56 Edison later claimed that the “director” particles that constitute human

53

Forbes, 11. Douglas Kahn, “Death in Light of the Phonograph: Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus”, in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, eds Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, Cambridge: MA, 1992, 97-98. 55 Winter, 57, 120. 56 Peters, 160. 54

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personality could also be located in the part of the brain known as the “fold of Broca”: The thing that really matters is what happens to what one may call the “master” entities – those that direct the others. Eighty-two remarkable operations upon the brain have definitely proved that the seat of our personality lies in that part of the brain known as the fold of Broca. It is not unreasonable to suppose that these entities which direct reside within this fold.57

This claim clearly resembles the practice of phreno-mesmerism, in which mesmerists accessed data stored in various compartments of the brain, and it makes the connection between Edison’s valve and the phonograph even more explicit. Not only was the valve’s ability to magnify the movements of infinitesimally small units based on the principles of electronic sound amplification, but Edison’s notion of human personality as being stored in the folds or grooves of the brain also invoked the phonograph’s ability to inscribe information in the folds or grooves of a cylinder. This connection between phonography and brain mapping are far from accidental. As Friedrich Kittler points out, brain researchers originally employed Edison’s phonograph as a model for their attempts to chart neural pathways: A brain physiology that followed Broca and Wernicke’s subdivision of discourse into numerous subroutines and located speaking, hearing, writing, and reading in various parts of the brain (because it exclusively focused on the states of specifiable material particles) had to model itself on the phonograph.58

Broca and Wernicke’s attempt to isolate the various sensory channels in the brain was itself based on pre-existing acoustic and optical media technologies, and thus their model of consciousness followed a media logic. The most obvious similarity between Edison’s theories and Poe’s mesmeric revelations, however, lies in their reconception of 57 Shaw Desmond, “Edison ‘Spirit Finder’ Seeks Great Secret: Electric Wizard Discusses Life Beyond”, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 August 1922, see section f, p. 5. 58 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz, Stanford, 1999, 38.

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consciousness itself as an invisible, yet material substance. Just as Poe conceived of the mind as being composed of “unparticled” matter – invisible, yet material through and through – Edison claimed that human personality was made up of invisible “director” particles, which were so physical that they could even be identified on an anatomy chart. So Poe and Edison both contributed to a larger discursive tradition in which the divisions between mind and body, human and machine, and materiality and immateriality were being reconfigured for the electric age, and their theories provide a perfect illustration of McLuhan’s famous claim that “with the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself”.59 Unlike Descartes’ notion of mind and body as separate entities, Poe and Edison envisioned their collapse into a single, material, invisible being – a being appropriate for the electric age because it is both extended and dispersed, material and finite.

59

43.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London, 1964,

MESMERIC DELUSIONS: MIND AND MENTAL TRAINING IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S WRITINGS

LOUISE HENSON

Elizabeth Gaskell is not generally associated with the mesmeric culture of the mid-nineteenth century, although references to mesmerism do appear in her letters and in her fiction. Unlike her noted contemporaries Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Wilkie Collins, she did not employ mesmeric language and concepts in a recognizably cohesive and systematic manner. Yet she did devote much space to describing and analysing some of the psychological issues that were raised in the controversy over mesmerism, particularly questions about the powers of the mind and problems of mental development. To date there has been no major study of Gaskell’s mental philosophy, and this in part accounts for why her writings have not been associated with mesmerism. It is my purpose in this essay to analyse Gaskell’s work in conjunction with sceptical responses to mesmerism and related phenomena in the 1850s, when mesmeric controversy was not only focused on powers of the mind, but had also begun to converge with questions of mental health, mental cultivation, and the drive for educational reform. The broader significance of mesmerism in mid-nineteenth-century culture is suggested by the social issues with which it was associated in the minds of its enthusiasts and its sceptics. Studies of the representation of mesmeric phenomena in literary sources have traditionally focused on the writings of mesmeric practitioners. Yet the work of sceptics can also be illuminating and this literature deserves attention if we are to appreciate Victorian mesmerism as a contested field of ideas about mind and body with problematic social implications. Gaskell’s representations of mesmeric states of mind as ordinary mental phenomena illustrate some of the ways in which the mesmerist’s authority was being contested in this period. From the late 1830s John Elliotson’s claims about the sensational therapeutic and clairvoyant powers of animal magnetism fuelled debates about the mysteries inherent in human nature and the curious

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interrelations of body and mind. Elliotson, concerned about the limited therapies open to the medical man, made a particular plea for the curative potential of animal magnetism in the fifth edition of his Human Physiology (1840). “Mesmerism”, he wrote, is a most useful addition to our remedial means. By it, without giving any medicine, I have several times cured epilepsy …. A case of violent and singular jumping and striking fits of twelve years’ duration, lasting six weeks spring and autumn, has yielded to it. A case of chorea was perfectly cured.1

Elliotson persisted in his efforts to establish the mesmeric influence as a physical one and attempted to test the complex interrelations between the vital and physical forces of nature. His early work attracted considerable attention from prominent scientific authorities, such as Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone and Dionysius Lardner. Lardner and Elliotson conducted experiments aiming to show that the mesmeric agent was subject to the same laws of reflection as light, and the two men claimed to have magnetized a patient by making magnetic passes at her reflected image.2 Yet other observers questioned the nature of Elliotson’s evidence, and found it inconclusive, inadequate, or indicative of blatant deception. At issue was the question of how far the behaviour and testimony of Elliotson’s experimental subjects could be trusted. The therapeutic aspects of Elliotson’s magnetic treatment, moreover, soon began to be overtaken by the more sensational behaviour of two of his patients, Elizabeth and Jane O’Key. When Elliotson began to induce the “delirium” associated with their illness artificially, he succeeded in producing incredible effects known as symptoms of the magnetic rapport.3 Such effects were accounted for by the presence of the magnetic fluid acting on the vital energy of the patient, but during these demonstrations the sisters became increasing unpredictable and thus, in the eyes of many of Elliotson’s peers, unreliable vehicles for testing his scientific claims. For sceptics mesmerism became inextricably linked with the problems inherent in human nature, particularly human susceptibility 1

John Elliotson, Human Physiology, 5th edn, 2 vols, London, 1840, II, 1193. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 53-54. 3 Elliotson, 1165. 2

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to new sensational trends. Mesmeric influence was represented as the latest fashion to capture the popular imagination. The second edition of Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1852) included a chapter on “The Magnetisers” which had not appeared in the 1841 first edition.4 In this attempt to demonstrate “how easily the masses have been led astray and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes”, Mackay linked mesmerism with such phenomena as the Dutch Tulipomania of the seventeenth century, and the “madness” provoked by the financial projects of the South Sea Company and the Mississippi scheme.5 The arrival of electro-biology6 and American spiritualism in the early 1850s intensified controversy over imponderable forces, their nature and provenance. Although scientific and technological knowledge shaped the overlapping mesmerist and spiritualist cosmogony, comparisons with the superstitions of the past abounded in hostile responses. These practices were associated with an inherited fascination with invoking mysterious magical forces and conjuring the dead. Nevertheless, they also invited serious psychological analysis of the influences at work, and helped to shape an increasingly scientific orientation towards human nature, and an interest in conceptualizing mental development, not merely within a chronological framework of cognitive and epistemological development, but also in terms of normal and pathological categories. During the mid-nineteenth century, anxiety about the epidemic mania, susceptibility to irrational belief, and subjection to imponderable forces can be identified with broader general concerns about mental development and mental health. It is within this context that Gaskell’s work must be placed. Gaskell’s approach to problems of mind was strongly conditioned by the powerful cultural influence of her Unitarian faith. The precise nature of the Gaskells’ Unitarian belief has been the subject of considerable critical speculation. From the 1830s to the 1860s Unitarians were divided between the Necessitarianism of Joseph 4 Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London, 1852, I, 262-95. 5 Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 2 vols, London, 1841, I, v. 6 Electro-biology was introduced into Britain in 1850 and involved the use of a small disk of copper and zinc which was held in the hand of the subject. The effects of electro-biology were reputed to be the suspension of the subject’s will, the paralysation of the muscles, and the deception of the senses.

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Priestley and the teachings of James Martineau, J. J. Tayler and J. H. Thom. R. K. Webb contends that Elizabeth Stevenson had spent her most impressionable years during the 1820s in a climate of Priestleyan teaching, and the religious ethics of her husband, William Gaskell, confirmed and further shaped these beliefs.7 Scholars have had difficulty defining the nature of Gaskell’s Unitarian beliefs. She has been placed both within the traditional Priestleyan camp, and associated with James Martineau’s new style Unitarianism, with its emphasis on free will over predetermined law, and feeling and personal example over rationally-conceived, allembracing solutions.8 Jenny Uglow suggests a synthesis of the two and finds that Gaskell’s fiction repeatedly acts out “Martineau’s ‘great moral truth’ of the contrast between ‘the emancipating energy of the unconscious affections and the feebleness of the self-interested will’”.9 However, the contrast between unconscious reaction and the deliberation of the will was a more complex idea in Unitarian thought than this comment would suggest, particularly in the context of debates triggered by mesmerism. It was a contrast examined in Unitarian mental philosophy where a higher moral value was invested in the efficient control of the will. This is most apparent in the work of the Unitarian physiologist, William Benjamin Carpenter, who emerged as a prominent figure of scientific authority during the early decades of mesmeric controversy and made strenuous efforts to naturalize and subordinate mesmerism, electro-biology, and spiritualism to established mental principles.10 Carpenter’s mental philosophy was underpinned by a rationalist Unitarian theology with the laws of the mind functioning as deterministically as those of the physical world. His mental physiology envisioned the mind under the domination of a controlling Will, which he identified with “all those higher exercises of the reasoning powers”. The ability to exert volitional control was proportional to the greater sophistication of the organism, so that the 7

R. K. Webb, “The Gaskells as Unitarians”, in Dickens and Other Victorians, ed. Joanne Shattock, London, 1988, 158. 8 See Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, London, 1979, 4-17, and K. J. Fielding, “Sceptical Carlyles and the Unitarian Elizabeth Gaskell”, Gaskell Society Journal, VI (1992), 42-57. 9 Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, London, 1993, 131. 10 The Gaskells were already acquainted with Carpenter by 1851. See The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, Manchester, 1966.

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“Automatic movements are found to be gradually subordinated to the Intelligence and Will, as we rise towards Man, in whom those faculties are most strongly developed”.11 The empowering agency of the will was crucial to maintaining control over one’s own mind and ultimately over the self. This notion, already established in the Unitarian tradition of Priestleyan teaching, was becoming a major point of general anxiety in early Victorian culture. In his influential article “Electro-Biology and Mesmerism” for the Quarterly Review in 1853, Carpenter rejected the view that the will of the mesmerist or electro-biologist could directly control the senses and the muscular motions of their subjects.12 Rather, Carpenter countered such claims by an appeal to established mental principles, developing Thomas Brown’s psychological concept of “suggestion” to show how the mind functioned automatically, under the influence of trains of thought triggered by associations of ideas, or external impressions. Such mental activity was independent of the control of the will, so that when the directing power of the will is suspended, the mind is incapable of correcting illusory ideas by an appeal to common sense. This was at the forefront of Carpenter’s theory of a “state of subjection of a dominant idea” where the “mind is liable to be seized by some strange notion which takes entire possession of it, and all the actions of the individual thus ‘possessed’ are the results of its operation”.13 This mental condition, common in individuals, was equally applicable in cases of epidemic mania where whole communities became affected. Hence Carpenter classified the invocations of the ancient Greek priestesses, the ecstatic revelations of the Catholic and Protestant visionaries, the behaviours of communities struck down by witchcraft and diabolical possession, the convulsions of the modern day Methodists, the dancing manias of the middle ages, mesmeric influence, and finally the “most remarkable specimen ... the tableturning and table-talking of the year 1853”, as equally symptomatic of

11

William B. Carpenter, Principles of Comparative Physiology, 4th edn, London, 1854, 649. 12 William B. Carpenter, “Electro-Biology and Mesmerism”, Quarterly Review, XCIII (September 1853), 516. 13 Ibid., 509.

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the same complaint: “the possession of the mind by a dominant idea, from which it makes no sufficient effort to free itself.”14 Unitarians as a whole were not attracted to the notion of an external agency controlling the mind and body of the mesmeric subject. Harriet Martineau’s defence of the efficacy of mesmeric cure and its personally-empowering and clairvoyant aspects was an atypical Unitarian response, but Martineau had first-hand experience of therapeutic benefits to back her views.15 Gaskell, however, expressed suspicion about the practice and its attraction even for the rationally-minded. She intimated her concerns about her own susceptibility to Mrs Scott: “I rather dread it altogether” she wrote, “I think because I have a feeling that it twisted Miss Martineau’s mind; but it may not be that, & it may be a superstitious feeling (& consequently a faithless one) of mine.”16 From her public comments about mesmerism it appears that Gaskell associated the phenomenon purely with loss of self-determination, something which usually has negative consequences in her writings. In a letter to Catherine Winkworth she described James Anthony Froude as a magnetizer, whose “magical, magnetic, glamour-like influence” negated the autonomy of her friends, the Darbishires: The D. D.’s all bend and bow to his will, like reeds before the wind, blow whichever way it listeth. He smokes cigars constantly; Père, Robert, Arthur, Vernon (nay even little Francis), smoke constantly. He disbelieves, they disbelieve; he wears shabby garments, they wear shabby garments; in short it’s the most complete taking away of their own wills and informing them with his own that ever was .… I stand outside the circle of his influence; resisting with all my might, but feeling and seeing the attraction.17

Gaskell explored the problem of susceptibility in Cranford, serialized in Charles Dickens’s Household Words between December 1851 and May 1853. “The Great Cranford Panic” published in January 1853 is a highly topical exploration of the epidemic delusion drawing on general anxieties crystallizing with the advent of electro-biology 14

Ibid., 510. “Miss Martineau on Mesmerism”, Athenaeum (23, 30 November; 7, 14, 21 December, 1844); Winter, Mesmerized, 221-25. 16 Gaskell to Mrs Scott, in Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 230. 17 Gaskell to Catherine Winkworth (21 August 1849), Letters, 83-84. 15

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and American spiritualism, and given more recent expression in the second edition of Mackay’s work on popular delusions.18 Gaskell depicted the provincial town of Cranford as something of an historical curiosity, for the pervasive and controlling influence of folk belief is as deep-rooted as the hierarchical social customs that govern the lives of the inhabitants. Cranford is also in the possession of the “Amazons”, all the main householders are women, most living in genteel poverty. The precarious social status of these women and their vulnerability to unpredictable economic and social forces is poignantly exposed, but Gaskell underscores the vulnerability of her ladies further as they fall prey to invisible psychological forces. Gaskell gradually builds up the tension with the arrival of the mysterious conjuror, Signor Brunoni, whose professional displays are received as black magic by Miss Matty and Mrs Forrester. Miss Pole, on the other hand, who imagines herself to be the voice of reason, is “so much above superstitious fears” (415) and “inclined to think that there might be a scientific solution found for even the Witch of Endor” (392). There are, however, invisible and destabilizing psychological forces at work which rapidly sweep through the whole community. Gaskell’s narrator, Mary Smith, identifies the tenuous chain of associations which culminate in the panic: I think a series of circumstances dated from Signor Brunoni’s visit to Cranford, which seemed at the time connected in our minds with him …. All at once all sorts of uncomfortable rumours got afloat in the town. There were one or two robberies – real bonâ fide robberies … and that seemed to make us all afraid of being robbed. (394).

From a grain of truth the situation is subsequently distorted by rumour and fanciful speculation. Miss Pole, “who affected great bravery herself, was the principal person to collect and arrange these reports, so as to make them assume their most fearful aspect” (390). As panic ensues, so explanations become more fantastic. The death of Mrs Jamieson’s dog, which “uneducated people thought” was caused by “apoplexy, brought on by too much feeding and too little exercise”, is attributed to the sinister presence of Signor Brunoni, who “had apparently killed a canary with only a word of command”. Thus, “his 18

Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Great Cranford Panic”, Household Words, VI (8, 15 January 1853), 390-96; 413-20.

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will seemed of deadly force; who knew but what he might be lingering in the neighbourhood willing all sorts of awful things!” (396). This highly topical reference to belief in the imposition of a controlling, alien will reflects contemporary anxieties about the operator-subject relationship of mesmerism and electro-biology. The ladies’ anxieties about the magical and dominating power of Brunoni’s will, Gaskell suggests, is proportional to the weakened state of their own will. Their susceptibility to the rumours and superstitious fancies of their own making is maintained by a sympathetic agitation which pervades the entire social circle. These anxieties culminate one evening at Mrs Forrester’s home, when in accordance with the communal mood, they give vent to their own individual fears. Mrs Forrester offers “Ghosts!” as her particular weakness, and the ensuing debate divides the ladies: Miss Pole came down upon her with indigestion, spectral illusions, optical delusions, and a great deal out of Dr Ferrier and Dr Hibbert besides. Miss Matty had rather a leaning toward ghosts … and what little she did say was all on Mrs Forrester’s side, who emboldened by sympathy, protested that ghosts were part of her religion; that surely she, the widow of a major in the army, knew what to be frightened at, and what not …. When the elder-wine was brought in, it gave rise to a new burst of discussion: for Jenny, the little maiden who staggered under the tray, had to give evidence of having seen a ghost with her own eyes, not so many nights ago, in Darkness Lane – the very lane we were to go through on our way home. (415)

Miss Pole’s citations from popular aetiological assessments of the apparition prove inadequate, however, for the ideas suggested predominate over her feeble attempt to rationalize the matter.19 Thus, when it is time to brave Darkness Lane and the headless ghost that reputedly haunts it, the ladies: preserved a discreet silence as to the headless lady while we were putting on our things to go home, for there was no knowing how near the ghostly head and ears might be, or what spiritual connection they might be keeping up with the unhappy body in Darkness Lane; and therefore, even Miss Pole felt that it was as well not to speak lightly 19

John Ferrier’s An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions, Warrington, 1813, and Samuel Hibbert’s Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions, London, 1824.

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on such subjects, for fear of vexing or insulting the woe-begone trunk. …. Miss Matty drew the curtains round the windows of the chair to shut out disagreeable sights; and the men … set off at such a round and merry pace that it was all Miss Pole and I could do to keep up with them. She had breath for nothing beyond an imploring “Don’t leave me!” (415)

Gaskell thus reduces her characters to a state of irrational panic, but of particular note is the manner in which the suggestion of an idea assumes a reality even against the will of the sceptical Miss Pole. A tendency to give in to the excesses of the imagination is, above all else, the particular Cranford foible. The panic is associated with the negation of mental control, and therefore Gaskell’s strategy for halting the epidemic delusion necessitates the recovery of some kind of discipline over the self, which she effects through an appeal to the highly developed moral sensibilities of the ladies. They eventually learn of the real identity of Signor Brunoni and his family, of their hardship and poverty, and begin to channel their attention into a new practical interest in the Brunonis’ welfare, thereby subordinating the fanciful propensity of the Cranford mind: We were all of us far too full of the Signor’s precarious state to talk about either robbers of ghosts. Indeed, Lady Glenmire said, she never had heard of any actual robberies; …. But that was expecting too much of us; we could not acknowledge that we had only had this small foundation for all our panic. (417)

The depiction of epidemic delusion in Cranford is above all comic and light-hearted, but Gaskell returned to the subject and portrayed it in much darker and sinister terms in “Lois the Witch”, serialized in Household Words in 1859. Gaskell handles this retelling of the story of the Salem witch hysteria of 1692 with her characteristic cultural and historical sensitivity, but the narrator’s main focus is on the destructive mental forces at work. Her narrative offers an authoritative and diagnostic view of the behaviour of the protagonists which engages directly with Victorian concerns about the epidemic mania. The Unitarian’s characteristic dislike of religious obscurantism and excessive superstition is apparent in both Carpenter’s work on

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epidemic delusions and in “Lois the Witch”.20 Carpenter argued that “the ‘possession’ of men’s minds by dominant ideas has been most complete, when these ideas have been religious aberrations”.21 What is also apparent is the manner in which both Gaskell and Carpenter treat possession as a subjective psychological power, and the negative implications they attach to the dominance of mental reflexes, in the form of automatic ideational sequences, over the restraining power of the will. Gaskell represents Salem in 1692 as a community lacking the guidance of a rational “head”, having lost by death, “nearly all its venerable men and leading citizens – men of ripe wisdom and sound counsel …. They had been beloved as fathers, and looked upon as judges in the land” (596). The absence of a guiding head leads to dissension within the town torn in its support between the feuding ministers, Tappau and Nolan, but Gaskell also captures the extreme susceptibility of Puritan Massachusetts, confronted by the mysterious otherness of the native Americans, threatened by French “Papist” (567) pirates and, at that time, passing through a phase of latitudinarianism and authoritarian counter-reaction. The psychological effects of an insecure environment, heightened by the physical hardship of the New England winter, are given coherence by the Elders, who perceive the infliction of Divine wrath in all their difficulties and represent any unusual phenomena as supernatural manifestations of evil, sent to test and tempt the community: there was much to tell upon the imagination in those days, in that place, and time. It was prevalently believed that there were manifestations of spiritual influence – of the direct influence of both good and bad spirits – constantly perceived in the course of men’s lives. Lots were drawn as a guidance from the Lord; the Bible was opened, and the leaves allowed to fall apart, and the first text the eye fell upon was supposed to be appointed from above as a direction. Sounds were heard that could not be accounted for; they were made by evil spirits not yet banished from the desert places of which they had so long held possession. Sights, inexplicable and mysterious, were dimly seen – Satan, in some shape .... And at the beginning of the long winter season, such whispered tales, such old temptations 20

“Lois the Witch”, All the Year Round, I (8, 15, 22 October 1859), 564-71; 587-97; 609-24. 21 Carpenter, “Electro-Biology”, 557.

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and hauntings, and devilish terrors, were supposed to be particularly rife. Salem was, as it were, snowed up, and left to prey upon itself .... The white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms, ... the distant fall of mighty trees in the mysterious forests girdling around them, the faint whoop and cry of some Indian seeking his camp, ... the hungry yells of wild beasts … – these were the things which made that winter life in Salem in the memorable time of 1691-2, seem strange and haunted, and terrific to many (592).

The ensuing chaos, in a community already highly superstitious and insecure, leads to the witch hysteria itself, initiated and propelled by the Victorian antitype of rational behaviour, a group of young girls. The strange convulsions that commence with Minister Tappau’s daughters are soon duplicated by their rival Prudence Hickson, and subsequently throughout the community: “Here and there girls, women uttering strange cries, and apparently suffering from the same kind of convulsive fit which had attacked Prudence, were centres of a group of agitated friends, who muttered much and savagely of witchcraft” (617). The role played by the imagination in bringing about physiological effects was well known in mental physiology, but it had a more urgent topicality in the 1850s. For many Gaskell’s cousin, the eminent society physician, Henry Holland, had convincingly demonstrated the influence of mental attention, both voluntary and involuntary, upon the intensity of sensation, or upon bodily organs. He attributed the mesmerist’s claim to produce certain effects in the limbs of the subject to the influence of the subject’s own mental attention on parts of their body, a process Holland termed “morbid solicitation”.22 Likewise, the attacks or fits sometimes witnessed in magnetized patients, he claimed, were brought on by mere expectation of them, or by imitation.23 William Carpenter explained how emotional excitement, originating in the contemplation of some idea “may act downwards through the automatic system”, thereby exciting “irregular or convulsive movements, totally unrestrainable by the Will”.24 Such convulsive movements were readily associated in the public mind with hysterical mesmeric patients and the symptoms of table turning 22 23 24

Henry Holland, Medical Notes and Reflections, 2nd edn, London, 1840, 76. Ibid., 74n; Carpenter, Principles, 699. Carpenter, Principles, 699.

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and spirit rapping. The influence of expectant attention was similarly foregrounded in Michael Faraday’s celebrated experiments with tablemoving in 1853. Faraday attributed the phenomenon to a quasiinvoluntary action produced by the power of suggestion, or expectation, upon the minds of the participants. The influence of expectant attention, suggested by the idea of the table moving, forced an involuntary movement of the hands of the participants, which in turn propelled the table.25 In “Lois the Witch” Gaskell’s authoritative narrative voice subscribes to this mid-nineteenth-century scientific refigurement of traditional ideas about possession as psycho-physical predetermination. Possession is represented here as a deterministic acting out of what Carpenter termed an “expectant idea”, as the very fears anticipated by the community are gradually made manifest under the influence of expectation.26 The “constant dwelling of the thoughts, even with horror, upon certain possibilities, or what were esteemed as such, really brought about the corruption of imagination at last”. The fear of witchcraft becomes an epidemic mental disorder which oppresses the mind like the “overpowering dread of the plague”. Thus, “some, weak and terrified, came honestly to believe their own guilt, through the diseases of the imagination which are sure to be engendered at such a time as this” (609). The habits of mind associated with the superstitions of former ages were of direct interest to those Victorians seeking to account for the hold that mesmerism, electro-biology, and spiritualism had over the minds of their contemporaries. Analyses of the impressible or superstitious mind and prescriptive advice on how best to cultivate the rational judgement were prominent in the 1850s, when the question of educational reform intersected increasingly with mesmeric and spiritualistic debates.27 William B. Carpenter, Michael Faraday, and David Brewster criticized general standards of education which failed to fortify the public mind against the powerful attractions of mesmerism, electro-biology, and spiritualism. Brewster, the author of Natural Magic (1832) which offered comprehensive scientific explanations for a broad range of supernatural and occult phenomena, 25 26 27

Michael Faraday, “On Table-Turning”, The Times, 30 June 1853, 8. Carpenter, “Electro-Biology”, 540. See Winter, Mesmerized, 294-300.

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described the “sound mind”, as one which was best fortified by scientific knowledge: Minds which have the ballast of established facts and laws, or a knowledge of what can be seen and handled, are less likely to be the victims of credulity and imposture than those which indulge in light literature, and in the romance of the present day. They have in their possession a fixed standard of truth to which they can appeal when startling phenomena and wild theories are submitted to their judgement. Who … that is acquainted with the simple facts and laws of electricity and magnetism … could for a moment believe that such a principle could pass into tables and pendulums and other nonconducting materials, and impress upon them motions contrary to every known mechanical law, tossing and twisting them in all directions.28

The drive for improvements in educational standards, however, was not merely concerned with the curriculum, it also involved mental training. In Carpenter’s mental science early mental training was given a crucial role in the cultivation and maintenance of a sound mental disposition, and a discerning judgement. Efficient exercise of the will was vital in the application of judgement, whose function it was to compare ideas and select those appropriate to the object of thought. This process, Carpenter wrote, is “the source of that common-sense whereon we rely in the ordinary conduct of life”. The child, who has no significant store of experience with which to correct erroneous ideas he or she may create, or encounter in others, is particularly vulnerable in the area of the judgement, which must develop out of habitual practice.29 The credulous adult whose capacity for independent judgement remained undeveloped might therefore be compared to the untutored child. Unitarian voices had been prominent in debates about education and its reform for decades. Gaskell’s father, William Stevenson, produced Remarks on the Very Inferior Utility of Classical Learning in 1796 which argued for the benefits of modern languages and scientific subjects, and claimed that a classical education developed the memory at the expense of the judgement. Gaskell’s own interest in 28

David Brewster, “Sir Henry Holland on Mental Physiology”, North British Review, XXII (November 1854), 222. 29 Carpenter, “Electro-Biology”, 508.

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mental habits is apparent in her letters about her daughters. She wrote, for example, to Eliza Fox about the formative influence of early impressions on the developing character of the child: Miss Mitchell told me yesterday (apropos of Meta) that she had noticed that children accustomed to tidiness and cleanness from their early babyhood, even if that tidiness and cleanness was produced by the exertions of others entirely without any thought or contrivance of their own, when withdrawn from this situation where everything is done for them, had acquired such a taste for order that they will exert themselves ever so much to procure it.30

Conversely, appropriate corrective strategies were sought for what were considered to be poor mental habits. The Gaskells attempted to counter the “indolence of mind” of their eldest daughter, Marianne, by cultivating her interest in music.31 The study of the “science” of harmony, Gaskell wrote, “will I hope be of material service to her mental character by enabling her to concentrate her attention on a train of thought”. The Gaskells’ search for a school for Marianne was influenced by this concern, and Elizabeth chose Mrs Lalor of Hampstead, wife of the editor of the Unitarian Inquirer, and famed for “her power of forming conscientious, thoughtful, earnest, independent characters”.32 Mrs Lalor’s suggestion that Marianne’s taste for music might be applied “to the correction of [this] mental fault” through the study of harmony, concurred with Gaskell’s own diagnosis.33 In her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) Gaskell took special pains to account for Charlotte’s peculiar morbid temperament by describing the inauspicious influences to which she had been subjected during childhood. She gave a prominent and influential role to the bleak and desolate moorland surrounding the parsonage, the behaviour of an eccentric parent (such was Gaskell’s assessment of Patrick Brontë), and the superstitious stories of oral tradition, particularly those that came from the Brontë servant, Tabitha Ackroyd. Gaskell described how, following the death of her siblings Charlotte’s nerves gave way under the oppressive influence of solitude and gloomy mental habit: 30 31 32 33

Gaskell to Eliza Fox (26 April 1850), Letters, 111. Gaskell to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (12 December 1850), Letters, 138. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 138.

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All the grim superstitions of the North had been implanted in her during her childhood by the servants, who believed in them. They recurred to her now, – with no shrinking from the spirits of the Dead, but with such an intense longing once more to stand face to face with the souls of her sisters …. It seemed as if the very strength of yearning should have compelled them to appear. On windy nights, cries, and sobs, and wailings seemed to go round the house, as of the dearly-beloved striving to force their way to her.34

Brontë’s authorship, Gaskell suggested, was the means by which the adult Charlotte strove to unload these stifling mental habits. “I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing, and out of her life”, she wrote to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, “What would have been her transcendent grandeur if she had been brought up in a healthy and happy atmosphere.”35 Significantly, as Gaskell knew, Brontë was drawn towards mesmerism and insisted that Harriet Martineau mesmerize her during her visit to the latter in 1850. The episode was presented differently in the Life of Charlotte Brontë, where readers were led to believe that it was Martineau who had persuaded Charlotte to undertake the experiment. Yet the association between Charlotte’s mental disposition and her suitability as a mesmeric subject was nevertheless made clear: You ask me whether Miss Martineau made me a convert to mesmerism? Scarcely; yet I heard miracles of its efficacy, and could hardly discredit the whole of what was told me. I even underwent a personal experiment; and though the result was not absolutely clear, it was inferred that in time I should prove an excellent subject.36

This interest in mental cultivation and the habits of mind that indicated the ideal mesmeric subject is reflected in “The Doom of the Griffiths”, which Gaskell published in Household Words in January 1858. Gaskell’s principal characters, Squire Griffiths and his son Owen, believe themselves subjected to a family curse which is to be fulfilled in their time. The curse is shown to be a delusion, but its effects are nevertheless brought about by the unconscious agency of 34 35 36

Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shelston, London, 1975, 401. Gaskell to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (7 April 1853), Letters, 229. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 438.

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father and son. Gaskell attempts to account for the mental weakness and impressibility of both characters by focusing on the formative years of Owen Griffiths. Again there is a noticeable overlap between Carpenter’s views on formative mental training and those expressed by Gaskell in “Doom”. The story was based on the oral traditions of North Wales commemorating the national hero, Owain Glendwr, the “redoubted chieftain [who] is, even in the present days of enlightenment, as famous among his illiterate countrymen for his magical powers as for his patriotism”.37 The traditional account of Glendwr’s fifteenthcentury revenge prophecy – that the race of the treacherous Rhys ap Gryfydd should be accursed and that each generation should see their land and wealth vanish until the ninth generation, when the son should slay the father and hence extinguish the line – holds that the doom had been fulfilled. Gaskell stresses the awe-inspiring fatalism of oral tradition and its influence over the popular imagination, but undercuts the truth-value of the curse which has been contradicted by history: the lapse of many years had almost deadened the wonder-inspiring power of the whole curse. It was only brought forward from the hoards of Memory when some untoward event happened to the Griffiths family; and in the eighth generation the faith in the prophecy was nearly destroyed, by the marriage of the Griffiths of that day, to a Miss Owen … an heiress … for a while the prophecy lay dormant. (34-35)

Gaskell subtly ties all the fantastic events in the story to contemporary issues in mental physiology. For example, the absorption of the details of the prophecy into the folklore of the region and the coincidental association by which it is triggered from a dormant folk memory into an active idea, parallels the actual process of memory, as conceived in nineteenth-century mental science. Henry Holland described the memory as a faculty for retaining impressions of former states which lie dormant to the consciousness, until revived by exciting causes, either associations independent of the will, or acts of recollection directed by will.38 This theory emphasized the crucial role of memory in determining the attitudes and behaviours of the present, even when 37 Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Doom of the Griffiths”, in Round the Sofa, 2 vols, London, 1859, II, 32. 38 Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology, London, 1840, 150.

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the conditions of the present have no direct relevance to those of the past. The narrative focus of “Doom” on the formative years of Owen Griffiths, son of the ninth squire, and the emotive associations which will come to govern his adulthood, connects the psychology of the curse with the powerful agency of memory. Again psychological determinism frames Gaskell’s story as she offers an authoritative analysis of the consequences of a defective education and its effects on mental character. The curse affecting both the Squire and his son emerges as a particular morbid disposition passed on through the family. The semi-educated Squire channels his vehement passion into antiquarian pursuits, but his primary aim is simply to collect specimens, rather than study their contents in any philosophical depth. This interest underlines the peculiar nature of the Squire’s disposition, which is both inclined towards, and conditioned by, the influence of local superstition. The family curse is his personal obsession: “His strong imagination rendered him particularly impressible on such subjects; while his judgement, seldom exercised or fortified by severe thought, could not prevent his continually referring to it” (41). These negative mental habits are passed on within the family and the Squire’s peculiar disposition is acquired by his son, whom the former delights to interest in antiquarian studies, without considering their effects on a young mind. Owen’s “unnatural” childhood is spent in the company of antiquarians and in the shadow of the prophecy, told to him from earliest infancy, so that the “legend was wrought into the boy’s mind, and he would crave, yet tremble, to hear it told over and over again” (41-42). Indulged, and educated in “imaginative and speculative” knowledge, Owen grows up with the family prophecy and his early and close relationship with his father firmly associated in his mind. Through this associative link, the legend comes to assume greater significance for Owen who is subsequently alienated from his father from the time of the latter’s second marriage. The boy, once pampered and indulged, becomes an object of neglect, and accordingly gives way to wildly speculative, and passionate indulgences in “gloomy and morbid reveries” (50). The habits of thought cultivated in childhood have become the automatic responses of Owen’s adulthood: he would pull out an old school volume ... and in accordance with the dark legend that still lurked in the recesses of his mind – a shape of gloom in those innermost haunts awaiting its time to come forth in

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Owen’s reading of the Greek tragedies, whose plots are appropriately shaped by pagan belief in the determining power of Fate, reaffirms the idea of the curse and his subjection to it. However, it is the family traits passed from father and son, particularly a deficient judgement, the inclination to give way to the passions and a consequent lack of control over thoughts, words and actions that finally succeed in turning the curse into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Owen’s persistence in believing that his fate must be determined by an external influence independent of his own will was particularly troubling from a mid-Victorian point of view because it freed him from the burden of moral responsibility. Likewise, one of the many concerns about mesmeric influence was not only the immoral behaviour of the subject in the mesmeric trance, but also the possibility of denying responsibility for this behaviour. This anxiety is played out in Gaskell’s story. The struggle between the Squire and his son that accidentally results in the former’s death, seems to have been orchestrated by the forces of Fate, and therefore Owen, “wild, despairing, helpless, fate-pursued” may protest, “it was not me. It was my doom”: Neither words nor deeds but what are decreed can come to pass. I was set to do my work, this hundred years or more. The time waited for me, and the man waited for me. I have done what was foretold of me for generations. (85)

A similar association between an illusionary mesmeric influence and moral behaviour is explored in Wives and Daughters (1864-66), Gaskell’s final novel which reflects on social evolution and political reform in the nineteenth century. Here the language of mesmerism is used to describe manipulative human relationships, and to expose moral weakness and misjudgement. Gaskell’s focus for this association is the character of Cynthia Kirkpatrick, whose magnetic

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and fascinating figure attracts and influences all around her, including her stepsister Molly Gibson. Gaskell’s initial description of Cynthia’s captivating and glamorous façade recalls her characterization of Froude as a mesmerist. “Some people have this power”, Gaskell admits, but “its effects are only manifested in the susceptible”.39 She continues, “perhaps it is incompatible with very high principle”: “Molly might soon have been aware that Cynthia was not remarkable for unflinching morality; but the glamour thrown over her would have prevented Molly from any attempt at penetrating into and judging her companion’s character” (226). Shortly after her arrival in Hollingford Cynthia finds herself in difficulty when she becomes engaged to Roger Hamley, while already contracted to Mr Preston. Yet she is unwilling to accept absolute responsibility for her moral decisions, and attempts to negate her own agency in the dilemma of her double engagement. She explains both her mysterious submission to Preston, whom she confesses to hate and who is attempting to blackmail her into honouring their agreement, and her rejection of the worthy Roger, in terms of mesmeric rapport, in which she is on this occasion the subject. Cynthia speaks of her “strong presentiment” that she will never marry Roger, and informs the astonished Molly that she may marry Preston instead, for “More unlikely things have happened. Have you never heard of strong wills mesmerizing weaker ones into submission?” (474) Cynthia, however, is never weak-willed. Gaskell tell us that her “emotions were generally under the control of her will” (457). The invisible bond of mesmeric rapport that Cynthia describes has no substance, but it enables her to gloss over her own responsibility for the serious moral danger in which she has placed herself. Cynthia merely follows her nature, “which was to attract every one of those she was thrown amongst” (488), regardless of the consequences, and thus is never willing to have her character or her behaviour scrutinized too closely by others. Despite her susceptibility to Cynthia’s charm, Molly soon begins to see through this façade, and finds herself taking on the responsibility of extricating Cynthia from her entanglement with Preston at the risk of tarnishing her own reputation. Wives and Daughters is deeply concerned with the process of national education reform and Gaskell’s analysis of the deficient 39

Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1864-66), ed. Angus Easson, Oxford, 1987, 225.

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moral judgement of Cynthia is linked to her broader discussion of education in subtle ways. At the root of Cynthia’s superficial personality, Gaskell traces an unguided and neglected childhood, but in addition to her incomplete moral education, Gaskell also glances at the female curriculum. Cynthia is educated in the traditional feminine accomplishments, while Molly is the model for the scientificallyeducated woman, informally tutored at home by the naturalist, Roger, whom Gaskell based in part on her distant cousin, Charles Darwin. In Gaskell’s plan for the novel Molly was to have fulfilled a function identified by many advocates of a scientific education for women: that of companion able to converse and sympathize with a husband’s interests. Gaskell died before the completion of Wives and Daughters, which was serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, but her plan to unite Roger and Molly was explained to Cornhill readers in a postscript by Frederick Greenwood in early 1866. In the figure of Roger Hamley Gaskell takes up contemporary interest in the reform of university education. Wives and Daughters is set in the late 1820s when Roger’s scientific interests are not catered for at Cambridge University. The neglect of the scientific subjects which interest Roger reflects the concerns of middle-class Nonconformists and their criticisms of the deficiencies in national education. Roger thus represents the entrepreneurial spirit associated with nonconformist professionalism. His reputation leads to an invitation to undertake a scientific voyage of discovery, and his published writings attract the notice of the French zoologist, Étienne Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire. Science, and particularly natural history, is a powerful authority in Gaskell’s writings, reflecting Unitarian emphasis on the sanctity of natural law. Appropriately, two of her most prominent scientific figures, the botanist Job Legh in her first social-problem novel, Mary Barton (1848), and the naturalist Roger Hamley in Wives and Daughters are also models of reasoned selfcontrol whose judgement is to be relied upon. Although he sympathizes with industrial causes, Job has no time for Union activity because it operates irrationally. Gaskell describes working-class combination in Mary Barton as she was to describe the hysterical mob in Salem, as a body functioning without a rational head: Combination is an awful power. It is like the equally mighty agency of steam: capable of almost unlimited good or evil. But to obtain a blessing on its labours, it must work under the direction of a high and

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intelligent will; incapable of being misled by passion, or excitement. The will of the operatives had not been guided to the calmness of wisdom.40

Similarly, in Wives and Daughters Roger’s power of independent judgement reflects a mind fortified by scientific training. The symbolism of Roger as a naturalist is significant here: his knowledge of comparative anatomy makes him an expert in tracing causes and piecing together complex structures. Although Roger is at first attracted to Cynthia’s magnetic personality like everyone else, he comes in time to understand her true nature. Cynthia also understands and fears Roger’s ability to see beyond the mesmeric delusion and anatomize her character. Her decision not marry him is determined by this consideration. “I almost hate the idea of Roger judging me by his own standard”, Cynthia confesses, “which was not made for me, and graciously forgiving me at last” (637-38). The mesmeric attraction of Cynthia will ultimately fail to withstand the scientific scrutiny of Roger as his early enthusiasm turns to scepticism. The mesmeric connotations of Gaskell’s work reveal some of the ways that the claims of mesmerists were being contested in this period. Her authoritatively diagnostic narrative voice represents states of mind and behaviours associated with mesmerism, such as epidemic delusions, susceptible temperaments, and dominant ideas, as ordinary mental phenomena. She also attempts to account for these mental phenomena, scrutinizing the susceptible mind, analysing the development of mental character, and highlighting environmental and circumstantial influence. Gaskell’s approach typifies Unitarian convictions of the Priestleyan tradition: that natural laws to which body and mind were subject, were never capricious or obscure, and that moral certainties were as fixed as the laws of the natural world. For Gaskell, it seems, mesmerism did not fit comfortably with this vision for it disabled the judgement and undermined responsibility for moral conduct.

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Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848), ed. Stephen Gill, London, 1985, 223.

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MESMERISM, CLAIRVOYANCE AND LITERARY CULTURE IN MID-CENTURY AUSTRALIA

TIFFANY DONNELLY

In 1860, some ten years before the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson was born, her mother Mary Richardson contemplated a visit to the mesmerist “Madame Carole”, proprietor of a Mesmeric Institution in the heart of Melbourne’s medical district. “Shall I go to the Mesmerist in Collins Street or not?” she wrote to her husband in Ballarat, “Aunt would go with me”.1 At the time she had been married for five years, had suffered at least one miscarriage and persistent reproductive troubles, and wanted to know if she would ever bear live children. The mesmerist she consulted was Caroline Harper Dexter (1819-84), a native of Nottingham who had emigrated to the colonies in 1854, bringing with her a knowledge of the sciences of mesmerism, clairvoyance and homoeopathy, as well as a pronounced interest in literature and art. As Madame Carole she had established her clinic to treat what her advertising pamphlet described as “those dangerous and debilitating diseases which are peculiarly incident to females”.2 In addition to her mesmeric work she engaged in a number of literary enterprises, some with an occult bent, which brought her at various points into the colonial public eye. As this essay shows, for Harper Dexter issues of emigration, economics and gender converged around the twin activities of mesmerism and writing during the first decade of her life in Australia. As well as forming part of her woman-centred vision, her experiments with mesmerism and publishing helped transplant ideas and debates circulating in Britain at the time, ensuring that some key issues were played out with their own colonial flavour at the margins of imperial space. By 1858 Harper Dexter was living separately from her husband and her mesmerism enterprise, as well as drawing on precedents of 1

Walter and Mary Richardson, Walter and Mary: The Letters of Walter and Mary Richardson, eds Elizabeth Webby and Gillian Sykes, Carlton South, 2000, 89. 2 Mesmeric Institution Pamphlet, La Trobe MS 11630, 1859.

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female healing and occult power, answered a pressing financial need. Mesmerism was proving as popular in Australia at the mid-century as in England, helped along by the arrival of publications from Britain and practitioners like Harper Dexter who were able to pass its precepts on to an eager colonial audience. As in England writers, journalists, politicians and intellectuals took an interest in the subject and set about exploring its proofs and potential through publications and private experiments. In Australia mesmerism and later spiritualism offered additional solace in which geography played an important part: cut off from direct contact with friends and relations, these practices offered both the prospect of news from home and the consolation of a future spiritual reuniting. British books on mesmerism began to appear in Australian editions from the 1840s, and colonial devotees also began to lecture and write on the subject by mid-century.3 Harper Dexter’s contribution to mesmerism’s transit to Australia was a deliberate extension of the role mapped out for the female emigrant in the colonial period. Women were in dire shortage in Australia – by the late 1850s there were 200,000 surplus men in the colony – and observers were worried that in the feverish race to hew out the nation, genteel social and domestic life would not take proper hold. Middle-class women, it was felt, were needed in Australia both to redress the demographic shortfall and to act as purveyors of oldworld cultural practices in the colonies. As a contemporary commentator noted: “There is especially a want [of] women – not women of the rougher classes only, but healthy, patient, educated and accomplished women, who, while not disdaining to take their share in domestic work, can bring and shed around them the sweeter influences of life.”4 As part of their “civilizing mission” women acted as conduits for the transmission of northern hemisphere culture through traditional feminine pursuits such as reading, writing, painting, keeping the artefacts of the old country alive in the new – in other words, by endorsing and maintaining the Victorian precepts of separate spheres for the sexes. Some women, however, were able to exceed the 3

J. B. H., A Catechism of Mesmerism, in which the Principles of Science are Developed: the Popular Objections Combatted; and Examples Given Illustrative of its Power as a Curative Agent, Melbourne, 1850. 4 “The Women’s Emigration Society”, Logan Witness, 26 February 1881, 3.

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confines of domesticity by engaging in activities in the public sphere. Imperialism demanded a definitively masculine posture (carving out new territory or building new cities), leaving a cultural space for educated and spirited women such as Harper Dexter to step in and extend the activities available to them. Consequently, some women managed to reinvent the feminine civilizing mission as an empowering basis for greater cultural and public activity. These activities of course came at a price, since any move into the public sphere still carried with it the potential for social censure. At various points in her career Harper Dexter fielded charges of gender trespass and strong mindedness – symptoms of the paranoia spurred by the concurrently emerging Woman Question debate. Harper Dexter believed that part of woman’s cultural mission in Australia was to help inculcate European ideas and practices in the new colony, and she was prepared to do this in ways which influenced more than her own womanly circle. Two months after stepping off the emigrant ship Marie Gabrielle in January 1855, she gave a public lecture at the Sydney School of Arts – reputed to be the first lecture given by a European woman in Australia – in which she “rebutted the idea that a wife should be confined to what was called a ‘domestic sphere’ exclusively, pointing out that as society received its moral tone from female refinement, it followed as a matter of course that the greater the influence of the latter, the more extended must be the advantages resulting to the whole human family”.5 Picking up on the civilizing agenda of female emigrant literature of the day, Harper Dexter extended her cultural mission beyond the domestic sphere in a number of ways during the remainder of her life in Australia: one of these was mesmerism. Harper Dexter was educated in Paris in the 1830s and her introduction to mesmerism probably occurred in France, where it enjoyed an unstinted popularity despite official discredit. She remained a lifelong Francophile, and her choice of a professional name in Melbourne indicates she felt confident enough to pass herself off as a continental gentlewoman. As Madame Carole she was able to support herself, and to mobilize her civilizing mission both through her medical work and her several concurrent publishing ventures. In addition to lending a cultivated European air to her Melbourne 5

Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 1855, 4.

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persona, her professional name masked a notoriety which threatened her Australian career at several points during the 1850s and 60s. Three years before emigrating to Sydney she had been associated in the British (and colonial) press for her sartorial experiments with Bloomerism. Harper Dexter was living in London when this brief but highly contentious attempt at female dress reform arrived from America in mid-1851. She was one of the first to take up Amelia Bloomer’s health-giving Turkish-style trousers and knee-length skirts; by September she had begun lecturing on Bloomerism, extolling the physical benefits of the new uncorseted ensemble and urging women to shrug off their slavery to the tyrannies of conventional fashion.6 Her London lectures produced several public disturbances: her first in September 1851 at the Literary Institution in Fitzroy Square attracted over twelve-hundred visitors, most of them men eager to catch a glimpse of the titillating sight of a woman in trousers.7 Her third lecture, at the Royal British Institution in Cowper Street, was cancelled due to overcrowding.8 Her lectures sparked off a plenitude of serious and satirical imitators, a flurry of theatrical lampooning9 and a huge amount of copy in the newspapers and journals of the day. Ignoring the health aspects of the dress, detractors chose to view the costume as an emblem of the growing debate about women’s rights, and as an audacious attempt at gender-role reversal. By the end of September The Times had dubbed Harper Dexter the “Apostle of Bloomerism”,10 and by the end of the year her name (with all its potential for dexterous puns) had become a byword for sartorial folly. Her part in the short-lived movement was clamorous enough to earn her a notoriety that was to follow her to Australia.11 This controversial manifestation of Harper Dexter’s interest in women’s health dovetailed with her interest in mesmerism, in particular its curative form as a healing agent, and also coincided with her training in homoeopathy. By 1852 she was working in conjunction 6

New Zealander, 27 March 1852, 4. Illustrated London News, 20 September 1851, 343. 8 The Times, 30 September 1851, 8. 9 Tiffany Urwin, “Dexter, Dextra, Dextrum: The Bloomer Costume On the British Stage in 1851”, Nineteenth Century Theatre, XXVIII/2 (Winter 2000), 89-113. 10 The Times, 30 September 1851, 8. 11 Tiffany Donnelly, “‘Trumpery Stuff’: Gender Politics in Australian Publishing, 1858”, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, XXVI/1 (2002), 29-42. 7

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with Dr G. F. von Viettinghoff at a Homoeopathic Dispensary in Middleton Square, London where she is likely to have received instruction in herbal and homoeopathic medicine.12 She seems to have continued working as a medical mesmerist and herbalist in London for a period of several years, both prior to and after William Dexter left for the Australian goldfields in 1853.13 It was a means of self-support at which she appeared to have achieved a reasonable degree of success: when she set up practice in Melbourne in the late 1850s, the names of European and Australian patients willing to vouch for her abilities were used as testimonials on her business card. These also indicate that she had begun to exercise her mesmeric talents soon after her arrival in Australia. A testimonial from the Consul Général de Belgique en Océanie, Theodore Heyvaert, written in 1855 from the Consulate in “Glebe Road, Sydney” stated: “It is with great pleasure that I acknowledge my belief in your high professional attainments, and in stating my conviction that you are a lady well qualified in the ‘gift of healing,’ as I find my wife’s professedly ‘incurable’ disease has been cured by your treatment and care.”14 Although her testimonials carry names of other Sydney residents (including her friend, the poet and editor Joseph Sheridan Moore) her mesmerism work was carried out largely on an informal, intermittent basis between 1855 and 1858, when problems in her marriage culminated in the separation from her husband. At this date she took up permanent residence in Melbourne in order to pursue her publishing interests and to set up her mesmerism practice full time. In September or October 1858 Harper Dexter entered into a oneyear agreement with a Dr Walker to work as a medical mesmerist, herbalist and clairvoyant. She seems to have operated relatively autonomously from Walker (hers is the only name which appeared in Sands and Kenny’s 1859 Melbourne Directory at 190 Collins Street East, where she was listed as a “Practical Mesmerist”),15 however since their agreement is referred to only in fairly general terms in her correspondence with Dexter, it is difficult to know for certain the precise nature of their understanding. There are some grounds for 12

La Trobe MS 11630, 1859. Ibid., 29 May 1859. 14 Ibid.,1859. 15 Sands and Kenny Commercial and General Melbourne Directory, Melbourne, 1859. 13

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speculating that there was a formal (legal) partnership agreement between them in which Walker referred patients to Harper Dexter on the stipulation that she pay him a commission or provide return services. As a married woman she was precluded from entering into any legalized contract unless her husband acted as her agent, in which case he would be liable for any breach of contract or debts she incurred in relation to the business.16 Although Dexter was ambivalent about the enterprise from the start he may have agreed to act as her agent in this instance, since he was unable to support her himself. A letter he wrote to his wife on 6 March 1859 notes: “Your bond with the Dr is nothing without my sanction.”17 At the outset of her relationship with Walker, Harper Dexter asked her husband to paint two “glaze calico” hangings for her consulting rooms with six written “regulations” for her patients which were clearly designed to promote her professional credibility and protect her from potential sceptics: The Clairvoyante will demand an extra fee if the consultation exceed half an hour. The Clairvoyante will not answer frivolous, useless, nor unreasonable questions. The Clairvoyante will answer any question which is calculated to improve the condition and happiness of mankind. The Clairvoyante will not hold herself responsible for any reply she may give during her magnetic sleep. The Clairvoyante will not vouch for the infallibility of her faculty; neither will she gratify any irrational test. The Clairvoyante will not answer questions of a dangerous tendency; nor of an immoral character.18

When she received the hangings from Dexter she wrote back telling him: “You forgot the letter E at the end of Clairvoyant which is Clairvoyante in the feminine.”19 As her regulations show, Harper Dexter’s primary interest during the time she worked in Melbourne was in the medical application of 16

Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England, Toronto, 1983. 17 La Trobe MS 11630, letter, 6 March 1859. 18 Ibid., October or November 1858. 19 Ibid., undated letter [1859].

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mesmerism and clairvoyance, and not in their more questionable associations with eliciting fantastical trance phenomena or communing with the spirit world. Her work involved a number of medical and pseudo-medical procedures: mesmerizing her patients in order that they derive the benefits of the trance state’s curative powers, putting herself into her own magnetic sleep and entering a clairvoyant state in order to give diagnoses, and prescribing and preparing herbal or homoeopathic remedies for treatment. Along with medical treatment sought by mesmeric means, however, Walker had expected Harper Dexter to extend her activities to religious spiritualism, to the practice of which she found herself becoming increasingly antagonistic. In December 1858 she wrote to Dexter: “The Doctor and myself are not on the best of terms as he wishes me to devote so much time to religious spiritualism and is really so fanatical that I cannot reduce myself to his views.”20 It was this clash of ideas which eventually led Harper Dexter to sever her contract with Walker in May 1859. While mesmerism and spiritualism were often aligned in popular thought because of their mutual entanglement with so-called “occult power”, Harper Dexter made a distinction between her practice of the two. Both were at times viewed as alternative religious practices by a variety of nineteenth-century commentators, since results of occult experiments offered tantalizing explanations for miracles, spirit manifestations and the notion of non-physical existence in terms that seemed better to explicate and even to extend the knowledge in the bible. Walker’s brand of religious spiritualism probably involved Harper Dexter holding private sessions as a professional medium and communing with spirits from a self-induced trance state in an effort to proffer spiritual guidance and relay comforting messages from the beyond. Women were highly regarded as mediums within spiritualist culture during the nineteenth century and although Harper Dexter’s association with religious spiritualism was apparently brief it did anticipate the wider establishment of mediumship later in the century as a profession in which women could excel and from which they could derive substantial returns.21 20

Ibid., letter, December 1858. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth-Century England, London, 1989, 4. 21

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While Harper Dexter shunned a professional association with the spirit world, she did continue to practice clairvoyance as a means of extracting both medical and wider “spiritual” knowledge. Because of its apparently natural or spontaneous occurrence in the mesmeric state, clairvoyance was an acceptable part of medical mesmerism even if it contributed to scepticism outside mesmerism circles. The knowledge vouchsafed by the clairvoyant and her patient was seen by Harper Dexter as new and important information heralding civilization’s progress. Her new Mesmeric Institution pamphlet offered an explanation of her mesmerism philosophy and made a link between the promotion of health and the promise of spiritual epiphany. A healthy body, the passage notes, frees the mind to focus on a revelatory future: Pure philosophy, when faithfully followed, leads the human mind into a full investigation and understanding of causes and principles; therefore, if we desire to find and comprehend that just condition of the body and mind termed health, we must become acquainted with those laws and causes which develop and sustain that condition. Perfect health is perfect harmony – and there can be no unreasonableness in the presentiment, that in the present age when the doctrines of the past have lost their influence and vitality, and man has attained a degree of development, unfolding new wants and feelings, and higher sentiments – a new revelation suited to his enlarged views and more spiritual needs should be vouchsafed. It may be that we are on the verge of an era when this apparently mysterious and mediatorial element between mind and matter, the magnetic fluid, will open up to us a means of intellectual acquisition and physical experience, more commensurate with our yet unfolded capacities and boundless desires.22

Addressing herself to her female patients, Harper Dexter established herself as female prophet, a role which had gained credence in occult culture by the late 1850s. In her study of Victorian feminism and the occult Diana Basham notes that during the 1840s “women began to appear, both in Victorian literature and Victorian society, wearing the mantle of the prophetess and claiming for themselves the articulation of an inspired discourse”. The Victorian prophetess “spoke and prophesied on behalf of her own sex”, and mesmerism was seen 22

La Trobe MS 11630, 1859, unsigned central panel.

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particularly “as a means of unlocking the ‘sealed fountain’ of female experience”.23 Harper Dexter’s belief in women’s healing power is testified in her published writings. In an epithet in the January number of the Ladies’ Almanack 1858: The Southern Cross or Australian Album and New Year’s Gift she stated, quite simply and explicitly: “Women should be their own sex’s physicians.”24 In her partnership with Walker she had made the decision to limit her medical treatments to women, a decision also informed by a concern which persistently plagued midcentury mesmerists: that of the questionable propriety of men and women placing one another in a trance-like state and exercising a dominant will over a subdued one. As mesmerism had become a powerful site for sexual and moral anxiety, Harper Dexter moved quickly to ensure the credibility of her practice and to protect her character. Her practice quickly gained momentum and she clearly equated her professional and financial success with this decision to treat her own sex. By the end of 1858 she reported to Dexter: “Last week I made 10 Guineas and my practice is greatly increasing since I only receive Ladies.”25 In the first months of 1859 Harper Dexter’s relationships with both Walker and her husband broke down irretrievably: after hearing she had severed her contract with the doctor Dexter became increasingly insistent that his wife return to Sydney. She staunchly refused and by the end of May she had established herself in new premises at the corner of Collins and Russell Streets in her own “Mesmeric Institution”. Pamphlets advertised her new venture in which she styled herself “Herbal Physician, Mesmerist and Clairvoyante”. She continued her specialization in women’s illnesses, providing daily consultations and charging a fee of one guinea for half an hour of her time, or the same amount for consultation by letter (clairvoyant diagnosis could be procured in the absence of the patient as long as a personal item, such as a letter, was sent). Her pamphlet stated that consultations were gratuitous on Saturdays between 10 and 12, and that she was “making arrangements for the accommodation of invalid 23 Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society, London, 1992, 41. 24 Caroline Harper Dexter, Ladies’ Almanack: The Southern Cross or Australian Album and New Year’s Gift, Melbourne, 1858, 13. 25 La Trobe MS 11630, letter, 1859.

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ladies who desire to be under her immediate superintendence and care” by establishing a convalescent facility with “Electro-Magnetic Baths” and accommodation in the manner of a short-term sanatorium. In addition to personally prepared herbal remedies for chronic coughs, rheumatism and gout, mouth and dental complaints, burns, stomach disorders and scurvy, the “List of Herbal Remedies made and sold by Madame Carole” printed on her pamphlet included a remedy referred to as “Female Corrective Pills”.26 As the name suggests, the pills were designed to alleviate a variety of symptoms associated with women’s menstrual cycles; Patricia Clarke notes that they may even have been herbal abortifacients.27 The prescription of these pills and the associated mesmeric treatments Harper Dexter administered to women underscore the fact that her practice consciously addressed itself towards one of the key concerns of nineteenth-century medicine and mesmerism. The “dangerous and debilitating diseases which are peculiarly incident to females”28 that Dr von Viettinghoff of the London Homoeopathic Dispensary recorded as Harper Dexter’s specialty were undoubtedly disorders of women’s reproductive systems commonly lumped together as hysteria. Hysteria was a hotly debated subject between the mesmeric and medical fraternities and one in which – as Harper Dexter’s female-only practice shows – the mesmerists felt they were gaining significant ground. The advertising material for her new business listed the names of several women living in Melbourne whom she had successfully treated during her association with Walker. Letter testimonials from these patients lauded her ability to cure long-standing female ailments which had previously defied conventional medical treatment. Addressing Harper Dexter as “My good Physician”, a Mrs Minchin of Duke Street, Prahran, professed herself quite cured of a “lingering female disease” since “Providence put me under your treatment”. Ellen Wilson of Lonsdale Street East also praised the benefits of remedies prescribed by Harper Dexter, when “all others failed”. She continued: “I feel that I cannot speak too flatteringly of your very 26

La Trobe MS 11630, 1859. Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia, Sydney, 1998, 79. See also Angus McLaren, “Neo-Malthusianism and the Fertility Transition”, A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day, Oxford, 1990, 189-93; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, Oxford, 1985, 217-44. 28 La Trobe MS 11630, 1859. 27

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simple and natural mode of curing diseases.” The testimonial from Anne Clay of Waterloo House in Bourke notes: My dear Madame Carole, I have been a great sufferer for more than two years, and have undergone treatment the most excruciatingly painful, recommended and applied by men of the highest standing in the profession, but until I consulted you my malady was unabated. Under your treatment I have received benefits for which I cannot be too grateful, and would most cordially recommend all of my sex who suffer, to apply to you for relief.29

Although not directly stated, given the gendered nature of the illnesses these women suffered, it is likely they would have been diagnosed both by mesmerists and medical men of the time under the encompassing rubric of hysteria. Hysteria was a “protean ailment” so mercurial in its symptomatology that by the nineteenth century it had come to be seen as almost synonymous with femininity.30 As Elaine Showalter has remarked: “Hysteria” was linked with the essence of the “feminine” in a number of ways. Its vast, unstable repertoire of emotional and physical symptoms – fits, fainting, vomiting, choking, sobbing, laughing, paralysis – and the rapid passage from one to another suggested the liability and capriciousness traditionally associated with the feminine nature.31

Mesmerism was advanced in the mid-century as a means of curing nervous or hysterical disorders. A significant proportion of the cases involving female patients related by doctors who practiced mesmerism were described as disorders of the reproductive organs, and were commonly referred to as hysteria. Uterine ulcers, diseased wombs, and problems relating to pregnancy and menstruation were prevalent in the literature on medical mesmerism. By offering a way of diagnosing and treating female complaints without submitting the patient to an internal examination, mesmerism and mesmeric clairvoyance were a 29

Ibid. Smith-Rosenberg, 197. 31 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, London, 1987, 129. 30

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means by which women could circumvent the intrusive gaze of male medicine and even put themselves in the hands of sympathetic women. In The Use of Clairvoyance in Medicine (1857), for example, Dr John Mill related a case of a woman with a “diseased womb” who refused to allow the doctor to do a speculum examination, declaring that “she would rather die than submit to it”.32 A female clairvoyante was consulted, and a correct diagnosis and cure were effected. During the 1840s Harriet Martineau suffered from a displaced womb, a painful and incurable condition which had left her reliant on opiates until her maid was able to cure her by repeatedly putting her into the mesmeric sleep over a period of months.33 Similarly, in an article on “Mesmerism in Australia” published in the Zoist, J. B. Motherwell related a case of a female patient who exhibited “deranged” uterine functions accompanied by “hysterical fits and convulsions of an epileptic character” – symptoms which were eventually eased by mesmeric sleep treatment.34 While mesmerism’s apparent success in treating hysteria and the connection of both with femininity and feigned malaise continued to generate denigratory press, pro-mesmerism writing hailed the cure of female menstrual disorder. Implicit in these writings was an underlying feminist message which, like the text on Harper Dexter’s pamphlet, suggested a liberation from debilitating femininity, a harnessing of female power, and access to knowledge from previously untapped realms. As Basham notes: “Mesmerism was the science which, with the proper controls of male doctor and female patient, would prove that the menstrual energies and electrical fluids of the female, with the inspiration that came from them, could now act as a liberating force for the future of the species, no longer allied to the fatal determinism of Eve’s original sin.”35 In Harper Dexter’s case, the treatment of women’s problems by a woman went a step further: the cycle of male medicine which had inscribed the hysterical female within an economy of sexual difference was interrupted, and female disorder was reconstituted as women’s business. 32

John Mill, The Uses of Clairvoyance in Medicine, London, 1857, 20. Alison Winter, “Harriet Martineau and the Reform of the Invalid in Victorian England”, Historical Journal, XXXVIII/3 (1995), 597-616. 34 J. B. Motherwell, “Mesmerism in Australia”, The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare, X/37 (April 1852), 46. 35 Basham, 59. 33

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When Mary Richardson wrote in June 1860 to her husband in Ballarat asking whether she should go to see the Collins Street Mesmerist, she did not at first receive an answer to her query. Eager to make the visit, she wrote again several days later, asking Walter to send her the date of her last period (referred to euphemistically as “something”) so that she could start for home as soon as her next cycle had passed and she added: “You did not say whether I should go to the Clairvoyant. I should like to do so if I could afford it” (9 June 1860, emphasis in original).36 Walter Richardson had cultivated an interest in mesmerism, clairvoyance, homoeopathy and spiritualism from his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1840s, and his Ballarat medical practice specialized in obstetrics.37 In reply to his wife’s June 9 letter Walter wrote: Tuesday May 15 was the day dear, so I suppose it is Monday this time …. Go to the Clairvoyant if you wish certainly & ask her any questions you choose, you should however write down the answers. (12 June 1860)38

No record has survived of Mary’s visit to Harper Dexter’s Mesmeric Institute in June 1860. Walter’s next letter, while it confirms that the Collins Street clairvoyant was Harper Dexter, merely passes on some scurrilous information from a Melbourne friend: “Smith says Madam Carol [sic] was a Mrs Caroline Dexter the inventor of Bloomerism & is a decided humbug.”39 Harper Dexter’s prognostications on Mary’s fertility were apparently not of a favourable sort, and the information she imparted to Mary in her “magnetic sleep” regarding her future progeny was either lost or destroyed. Walter’s “humbug” comment – that quintessential Victorian suggestion of quackery – is formulated at least partially on hearsay about Harper Dexter’s Bloomerism, and this is one of several instances in which the Bloomer episode had later repercussions for her professional life.

36

I would like to thank Gillian Sykes and Elizabeth Webby for bringing this material to my attention. Walter and Mary: The Letters of Walter and Mary Richardson, 91. 37 Axel Clark, Henry Handel Richardson: Fiction in the Making, Brookvale, 1990, 78. 38 Walter and Mary: The Letters of Walter and Mary Richardson, 93. 39 Ibid., 94.

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Seventy years after this episode Henry Handel Richardson recounted her parents’ marriage in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930). Richardson drew heavily on her parents’ letters for material for the novel – she even went as far, notes Michael Ackland, as “incorporat[ing] parts of their actual correspondence in the fictional text”.40 While neither the letters quoted above nor the episode of Mary’s visit to the clairvoyant are repeated in the novel (indeed, Mary is antagonistic to occult subjects throughout), both the couple’s early childlessness and Mahony’s interest in mesmerism and spiritualism are major thematic threads in the narrative. Walter’s obsession with the occult provided a strong model for the novel: in 1870 he became a founding member and first president of the Melbourne Branch of the Victorian Association of Progressive Spiritualists,41 and began contributing articles to its monthly magazine, the Harbinger of Light.42 While there is no evidence that the author drew on her mother’s encounter with Harper Dexter, it is hard to resist quoting two comments from the novel, one by Mary Mahony and one by Richard, which echo the terms used in the Richardsons’ letters quoted above. Frustrated by her husband’s growing enthusiasm for séances, mediums and table turning, Mary finally upbraids him: “nearly every time we go out now I have to sit by and watch you let yourself be humbugged.” Later when Mary defends her sister’s choice of husband in unusually strident terms, Mahony remarks in response: “Hear, hear! Why, love, at this rate we shall soon have you clad in bloomers and spouting on a platform for women’s rights.”43 That Harper Dexter’s practice in medical mesmerism intersected with her own publishing activities and her active sideline interest in various aspects of the occult movement is apparent in her publications. These form a disparate literary grouping: two sensational pamphlets, two volumes of a jointly edited blue-stocking monthly, the Interpreter, a political satire, and the first women’s almanac produced in Australasia. Her writings attest to her remarkable versatility and 40

Michael Ackland, Henry Handel Richardson, Melbourne, 1996, 59. Catherine Pratt, Resisting Fiction: The Novels of Henry Handel Richardson, St Lucia, 1999, xii. 42 Ackland, 7. 43 Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), Ringwood: Victoria, 1998, 490-91, 444. 41

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although, to some extent, they were economically motivated, her publications like her mesmerism were part of a conscious reproduction of British culture. She transplanted a host of literary genres into the colony, often with a manifestly improving intent, and always with a gesture to her belief in the occult sciences. In October 1857, Harper Dexter produced a sensational pamphlet on a contemporary female murder trial. Published by the Melbourne Herald under the pseudonym “Budgery”, Miss Madeline Smith: The Glasgow Poisoning Case. A Tale of “Scotch Mist”-ery, Entitled Emile and Madeline; or Love and Murder, was an exposé of the case of twenty-one-year-old Smith, daughter of a prominent Glasgow architect, accused of murdering her French lover, a shipping clerk, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, by poisoning him with cocoa and wine laced with arsenic. Smith’s motive for murdering L’Angelier apparently lay in a prospective alliance with a more eligible suitor. Faced with the dilemma of terminating her engagement with a persistent lover, whose knowledge of her sin (and hard evidence in the form of her explicit love letters) threatened her future prospects, Smith, it was alleged, resorted to murder in an effort to free herself. Harper Dexter’s pamphlet offers a commentary on the case with a summation of the evidence and verdict, and expurgated transcripts of some of the letters Smith wrote to her lover during their liaison. Although the cause of L’Angelier’s death was certain, and although Smith was known to have purchased arsenic prior to his demise, there was no direct evidence that Smith had actually administered the poison and the jury handed down a verdict of not proven. Nevertheless, in light of the undeniable fact of Smith’s sexual intimacy with L’Angelier, the only way for writers to reconcile the troubling combination of Smith’s class and gender with her sexuality was to impugn her. Despite her usually clear feminist (or womanist) sympathies Harper Dexter sided vehemently with Smith’s detractors. Smith was, she felt, guilty by virtue of her unwomanly conduct. She remarks, melodramatically: Humiliation and degradation will ever more hang their heavy chains around her; for although she may not have administered the poison with her own hand, she is quite guilty of all the rest. She threw back his love – blighted his dreams of happiness – cancelled his glowing expectations; and what, if in his disappointment, dejection and dark despair, he extinguished the light of a life that was no longer

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The details of the case mobilized public anxiety about the dangerous sexuality and murderous potential of middle-class women – anticipating some of the central themes of the sensation novels of the early 1860s. In order to explain Smith’s behaviour Harper Dexter deployed pseudo-scientific terms and drew on descriptions which emphasized unattractive aspects of her physiognomy. Smith’s forehead was “larger than is pleasant in a woman”, and the lower parts of her face displayed “a want of feminine grace”. Her greyish-blue eyes, moreover, were said to have “something of a disagreeable expression in them” (9-10). Indeed, Smith’s phrenological organization might well explain her evil tendencies: When we hear tales of petty tyrants who are influenced by those powers or passions which phrenologists denominate “combativeness” and “destructiveness,” it is not unreasonable to conceive, that the EVIL parts and parcels of that incomprehensible organisation which help to build up the temple of two-sided humanity will more frequently preponderate, and those convulsions of passions be wrought into devilish workings, which “Cain-like” engender wrath and fury against every impediment that crosses their path, or frustrates their vile and selfish purposes.

Smith is read as having a “diabolical propensity” (7), a fact which is written onto the face and body of the criminal degenerate. However, the most manifestly occult of Harper Dexter’s body of published work was her Ladies’ Almanack 1858.45 Traditionally including lunar cycles, predictions for the coming year and information on popular superstitions – all of which, in addition to some original poetry and prose in the emigrant literature vein, she faithfully reproduced in her own volume – almanac literature had catered to the public’s taste for the occult since early in the century. The Ladies’ Almanack opens with an “Invocation to the Unknown 44

Caroline Harper Dexter, Miss Madeline Smith: The Glasgow Poisoning Case. A Tale of “Scotch Mist”–ery, Entitled Emile and Madeline; or Love and Murder, Melbourne, 1857, 9-10. 45 Ladies’ Almanack: The Southern Cross or Australian Album and New Year’s Gift, Melbourne, 1858.

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Cycle 1858” – a hail to the “Spirit of the unborn Future” which “presentiment foretells” will bring auspicious times for “the prosperous and happy children of our highly favored and blessed Australia” (3-4). The calendar section which follows includes information on seasonal changes, lunar phases, and zodiac months, as well as gems such as “Drawing and Painting ennoble the mind” (17), “Neatness in dress is a proof of refined taste” (12), and “Do not dance unless you dance gracefully” (14). Some of Harper Dexter’s comments in the Ladies’ Almanack deliberately perpetuate the popular belief in women’s innate connection with the occult. In “Popular Superstitions” she mockingly beseeches any “Gentlemen” readers who happen to dip into the publication to “pass over” the pages containing material about popular superstitions. “They are”, she notes, “only a few fly-leaves just slipped in between the legitimate sheets of the ‘Ladies’ Almanack,’ for the Ladies’ especial and most private perusal”. This kind of material, she remarks further, is “part of female edification”: What is more natural to the feminine portion of Eve’s progeny, than hereditary curiosity? We must be peeping into the glass darkly to find out something that we cannot see, and thence diving into some occult mystery which we cannot understand. (26-27)

While the appeal to male readers of her women’s almanac amounts to a kind of taunt, her comments about “natural” and “hereditary curiosity” underscore the popular perception of the occult as women’s secret business. Three pages of “Oraculum” follows which includes a list of “Planetary Days for Matrimony”, predictions on the “Influence of Saints Days on Human Affairs”, and prognostications for the coming year for each of the signs of the zodiac (27-29). The Ladies’ Almanack was an important avenue for the transmission of Harper Dexter’s growing nationalism and her beliefs about preserving a well-ordered and genteel culture. Maureen Perkins remarks that Australian almanacs exemplify “the attempt to perpetuate English culture in unfamiliar surroundings”, and played a key role in carrying on certain deeply held social beliefs about astrology, prophecy and the natural world. As such, she notes, they can be seen as “influential cultural messengers”. The production of an almanac – particularly a rational, statistical one – was seen in Britain as, she

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argues, a “mark of civilisation”46 in a colonial setting, where the marking of time and seasonal change charted by the almanac imposed a rational ordering on a seemingly chaotic and alien landscape, this was particularly pertinent, and even in this relatively simple way, Harper Dexter’s almanac can be seen as a part of the colonizing process of the new settlement of Australia. She also picked up on a number of occult themes in her final publication in Australia, the two-volume Interpreter of 1861 which she co-edited with a friend, Harriet Clisby.47 The Interpreter styled itself “An Australian Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, &c”, the editors stating that they meant to “interpret ‘aright’ the thoughts, sentiments, and feelings of all those whose interest is the advancement of humanity” (Preface). Setting itself this cultural mission to elevate, educate and enlighten, the Interpreter contained articles on topics as diverse as colonial emigration, indigenous peoples, and new scientific discoveries, as well as printing poetry, prose, and literature reviews. It also had a decidedly feminist bent: despite declaring in the Preface to volume two that the magazine will be “scrupulously preserved from any sectarian bias, and will be open freely to the expression of ideas on subjects of interest from both sexes”, the different articles map out a picture of femininity from a variety of angles (fictional, historical, social, scientific) which highlight women’s “superior” capabilities and their role in cultural life. One section on the seventeenth-century Dutch linguist, poet, artist, and intellectual Anna Maria Schurmann, titled “Women’s Capabilities” and a second, “Female Influence”, promotes an idea of female patronage by examining the activities of a number of influential eighteenth-century German women: Women [were] not only creators in the realm of fancy and imagination, but exercised a controlling influence, by their relations of friendship and intimacy with distinguished literary characters. Princesses and the noble ladies of the land gave their patronage and protection to letters, and sought to gather round them the choice spirits of their day. (45)

46

Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time and Cultural Change 1775-1870, Oxford, 1996, 160, 1, 193. 47 Caroline Harper Dexter, The Interpreter: An Australian Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, &c., Melbourne, 1861.

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These were apparently sentiments Harper Dexter aspired to: her listing in the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that after retiring from her mesmeric work she “became a patron of local writers and artists, holding her salon at Bombala, her fashionable home in Brighton”.48 Although details of her “salon” have not come to light, her conscious belief in the cultural importance of women fostering medical, literary and artistic talent was strong: Henry Kendall and Marcus Clarke were among her acquaintances in the last decade of her life, both of whom, like her other literary friend J. S. Moore, had an interest in the occult sciences.49 As in Britain, literature and mesmerism were often fond companions. Northern-hemisphere writers’ fascination with the subject of mesmerism extended to their literary compeers at the colonial margin, just as the practice of mesmerism itself transmigrated as part of a general dissemination of a notion of imperial culture in nineteenth-century Australia. Consistent with the ideas she was concurrently working with in her Mesmeric Institution, issues of health and occult themes are both explored in the pages of the Interpreter. In addition to promoting good health in the colony – both issues contained a “Medical Page” with information on diet and dress for preventing illness (43-44) – the Interpreter also included articles on “A New Theory of Apparitions”, an attempt to explain ghosts in terms of “the eternal and immutable laws of magnetism and electricity” (92-93), and on “The Phrenology of Dreams”, an explanation of the kind of non-visual “seeing” which occurs in sleep (62-65). Additionally, she printed her own two-part fictional piece, “Our Portrait Gallery Photographed”, under the pseudonym “A Clairvoyante”. The story – a bigamy tale in the sensation mould – is recounted from the perspective of a roving “spirit-eye” whose narrative gaze is directed through the medium of a “magic mirror” (20). Containing curious biographical resonances (Dexter had married bigamously in Sydney in 1860, just weeks before his death), Harper Dexter’s authorship of the piece is verified by a typographical error: recalling Dexter’s painting of her calico hanging 48

Australian Dictionary of Biography 1851-1890, eds Douglas Pike, Bede Nairn, Geoffrey Serle, 6 vols, Carlton, 1966, IV, 64-65. 49 Clarke wrote several press articles on clairvoyance and spiritualism in the 1860s and 70s (Ian F. McLaren, Marcus Clarke: An Annotated Bibliography, Melbourne, 1982), and Kendall toyed with spiritualism in Sydney in the 1860s (Donovan Clarke, “A Critical Edition of the Letters of Henry Kendall”, MA Thesis, 2 vols, University of Sydney, 1959, I, 24, 36).

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of regulations, “Clairvoyante” is misspelled in the first volume of the magazine, and corrected to the feminine spelling in the second. Like her mesmerism practice, Harper Dexter’s written contributions to the subject were part of a conscientious dissemination of occult ideas, theories and “discoveries” in Australia. After the Interpreter folded in 1861 she ceased writing and publishing, concentrating solely on her mesmerism practice until its closure in 1864. She remarried and after her husband, William Lynch, built up a flourishing legal practice she retired from public life, reinventing herself as “Carrie Lynch” and concentrating on gathering together one of Australia’s first private art collections.50 Harper Dexter’s period of intense public activity in the late 1850s and early 1860s engaged in a mix of literature and mesmerism. However, her mesmeric work was not only the more successful and more lucrative venture, it was also the career that suited her particular talents. The success of her Mesmeric Institution helps to confirm the notion that practices such as mesmerism, spiritualism and clairvoyance were equally as popular in Australia as in England, and probably more so given the more heterodox social climate of the colonies. Citing the examples of “witch mania” in England prior to the civil war and rise of spiritualism in ante-bellum America, Basham remarks: “Occultism flourishes ... whenever disruptions of existing hegemonic structures become acute.”51 Mesmerism had emerged in France just before the Revolution and its burgeoning popularity in Victorian Britain coincided with several major disruptions in the social fabric, not least of which was the debate over the Woman Question. The establishment of Australia as a colonial outpost itself constituted a further set of challenges to hegemonic structures, both in Britain and in the new colony: it involved the significant demographic rupture of large-scale emigration and the enormous task of establishing and overseeing the growth of social institutions and a new social fabric. In line with Basham’s theory, this was precisely the kind of atmosphere that encouraged the flowering of occult practices such as mesmerism, and enabled practitioners such as Harper Dexter to gain a foothold. Disseminating her occult knowledge both through her Mesmeric Institution and her 50 Gerard Vaughan, “Art Collectors in Colonial Victoria 1854-1892: An Analysis of Taste and Patronage”, BA Honours Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1976. 51 Basham, 90.

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published works was a key part of Harper Dexter’s transmission of cultural information and practices, and helped map out a psychic territory for Australia which was part of the common vision of creating an “Australia Felix” during the colonial period.

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JIM CROWS, VEILED LADIES AND TRUE WOMANHOOD: MESMERISM IN THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

ANGELIC RODGERS

In Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy, Philip Cushman examines the progression of an American identity and how cultural images helped to create the modern consciousness.1 By focusing on ways in which the shifting economic background affected the psyche, Cushman’s analysis opens up some very interesting readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). At the heart of the novel are the same intersections that Cushman points to in his book – intersections between interior and exterior selves, woman as domestic and economic force, slavery and freedom. Hawthorne deals with such ideologies by showing how different forces create different forms of slavery to ideology – economic slavery, slavery to the mental powers of another, or devotion to an outdated aristocratic ideal. At the heart of The House of the Seven Gables is the identification of this shift from aristocratic values to an emphasis on the individual. To demonstrate this movement and to display the dangers of only valuing surface, Hawthorne uses the figures of Jim Crow and the mesmerized body. Through his use of these figures, Hawthorne suggests a focus on inner qualities rather than solely on exterior properties. That is not to say that the ending of The House of the Seven Gables suggests that the exterior has no place or importance, but that it should take a secondary position to the more significant interior. By using references to Jim Crow and to the mesmerized body, Hawthorne explores both the manner in which economic forces control individuals and the extent to which individuals should assert subjectivity. Often forced to rely on jobs that placed him within the economic and political spheres – both as a Customs Officer and as US Consul – Hawthorne was constantly

1

Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy, Reading: MA, 1995.

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examining how to present himself as an artist and as a product at the same time – a dilemma that is embodied in Hepzibah Pyncheon. Hawthorne’s personal experience with mesmerism involved Sophia Peabody’s treatments for her chronic headaches.2 From fear, it seems, he advised his fiancée not to continue to undergo the therapy. This is discussed in a fragmented manner in The American Notebooks: “A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment, by trying the operation of a certain vice on him.”3 Far more than just a notation of a possible story idea, this fragment demonstrates the notion that slavery is not dependent on racial lines but on power over another. The connection with mesmerism is that the philosopher does not enslave through physical means, but through moral and mental techniques as Taylor Stoehr suggests: The popularly conceived power of the mesmerist to exert his will precisely against the better instincts of his somnambulist is reflected not only in his defiance of the natural relations of parent and child but also in his unpardonable intrusion into sacred spiritual realm – the “holy of holies” of the victim’s soul. 4

Stoehr’s use of Hawthorne’s phrase “holy of holies” is crucial in considering the connection between slavery and mesmerism. Hawthorne entreats Sophia Peabody not to undergo mesmeric treatment because it would allow the mesmerist to enslave her sacred inner space. What Hawthorne knew as mesmerism derived from Anton Mesmer’s theories of human physiology and behaviour. But it was Charles Poyen who brought the science to the United States when he landed in Rhode Island in the 1830s. Poyen focused on the “somnambulic state”5 in which the mesmerized person (or somnambule) walks and acts. His popularity was such that in his short stay in the United States, he compiled The Progress of Animal 2

See Taylor Stoehr, “Hawthorne and Mesmerism”, The Huntingdon Library Quarterly, XXXIII (November 1969), 33-60. 3 Hawthorne, The American Notebooks: The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed William Charvat et al., Columbus: OH, 1984, VIII, 237. 4 Stoehr, 55. 5 Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls, Philadelphia, 1982, 18.

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Magnetism in New England and started a magazine, The Psychodinammist or Bulletin of Animal Magnetizers in the United States. By the 1850s, mesmerism was already well established in the Boston area as both a medical and commercial breakthrough. Individuals like Sophia Peabody, who had given up on traditional medical treatments for their illnesses, turned to mesmeric healers for help, and young factory girls took the opportunity for a better life by becoming mediums on stage.6 When we consider that Robert H. Collyer “in the summer of 1841 was attracting audiences of 500 to 1000, in Boston and New York”,7 it is hardly surprising that mesmeric acts became favoured over factory drudgery for young women. The field was lucrative for both the mesmerists and their subjects; in Boston alone it is estimated that by 1843, there were some two hundred mesmerists. Because many mesmerists performed on stage and tended to use female subjects, this form of entertainment was not only lucrative, but also generated tension as it drew women into commerce as objects of display. Hawthorne demonstrates this in his later novel The Blithedale Romance in which Priscilla is exploited as a stage performer. Once the mesmerist’s arts were used on stage mesmerism took on a different form. While practitioners still operated within the mesmeric fluid paradigm, the emphasis in the stage acts began to shift from medicine toward what we might now consider channelling. The mesmerized body, often referred to as the Veiled Lady, served as a type of medium or transmitter for information and messages from the beyond. The display began to take on the features similar to a contemporary hypnotist’s show. The subject was seen to be in a trance and was completely under the mesmerist’s control. While in such a trance, the subject supposedly was able to contact the spirit realm. Eventually, such shows evolved into séances and similar performances where the subject could induce the trance without aid. The most famous of these spiritualist acts were those of Kate and Margaret Fox and their popularity quickly led to stage mesmerism displays like those of the young Cora Hatch, who had met the Fox sisters in the early 1850s and was, by 1857, performing regularly in 6

For a history of stage mesmerism and the women involved, see Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Boston, 1989. 7 Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, New York, 1995, 185.

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public. Accompanied by her much older husband, Dr B. F. Hatch, Cora would sit on stage in an apparent trance and answer questions posed by the audience. A contemporary account from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper describes the spectacle: The [Broadway] Tabernacle is filled – and more than once – with a vast but decorous crowd. The rulers of the state smile to meet the renowned in science among the curious listeners, and the halfbelievers watch to see how these lights of society will accept what is coming. Dr [B. F.] Hatch, a man of rough, hardy, practical sense, steps forward, and states the programme. The audience is invited to select a committee who will prepare the questions, and to these the spirits are expected to answer through their medium, the inspired Cora .... Meanwhile a fair and slender girl, on whose flowing ringlets seventeen summers sit with light and easy grace, is visible in the background. She remains seated with upraised eyes fixed in an expression of intense but confident invocation. As the questions to be discussed are stated, an indescribable change steals over her face. It is a look of rapt entrancement, such as our fancy would depict for the Pythoness or Sybil of classic faith. It is a masterpiece of acting – if acting it is.8

Thus, in New England, the stage version of mesmerism progressed from medical theatres full of students eager to learn about the powers of mesmerism to stage shows where women like Cora Hatch were suddenly on display for the public eye.9 Even though we have no stage mesmerists in The House of the Seven Gables, women are, nonetheless, depicted as mesmeric subjects in other social spheres, and are on display in the name of commerce. Hepzibah has fallen into a reduced financial state and can no longer sustain herself on her family savings. Instead, she must open a penny shop in the lower regions of the house of the seven gables. It is this shop within the home that causes questions of identity to constantly emerge through the dynamics of mesmerism. Hepzibah’s life in the house is delimited; even though the shop and the house are in the same building, there is a definite difference between one space and 8 “Miss Cora Hatch, The Eloquent Medium of The Spiritualists”, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 9 May 1857, 358. 9 For a discussion of medical theatre displays of the mesmerized body by John Elliotson, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of the Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 85-93.

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another. This separation is typical of “domestic ideology [which] engenders and demarcates the spaces of work and ... personal life”.10 The shop-bell signals a move to the commercial space, while instigating a change in Hepzibah. When Holgrave enters, the bell manages to “convey notice to the inner regions of the house”, penetrating the inherited Pyncheon home to rest in the ears of Hepzibah where it “at once set every nerve of her body in responsive and tumultuous vibration”.11 Later we find that Hepzibah is entranced by the sound of the tinkling bell: “But here the little shop-bell rang; it was like a sound from a remote distance – so far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of her reminiscences” (60). She becomes mesmerized by commerce; in an attempt to disassociate from the labour which causes her discomfort, she enters a state of economic hysteria. Every ring of the bell induces nervous tremors. Her attempt to adapt is to enter a state of semi-awareness similar to that of the mesmerized body. According to Chauncy Townshend, who in his Facts in Mesmerism (1844), attempted to describe the stages of trance, Hepzibah is somewhere in stage two which can be described as essentially that of hypnosis. Thinking becomes relatively abstracted from events in the external world. The mind is centered solely on the “suggestions” supplied to it by the operator. All behavior is mechanistically determined by these suggestions with little forethought or consideration of consequences.12

Just as somnambulists were operated like puppets for the mesmerist, she responds “mechanically, to the frequent summons of the shopbell, and at the demand of her customers” (67). Her trance-like state allows her to reconcile her lady-like status that is associated with the Pyncheon family name with the fact that she has to work for a living. As long as she enters an altered mental state when operating the store, she can disassociate from the fact that she has entered the economic world where name and family status mean little. The sense that her work in the shop is executed under a type of mesmerism is reinforced by the fact that she falls under the gaze of the 10 Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, Berkeley, 1990, 63. 11 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Penguin edn, New York, 1981, 42. 12 Quoted in Fuller, 45.

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“strange and unloving eyes” (46) of those customers that stare at her and cause her humiliation. In the act of mesmerism, the eyes of the mesmerist often provide a focus for the subject. A certain voyeuristic shame is implicit in both keeping shop and in being a mesmerized subject; both have sexual implications and make the subject a consumable item. Part of the controversy caused by mesmerism, and certainly one of Hawthorne’s personal objections to the mesmerization of Sophia Peabody, came from the idea that the mesmerist and subject entered into a relationship that was even more intimate than sexual relations. Thus, just as the female shopkeeper has an economic intimacy with her customers that requires that she satisfactorily performs, so does the mesmerized subject have a similar relationship with mesmerizer and audience. Even though Hepzibah tries to please, she does not manage it. Her trance-like state may help her disassociate from her labour, but that is also problematic, as she “pr[ies] with vague eyes about the shop; proffering [customers] one article after another, and thrusting aside – perversely, as most of them supposed – the identical thing they asked for” (67). This description of Hepzibah in the shop is very similar to that of mesmerized subjects who were also oblivious to their surroundings. As a woman in reduced economic circumstances, Hepzibah is an “‘enslaved spirit’; the shop-bell is a ‘talisman to which she owes ‘obedience’”13 in a realm that is neither real nor fantasy – what Peter Bellis calls the “middle ground”14 between the domestic space within the house and the commercial world out in the street. She exists in between the class culture she grew up in as a Pyncheon and the new role she is economically forced to take; as our narrator tells us her “spirit thus flits away ... steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself, as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life” (67). Her only hope of breaking the spell is through economic success; when she makes her first sale, the coin takes on magical proportions:

13

Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies in Mesmerism and Literature, Princeton, 1978, 215. 14 Peter J. Bellis, “Mauling Governor Pyncheon”, Studies in the Novel, XXVI/3 (Fall 1994), 209.

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The little circlet of the schoolboy’s copper-coin – dim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which it had been doing, here and there about the world – had proved a talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn next to her heart. It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! (52) The reference to the galvanic ring connects it to the relatively new type of mesmerism that was promoted by John Dods in 1850 – that which plays upon the “electrical-psychological state”15 and used “a small disc, part zinc and part silver” as a focus object for the subject. Once the subject has concentrated on the disc long enough to induce the proper state of mind, the mesmerist then introduces curative suggestions. Gauld even refers to this disc as a “coin”,16 making this association even clearer. Hepzibah envisions her fallen economic state as a disease that can be cured by this new type of economic mesmerism. Just as Mesmer sought to cure hysteria by inducing it artificially, so Hepzibah’s hope of curing her economic problems can only be found by participating in commerce. There is another key clue of how Hepzibah deals with her new economic role as cent-shop proprietress: the Jim Crow cookies. The term “Jim Crow” has ill-defined origins but we do know that in 1828 Thomas Rice used the name in a song in his minstrel act.17 By Hawthorne’s time, Cushman notes, the term universally applied to a “stereotypical caricature of the African American”. He states that the “foremost characteristic of the African-American male in minstrelsy (as played by a white man) was that he was always clownish and foolish, in all important ways inferior to the white man”. Thus, the Jim Crow figure served as an instrument whereby white men could stereotype African-American males as possessing the inner qualities of laziness, shiftlessness, and inferiority. Cushman posits: “Perhaps it served to justify white contempt for African Americans and thus exonerated white-on-black discrimination and violence, and assuaged white guilt.”18 By using blackface and absurd behaviour, white 15

Gauld, 186. Ibid., 187. 17 For a discussion of Jim Crow, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy, and the American Working Class, New York, 1993. 18 Cushman, 41, 43, 47. 16

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minstrels were able to create a stereotype of what non-whites were like. Jim Crow is an act of impersonation, a forgery of inner qualities perpetrated by the white consciousness on the black body. Whereas the mesmerist acts upon a separate body, the minstrel creates a separate black body through which to act. The Jim Crow figure is important in the novel in terms of class and racial anxiety. Eric Lott argues that the shifting economy of the midnineteenth century led to a “splitting [of] formerly self-sufficient artisans into masses of wage workers on the one hand and select groups of industrious mechanics and capitalists who had in some cases been artisans themselves”. That the word “boss” was coined in these years, Paul Johnson observes, is “a sign that the interests of master and worker were now different and opposed”.19 The same shifts that led to the formation of the middle-class also resulted in an upheaval of hierarchies and the flattening of differences between the black and white working classes. According to Lott, one way of dealing with this upheaval was “the minstrel show’s cognitive equation of black and white working class”. Through using blackface as a means of degradation, white superiority was maintained. As a result, the Jim Crow figure provided a buffer zone to whites whose class position was in decline. Appropriately, then, Hepzibah sells Jim Crow cookies as she senses her slip into the realm of working-class whites – a shift that would place her only above working-class blacks in terms of social status. Lott’s argument that minstrel shows made the “whole business of class formation, uncomfortably apparent”20 can be deployed in an analysis of Hepzibah’s cent-shop. Hawthorne does not put Hepzibah in blackface, but he does place her on display, and it is through this display that her audience becomes conscious of the Pyncheon family’s class shift. The anxiety over this degradation in status is made evident as Hepzibah describes herself to Holgrave as a “woman ... I was going to say, a lady, – but I consider that as past” (44). The rank of a lady is dependent on leisure, on a life where title matters. Holgrave replies by asserting that it is better to be a true woman than to be a lady –

19 Lott, 70. See Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millenium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, New York, 1978, 42. 20 Lott, 156.

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reinforcing the notion that individuals should be valued for abilities, or, as Nancy Armstrong asserts, for inner qualities.21 Eventually, it falls to Phoebe Pyncheon to save Hepzibah from the necessity of shopkeeping. What we find in Phoebe is a young girl who perfectly embodies all of the inner qualities of domestic middle-class life with ease. Unlike Hepzibah, who cannot cook and whose patrimony it is to be a helpless, nervous lady, “Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement” (71). Phoebe can cook, clean, run a shop, and do all the activities expected of the middle-class woman because she practices a kind of “homely witchcraft” (72). As Gillian Brown notes, Phoebe is able to do this and remain feminine because she manages to perform labour that does not appear to be labour. Her “natural magic” (71) allows her to get things done invisibly and with seemingly no effort. Thus, the “selfhood [that] depends upon its severance from the world of work”22 is able to survive. Whereas labour becomes an obsession and denial of the aristocratic self for Hepzibah, for Phoebe the same work becomes a woman’s job – “a rescue mission” to save her elder relatives by bringing homeliness and domesticity back into the household.23 That we are witnessing a new beginning with Phoebe is made obvious through references to Eden that occur in the text immediately after her arrival; the very roses outside her window look as if they had “been brought from Eden” (71), and the interior and exterior of the house undergoes a transforming process. Sunshine “as fresh as that which peeped into Eve’s bower” (101) now illuminates the once gloomy interior of the house. Likewise, Phoebe’s first encounter with the ravenous Ned Higgins finds him no longer eating Jim Crows but rather consuming safer objects like “two dromedaries and a locomotive” (81). The need for Jim Crow has passed; being a part of the middle class is no longer such an abomination. Phoebe, as a domestic woman who can “excel in both public and private spheres ... [and] be the object of the gaze and still possess the subjective qualities

21

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford, 1987, 75. 22 Brown, 63. 23 Brown further asserts that Phoebe’s domestic qualities act as a sort of mesmerism over the inhabitants of the house (91).

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of a good wife and mother”,24 manages to prove that a true woman – one defined by inner depth rather than family lineage – is actually better than being a lady. Indeed, we later learn that being a lady is not as advantageous as Hepzibah thinks. Alice, a representative Pyncheon lady, falls prey to the power of the mesmerist and becomes enslaved to him because she places all of her worth in her class status and family name rather than in her self. Alice’s narrative is alluded to continuously from the beginning of the novel, but it is not until chapter thirteen that we get a full rendering of the tale. Alice’s troubles begin when the carpenter, Matthew Maule, is ordered to report to the house of his master, Gervayse Pyncheon. Maule demands that the slave who brings him this message tells Alice that he sends his respects. The slave quietly believes that Maule has overstepped the bounds: “The low carpenter – man! He no business so much as to look at her a great way off!” (188). As Maule enters the house, he finds more evidence of the distance between his status and that of the Pyncheons; when he steps into the room where Gervayse sits, “Mr Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence” (194). Assuming that Maule will understand that a superior does not answer to an inferior, Pyncheon takes his time addressing him. The carpenter interprets this gesture as a personal insult and infringes the bounds of courtesy by demanding what he has been called for. Gervayse wants to ascertain the claim to some disputed land. Maule replies by asking if he can place Alice in a trance so that she might reveal where the document is; he chooses Alice because “the only chance of acquiring the requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and virgin intelligence, like that of fair Alice” (200). What happens when Alice comes downstairs at the summons of her father seals her fate. Upon seeing Maule, she is automatically aware of the difference in status: As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was standing near its centre, clad in a green, woollen jacket, a pair of loose breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, 24

Armstrong, 78.

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the end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisan's calling, as Mr Pyncheon’s full-dress sword, of that gentleman's aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over Alice Pyncheon’s face; she was struck with admiration – which she made no attempt to conceal – of the remarkable comeliness, strength, and energy of Maule’s figure. But that admiring glance (which most other men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection, all through life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself that made Maule so subtle in his perception. (202)

At the core of this passage is the fact that Maule can see past Alice’s admiration of his physical form and apprise what motivates that admiration. He fails to read it as a compliment, but rather interprets her gaze as reducing him to a mere object, “a brute beast” (201). It is not the person within, the individual, that attracts Alice’s gaze, but rather the man as visual object. When Maule and Gervayse inform Alice of the plan to mesmerize her, she faces it proudly: “Setting aside all advantages of rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a power – combined of beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of womanhood – that could make her impenetrable, unless betrayed by some treachery within” (203). The problem is that Alice, a lady and a true Pyncheon, has nothing left to defend herself with once she relinquishes rank and social status. In Armstrong’s terms, Alice is all surface and no depth and consequently, Maule can take possession of her.25 Significantly, Hawthorne includes references to race and class in this story of Alice’s mesmerism, thereby bringing all of Hawthorne’s thematic preoccupations together in this chapter. Race is most apparent when Maule comes to the house at Gervasye’s bidding to discuss the matter with Scipio, “Mr Pyncheon’s black servant” (187). Maule addresses the servant as “friend Scipio” initially, but when Scipio asks him “what for do you look so black at me?”, Maule responds by calling him a “darkey”, while also drawing a comparison between himself and the servant by asking, “Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?” (188) These references to race and to Maule’s blackness are especially significant when we consider that Maule’s mesmerizing of Alice mimics what minstrels did with the image of the black body. Angered 25

See Armstrong, 59-95.

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by her superiority, Maule uses his influence over the girl to force her to undertake tasks that operate against her social standing. She becomes “Maule’s slave” (208) and he compels her to violate her social norms by laughing in the middle of “prayer-time, or at a funeral” (209). Alice’s final insult occurs when she is forced to act the waiting maid on Maule’s new bride. Maule, through his control over Alice, manages to successfully reverse the class distinctions that form the basis of the feud between the Maules and the Pyncheons. Whereas in the beginning of this chapter, Scipio believes that Maule has “no business so much as to look at [Alice] from a great way off” (188), the carpenter proves himself more powerful. His initial refusal to enter through “the backdoor, where servants and work-people were usually admitted; or at least to the side-entrance, where the better class of tradesmen made application” (191-92), is also a refusal to acknowledge and give credence to the class structure which endows the Pyncheon family with its power. When he forces that rejection to the point of placing Alice in servitude to his bride and to effect a class reversal, he completely breaks the façade of power that the Pyncheon family name held for Alice: “no longer proud” (209), Alice realizes that she is nothing but surface and expires. In contrast, the traits that allow Phoebe to excel in both the kitchen and the shop are the ones that help protect her later when Holgrave inadvertently begins to mesmerize her as he tells the story of Alice Pyncheon. Whereas Alice has no power to resist Maule, Phoebe has the inner qualities that allow her to resist when she puts “woman’s might against man’s might” (203). The narrator tells us that it would take “but one wave of his hand” and Phoebe would be entranced. What prevents Holgrave from committing the final wave is that he holds “the rare and high quality of reverence for another’s individuality” (212). Phoebe truly has achieved the modern consciousness and identity that Armstrong discusses, making Holgrave reluctant to give in to his temptation to take complete control of Phoebe. As Shelby Streeby points out, “the turning point in Holgrave’s development comes when he gives up this lawless mesmeric masculinity – his only inheritance – out of ‘reverence’ for Phoebe’s ‘individuality’.”26 Phoebe’s difference from Alice – her developed selfhood – safeguards her from suffering under the 26

Shelby Streeby, “Haunted Houses: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Middle-Class America”, Criticism, XXXVIII/3 (Summer 1996), 464.

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mesmeric influence of Holgrave. Upon recognizing that she does indeed possess the inner qualities that Alice lacked, Holgrave realizes the immorality of progressing any further and stops. Jaffrey Pyncheon suffers no such pangs of conscience in his use of mesmerism to control Clifford. When the novel opens, we discover that Clifford has been institutionalized for a number of years for supposedly killing Jaffrey’s father. Clifford, upon his release, comes to the family home to live. Although he has been released to the custody of his sister, we soon learn that Clifford still exhibits some alarming symptoms of mesmeric influence. He is, for instance, childlike, but even more disturbingly he is continually referred to as a veiled figure: “There he seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and world” (106); “A slumberous veil diffused itself over his countenance” (112); “Was he always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth? – this veil, under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world” (144). These descriptions of Clifford are strikingly similar to the typical descriptions of mediums on stage – the so-called veiled ladies. The reason stage somnambulists were veiled, according to Richard Brodhead, is that the veil allows the Veiled Lady to remain “a lady, but in being veiled she is made into a lady who does not appear in public”.27 The veil allows the woman behind it to be in the marketplace, and at the same time be absent from it because she cannot be seen. In this sense, Clifford’s withdrawn state removes his masculine public role; a role which Jaffrey has kept from him by allowing him to be institutionalized for a crime he did not commit. The references to the veil, therefore, that cover Clifford’s consciousness are not the only signs that he is in a state of mental enslavement to Jaffrey. On the physical level, Jaffrey was the one who kept Clifford in the asylum; when he demands to see Clifford, Jaffrey tells Hepzibah that “without not merely my consent, but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence, political, official, personal – Clifford would never have been what you call free” (233). Jaffrey admits that Clifford’s physical enslavement within the asylum was his doing, and that he has not yet relinquished all the influence he holds over him. 27

Richard Brodhead. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, Chicago, 1993, 49.

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Hepzibah, in her alarm over Jaffrey’s mesmeric influence upon Clifford seeks aid from Holgrave. She seeks him because “she had been conscious of a force in Holgrave, which might well adapt him to be the champion of a crisis” (245). Her suspicion that he “practised animal magnetism ... [and] the Black Art” (84), makes him the perfect foil to Jaffrey. Yet events overtake her. Failing to locate Holgrave, she returns to find Clifford in a much changed state. No longer sedate and veiled, Clifford vibrantly calls to his sister to celebrate: “we can dance now! – we can sing, laugh, play, do what we will.” The spell has been broken by Jaffrey’s sudden death in the parlour, and Clifford has regained his free will. The dispelled trance signals the freeing of class and economic pressures, for Clifford and Hepzibah “may be as lighthearted as little Phoebe herself” (250). His description of how he feels, when asked repeatedly by Hepzibah if their new liberation is merely a dream, is that he has “never been awake before” (256). Clifford’s self-depiction closely resembles subjects who described their experience of being mesmerized. Typically, they stated that “it was [as] if they had been existing in another realm altogether. They only knew that they were now more refreshed, energetic, and healed of their former ailments”.28 Clifford is no longer a somnambulist, sleep-walking through the world, now he is a free-spirited, a fully realized self. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, his celebration of Jaffrey’s death is “a celebration of defending the self against possession”.29 This identity that Clifford discovers upon the death of Jaffrey is appropriate for the nineteenth-century male role. He decides that he and Hepzibah must get out of the house, and in their exploratory adventure, we find that Clifford, who was once effeminate and silent, is now assuming the role of the man in the marketplace: At home she [Hepzibah] was his guardian; here, Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to their new position, with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or at least, into a condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and transitory. (258)

28

Fuller, 20. Walter Benn Michaels, “Romance and Real Estate”, in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, eds Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, Baltimore, 1985, 168. 29

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The separate spheres that belonged to middle-class ideology are present in Clifford’s new world view. He realizes that “the household [i]s a world with its own form of social relations, [and] a distinctively feminine discourse”30 while the world outside the home is a masculine domain. Clifford has been released from the spell of inherited power and family title that he associated with Jaffrey and is now able to live the outside life of an individual. The view of mesmerism that Clifford expresses while on the train complicates the perception of mesmerism as a whole in the novel. While we see mesmerism as a destructive element in terms of what it does to Alice and to Clifford under the power of people trying to do them harm, Clifford, by contrast, describes it as a wonderful idea: “Mesmerism, now! Will that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out of human life?” (263). However, Clifford does not envision mesmerism as a universal remedy. On the contrary, he informs his fellow passenger that such powers should not be used to invade one’s privacy and that “An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions”. Mesmerism is not to be used in the ways that the earlier Maules deployed it, for “the detection of bank-robbers and murderers” (264) through the invasion of their inner thoughts. Instead, Clifford sees its capacity to connect people to their dead loved ones. Thus, for Clifford, the spiritualist side of mesmerism is comforting and positive, anything else constitutes an invasion of privacy and should not be tampered with. This is not surprising when we consider the famous letter that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote from Brook Farm in an attempt to convince Sophia Peabody to stop mesmeric treatments. Toward the end of the letter, he makes the comment that “Love is the true magnetism”.31 That Clifford and Hepzibah take on gender related, socially specific roles once they leave the house is reinforced when they exit the train and move toward a domestic environment: The world had fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them. At a little distance stood a wooden church .... Farther off was a farm-house in the old style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward from the three-story peak to 30 31

Armstrong, 63. Hawthorne, “Letter to Sophia Peabody (18 October 1841)”, 590.

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Angelic Rodgers within a man’s height of the ground. It seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a wood-pile, indeed, near the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered logs.

Upon seeing the farm-house and realizing that they are out of the traffic of public life, Clifford turns to Hepzibah and tells her that she “must take the lead now …. Do with me as you will” (266), indicating that he is no longer in his sphere. The farmhouse can also be interpreted as a representation of their new country home. Under Jaffrey’s control, the country-house was domestically neglected – his only wife had died years before. Having just proclaimed that he will never live in the house of the seven gables again, Clifford finds himself faced with his new life, in which he and Hepzibah will perform gender-specific roles within a country estate. However, the transformation that comes over Clifford and Hepzibah extends to the house of the seven gables as well. Even though Jaffrey’s dead body is on the inside of the house, the exterior is transformed by Alice’s posies blooming on the roof, “as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was consummated” (286). We soon discover that something truly is consummated within the walls of the house when Phoebe and Holgrave meet in the next chapter. The union sought by Maule through his erotic mesmerization of Alice, the union of male and female, and of classes (as represented in the Pyncheon and Maule names), is benignly achieved when Phoebe, although unaware that he is a Maule, accepts Holgrave’s marriage proposal. Clifford recognizes the blooming of Alice’s flowers as a sign of this union when he tells them that: I thought of you both, as we came down the street, and beheld Alice’s Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house, to-day. (308)

A new world has opened up for both the Maules and Pyncheons, one in which they can co-exist in a single family. The ending of the novel signals this coming together of all classes and the freeing of the Pyncheons from the constraints of New World aristocratic views. Often viewed as problematic, the ending works, however, in terms of the realization of a new class structure. The family moves to Jaffrey’s country house, which unlike the house of the seven gables, is built of an impermanent material – wood. The

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family’s move to a mutable house indicates the abandonment of inherited structures. Family names, inheritances, and legacies are redundant in this nineteenth-century world. Instead, as the end of the novel makes clear, individuals must forge their own identities independent of class and family allegiance. This turning toward embracing all becomes even more evident as Clifford extends an invitation to Uncle Venner to come live with them. The mixture of Maule, Old Pyncheons (Hepzibah and Clifford), New Pyncheon (Phoebe), and Venner creates a society where family ties and class orientations no longer create or sustain hierarchical constructs. With the abandonment of class and family pride, Alice’s ghost is released and “floated heavenward from the House of the Seven Gables” (319) as the family leaves for the country. The lesson has been learned and the power that kept Alice tied to the house, the enslavement to old world values, has been broken. Certainly, by the end of the novel, we find that the mesmeric hold of family lineage and social position has given way to something new.

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GEORGE ELIOT’S THE LIFTED VEIL AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF CLAIRVOYANCE

MARTIN WILLIS

George Eliot’s short story The Lifted Veil was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in July 1859. Appearing almost directly in the middle of the long mesmeric century, from Mesmer’s early experiments to the First World War, it is unsurprising that the story should interrogate the key cultural implications of mesmeric phenomena. Centred on its clairvoyant narrator, Latimer, the story investigates the relationship between mesmeric abilities and the dominant paradigms of Victorian society. Concerned ultimately with the rise of a new and powerful capitalist economy, George Eliot envisions mesmeric clairvoyance as a practice unequivocally linked to labour, wealth and financial speculation. By detailing Latimer’s struggle to negotiate the impact of clairvoyance George Eliot reveals mid-Victorian anxieties over the role of work and capital in a changing economic climate, leading to a series of conclusions that remain ambivalent about the position and authority of a prevision that cannot fully be measured by materialist values. By 1859, when George Eliot was writing The Lifted Veil, there were a great number of mesmeric publications from which she could draw inspiration. For the most part these took the form of the published letter, or series of letters, detailing the varied clairvoyant abilities of subjects sensitive to mesmeric tactics. Beryl Gray and Malcolm Bull were first to reveal William Gregory’s Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism (1851) as one of George Eliot’s sources for the story.1 More recently, Helen Small has added Karl von Reichenbach’s Researches on Magnetism (1850) as another

1

B. M. Gray, “Pseudoscience and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’”, NineteenthCentury Fiction, XXXVI/4 (March 1982), 407-23; Malcolm Bull, “Mastery and Slavery in The Lifted Veil”, Essays in Criticism, XLVIII/3 (July 1998), 244-61; William Gregory, Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, London, 1851.

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key influence.2 Of course, George Eliot could have read any number of the other mesmeric publications circulating in Victorian culture from the 1830s, many of which resonate with her descriptions of clairvoyant ability in The Lifted Veil. One such publication, detailing the correspondence between William Stone and Dr Brigham, illuminates the cornerstones of mesmeric and clairvoyant debate in the mid-Victorian period. In a preface to his visit to the clairvoyant Miss Loraina Brackett, Stone admits to Brigham that he had taken to “disliking, exceedingly, the public exhibitions he [Mesmer] was making for money”. Stone’s condemnation of mesmeric clairvoyance is premised upon its acquirement of capitalist philosophies of financial profit, rather than, say, its controversial place within the natural sciences. Yet Stone is not entirely without sympathy for clairvoyant activity, especially as he knows Miss Brackett to be “a young lady of most respectable character [who] had received a good education”. Pecuniary advancement is here balanced by social status, the desire for wealth made acceptable by the class and position of the profiteer. Nevertheless, Stone is still “determined upon a course of examination which would test the case most thoroughly, and in a manner rendering [Miss Brackett’s] deception, delusion, and imposition of every kind, entirely out of the question”.3 Despite being persuaded of Miss Brackett’s credentials, Stone remains fixed upon experimental verification of clairvoyant talent. He is ready to accept its role within a financial economy only if it can provide material evidence to disprove any claims of fraudulence. For Stone, as for others, mesmeric clairvoyance must attest to its own status as credible labour if it is to achieve recognition for the profits of that labour. Therefore, to fail to offer substantive evidence when examined by scientific methodology also places in jeopardy clairvoyance’s social and cultural position within a capitalist economy. 2

Helen Small, Introduction, in The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, ed. Helen Small, Oxford, 1999, xix-xxii; Karl von Reichenbach, Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamides and Imponderables, Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallisation, and Chemical Attraction, in their relation to The Vital Force, London, 1850. 3 William L. Stone, “Letter To Dr A. Brigham on Animal Magnetism: being an account of a remarkable interview between the author and Miss Loraina Brackett while in a state of somnambulism”, New York, 1837, 14.

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In order to interrogate these concerns within The Lifted Veil it is incumbent upon George Eliot to place Latimer’s talent clearly within the common practices of mesmeric clairvoyant activity. Yet it is around this issue that the short story seemed most ambiguous. While the majority of writings on clairvoyance begin with the mesmerized subject who develops prevision, Latimer is never mesmerized. Although Malcolm Bull has argued that Bertha subtly mesmerizes Latimer the narrative remains ambivalent to that possibility. However, the key documents in George Eliot’s self-education of clairvoyant principles offer an answer to this fundamental problem. Helen Small’s recent introduction to The Lifted Veil briefly mentions the importance of Karl von Reichenbach’s work on odylic force, work introduced to Britain by another central figure, William Gregory. Small registers the importance of Reichenbach in reading George Eliot’s short story: Though Gregory’s own researches would lead him to examine [sensitivity] in detail in relation to mesmerism, Reichenbach’s “sensitives” had not been mesmerized. They were, as the name suggested, individuals who, in a normal waking state, were highly responsive – indeed, pathologically responsive – to their environment, and they provide an alternative, more ambiguously “mesmeric” model for understanding Latimer’s condition.4

Closer reading of Gregory and Reichenbach reveals that the mesmeric model for Latimer is not at all ambiguous. Indeed, as Gregory admits, if mesmeric trance can occur without the machinations of the mesmerizer then surely clairvoyance could work similarly? Does clairvoyance, using the term in a general sense, occur spontaneously? When we consider, that the state of natural or spontaneous somnambulism is, in all probability, or rather certainly, identical with the artificial magnetic sleep, we are prepared to expect that, as in some cases of the latter sympathy and clairvoyance occur, so also will these phenomena be sometimes present in the former.5

The connection between spontaneous and artificial mesmerism is one that Gregory had adhered to ever since reading of Reichenbach’s experiments in the late 1840s. In the Editor’s Preface to 4 5

Small, xxi. Gregory, 170.

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Reichenbach’s first British publication in 1850, Gregory argued that “spontaneous somnabulism is of very frequent occurrence” and that the mesmeric state “is merely somnabulism artificially produced”.6 Latimer, then, is a natural mesmeric sensitive, subject to spontaneous mesmeric trances within which he becomes clairvoyant. How, then, is clairvoyance defined by mid-Victorian mesmerists, and does George Eliot’s characterization of Latimer conform to their views? Both Gregory and Reichenbach had a great deal to say on this subject, as did many others who entered the debate at a later point. In the first part of his Physico-Physiological Researches in 1844, Reichenbach had argued that “the sensitive state is essentially a morbid one, and that perfectly healthy persons are perhaps never sensitive”.7 Although he later revised this opinion the connections between mesmeric sensitivity and health continued throughout his work and remained an important area of discussion for other mesmerists. William Edwards was one of the first to attempt to define the mesmeric constitution in his 1850 book on clairvoyance. In concordance with Reichenbach he suggested that “it is only some persons possessed of peculiar temperaments who become clairvoyante”:8 those with a sensitive, imaginative and perceptive character who suffer from disordered nerves but also maintain a purity both of body and mind. While Latimer’s purity can be questioned he is positioned by George Eliot as a man of poetic sensibilities who had been a “very sensitive child”9 and who remains prone to unstable nerves and fainting fits. This medical history would have coincided with Reichenbach’s own experiences of the pathology of the spontaneous somnambulist, who is often beset by “nervousness, spasms, catalepsy, &c. as an indication of a state of the system favourable to the development of sensitiveness”.10 So far, then, Latimer is very much a product of the mesmeric literature available to George Eliot in the late 1850s. William Gregory also directs his attention to health and bodily constitution. His descriptions of individual cases of mesmeric 6

Reichenbach, xxiii. Ibid., viii. 8 William Edwards, Mesmerism: Its Practice and Phenomena: with Numerous Cases Illustrative of Sleep-Waking and Clairvoyance, London, 1850, 64. 9 George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, Oxford, 1999, 5. 10 Reichenbach, xxiii. 7

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sensitivity offer profound similarities with Latimer’s own symptoms. In one example Gregory introduces his reader to a female clairvoyant: A lady was subject, occasionally, not to illness, but to a certain state of mind, possibly connected with a tendency to reverie or abstraction, in which she became aware of what the persons she thought of were doing at the moment, even at very considerable distances.

Shifting the emphasis from the morbid physical constitution introduced by Reichenbach to the psychological effects of somnambulism, Gregory’s subject is a remarkable template for Latimer’s own properties of mind in the second half of his personal narrative. More astonishing, however, is the connection between the first lines of Latimer’s narrative and Gregory’s description of clairvoyant prevision. Gregory tells us that: The next form in which prevision appears, is that in which the somnambulist predicts changes in his own state of health … They further announce, and not unfrequently, especially when under magnetic treatment, that the first, second, third or other attack, to take place on a certain day, at an hour and minute named, will be the last.11

Compare this to The Lifted Veil’s opening paragraph: The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence …. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments. (3)

Markedly similar in theme, these two passages highlight first George Eliot’s dependence upon Gregory’s experimental inquiries, and second her construction of Latimer along the lines set out in mesmeric writing of the 1850s. Latimer’s previsionary talent seems, then, largely representative of the clairvoyance experienced by researchers in the mid-nineteenth 11

Gregory, 171, 164.

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century and not simply a product of the generic gothic features that the narrative also employs. Indeed, scientific investigations of clairvoyance support the view that George Eliot was attempting an accurate portrayal of clairvoyant ability rather than accepting it as a supernatural or occult phenomenon. Gregory’s Letters again provide a useful starting point for considering those scientific inquiries that illuminate a reading of the text. Describing clairvoyance simply as “the direct perception, without the use of the eyes, of absent or distant objects” Gregory acknowledges that the clairvoyant’s ability to see “present and past events” has already been experimentally verified. More tentatively, he theorizes that “future events be also thus perceptible”,12 which George Eliot reiterates through Latimer’s vision of his own death, or of his father’s visit with Bertha. Later proponents of prevision, like George Eliot, readily accept that clairvoyant vision allows access to the past, present and future. Their work attempts instead to articulate the different types of vision to which the clairvoyant is subject. The Key, a spiritualist journal of the 1890s, defines Latimer’s primary talent as “objective clairvoyance [where] the vision is externalised, and is sometimes mistaken by the clairvoyante for a physical reality”.13 Latimer’s second vision, in which his father and Bertha appear before him in his salon, is precisely of this type: “Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, but not alone: there were two persons with him. Strange! I had heard no footsteps, I had not seen the door open” (11). A polemic on seership by the pseudonymous Sepharial adds further definition to Latimer’s ability by clarifying the two most common types of clairvoyant. In one, the positive seer is able to use the mind to enter a spirit world, whereas in the other, the negative or passive seer has the mind entered by the spirit world. This latter type describes Latimer well: The passive or negative seer has the more serviceable gift as their visions are clearer and come not as allegory or symbol but actual event. However they cannot institute visions for themselves.14 12

Ibid., 134, 159, 159. Anon., The Key: A Monthly Journal Dedicated to the Science of Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, Occultism, and all other branches of spiritual science, I/1 (April 1891), 2. 14 Sepharial, Second Sight: A Study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance, London, 1912, 32. 13

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Latimer’s clairvoyance is well defined by these various documents on mesmeric sensitivity. And it is no surprise to find such a detailed typology of clairvoyance. Classification was, after all, a distinctive preoccupation of the Victorians, and George Eliot satirizes this by submitting Latimer to the hands of the phrenologist at the behest of his father. Indeed Latimer’s clairvoyant constitution (nervous, sensitive, passive) seems in direct opposition to his father, who epitomizes the virile man of commerce of the mid-nineteenth century. George Eliot certainly sets up this opposition but only to deconstruct it as the narrative progresses. While Latimer often highlights the differences between his father and himself there are actually many more ways in which they are similar characters, driven by similar cultural forces. Of these forces the most ironic is their common fascination with speculation, a point of contact that leads George Eliot to comment subtly on the connections between clairvoyance and the financial economies of capitalism. Latimer, of course, is a speculator. He reads the future both through the minds of his competitors and in his visions of things to come. In so doing, he gambles with the stock of his own life against future gains. Likewise, Latimer’s father is a gambler on the stock exchange, had “a recent connexion with mining speculations” (6) and is “in root and stem a banker” (5). In 1850s Britain to be a stock exchange speculator was to be involved in a profession that struggled for authority and respectability as often as clairvoyance. Even before the great crash of 1857, brought on by over-zealous speculations and described by D. Morier Evans as the most significant financial crash of the century,15 the speculative financier was seen by some to employ “cunning and artifice”,16 to be a “wanton demon”17 bringing on “bad times” by “untrustworthy”18 promotions. In popular culture, at least, the act of speculation (either 15 D. Morier Evans, The History of the Commercial Crisis, 1857-1858, and the Stock Exchange Panic of 1859, London, 1859, 4. 16 Thomas Corbet, An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals, or, The Principles of Trade and Speculation, London, 1841, 142. 17 Anthony Romney, Three Letters, on the Speculative Schemes of the Present Times, Edinburgh, 1825, 26. 18 Alfred Russell Wallace, Bad Times: An Essay on the Present Depression of Trade, tracing it to its sources in enormous foreign loans, excessive war expenditure, the increase of speculation and millionaires, and the depopulation of the rural districts, with suggested remedies, London, 1885, 3.

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by prevision or financial impropriety) is intimately connected with unsound practice, fraudulence and moral laxity. In order to combat such attacks on respectability the speculator fell back on those material forms of Victorian culture which defended notions of propriety and moral correctness. In the case of the clairvoyant, as we have seen in William Stone’s letter, this was class and education. For Latimer’s father, the economic speculator, these defences are no different. Norman Russell argues that it was “absolutely essential ... for the Victorian banker to seem above reproach”, the necessary “hallmarks” being “an outwardly grave and calm aspect, and a shunning of personal ostentation” as well as “a standard of living consonant with his status as a gentleman”.19 Eric Hobsbawm agrees with this assessment, adding to it the further necessity of “power and influence, independent of the power and influence of traditional birth and status”.20 George Eliot characterizes Latimer’s father in almost exactly these terms. He is a “firm, unbending, intensely orderly man”, who does not show “melancholy or high spirits”. His power derives not from aristocratic means but from continual acquisition which is “aspiring to county influence”. His status is also dependent on the education of his two sons. The eldest was “already a tall youth at Eton” and was to be his “representative and successor” (5), an inheritance that complies satisfactorily with Victorian notions of class expectations. Latimer, the younger son, is to be given a scientific education, a profession equally respectable and also financially useful, as the previous mining speculations had proved. Primarily through the signs and symbols of class privilege, Latimer’s father places himself above and beyond the charges of impropriety that were occasionally levelled at the speculative aspects of his profession. Latimer, too, relies upon the benefits of class in supporting his personal fight with the clairvoyance that threatens to consume him. In figuring this conflict George Eliot concentrates on attitudes to labour and leisure, aspects of mid-Victorian Britain that had come into focus in the 1850s with the rise of the bourgeois class and the increased leisure time afforded to those with the financial security to enjoy it. For the majority of the narrative we see Latimer 19 Norman Russell, The Novelist and Mammon: Literary Responses to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 1986, 75. 20 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, London, 1997, 286.

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indulging in the typical nineteenth-century leisure pursuits of the upper classes: foreign travel, walking tours, and visits to sites of important cultural and artistic interest. All the time, however, the spectres of class and money are haunting the textual landscape. Vienna, for example, where Latimer spends some time is a city which had redesigned itself in the 1850s, building “a circular boulevard flanked by public buildings. What were they? One represented business (the stock exchange) ... and no less than eight the arts.”21 Constantly overshadowed by wealth, the ownership of which allows him extended leisure to pursue an interest in the arts, Latimer intriguingly articulates his clairvoyance within a rhetoric of labour rather than of artistry. Especially when we realize, as Richard Godden has shown, that “by the mid-nineteenth century [there existed] a clear distinction between ‘home’ and ‘market’, ‘leisure’ and ‘labour’”,22 it is a point of some considerable importance that Latimer’s focus for clairvoyance is as work rather than an extension of his artistic leisure pursuits. Latimer almost always invokes the notion of laborious work when confronted by his ability to see the future. We should be conscious here that Latimer already fears the commodification of his mind, the turning of his mental process into an object that can be bought and sold. His encounter with the phrenologist had led him to fear the “big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it” (6). With the onset of his clairvoyance such fears are again resurrected, but on this occasion are instigated by a concern that his abilities will turn him not into a product but a producer of products, a common labourer. Initially believing his clairvoyance to be a form of artistic inspiration – and thereby far removed from the work of the labouring classes – Latimer is “in a state of excited expectation” (11) for its return. When this does not occur he attempts to reproduce the original situation of his vision. However, he “could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions. It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity” (10). Setting artistic reverie against the ethic of physical work, Latimer condemns his attempted clairvoyance as laborious. 21

Ibid., 309. Richard Godden, Fictions Of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer, Cambridge, 1990, 15.

22

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This self-positioning is worth examining in the light of contemporary philosophies of mid-Victorian labour economies. A key figure in this debate in the 1850s was John Ruskin, whose work on art and labour appeared in 1853 and his critique of political economy in 1856, only three years before the publication of The Lifted Veil. In the first of these publications Ruskin argues that the labourer invests “mental powers of expression” in work, views the labour project as “a subject of intense affection” and believes that there is “a peculiar significance in this, indicative both of higher civilisation and gentler temperament”.23 Latimer’s initial view of his clairvoyance is very much in sympathy with Ruskin’s position. Seeing his talent as a form of artistic inspiration, he is accepting of the need to work towards a fuller understanding of its properties. However, the amount of labour involved in the path towards discovery soon makes Latimer dissatisfied. He “could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions” (10), a disappointment which leaves him “discouraged” (11). When, later, he enjoys the scent of new cologne because “I had produced it by slow details of labour, and by no strange sudden madness” (12) it is clear that Latimer is beginning to distance himself from both the labour and art of his clairvoyance and is instead defining it as a pathological illness. In making this decision Latimer moves from a position as the Ruskinian labourer to the very antithesis of Ruskin’s conception of fair and equal political economies, for he begins to use his clairvoyance not to celebrate the inspiring effects of labour but instead to gain social position and power. To do this, of course, he has to discredit labour as an “unhealthy activity” (14) not appropriate to his status within mid-Victorian social hierarchies. In defining his natural and spontaneous clairvoyance as a privilege of class rather than “the poet’s nature” (10) or the labourer’s affection, Latimer places his speculative prevision in parallel with his father’s economic speculations. Constructing such defences proves even more important to Latimer as the nature of his clairvoyance changes from speculative visions of the future to telepathic reading of minds. It is important to register that Latimer remains as passive as before in this new stage of his ability. He does not so much read minds, as the thoughts of other minds 23

John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic”, in Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer, London, 1985, 103.

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intrude upon his. And he undoubtedly views it as an intrusion, as a “thrust[ing] asunder by a microscope vision” (14) of his separation from those around him. The descriptions Latimer provides of those characters whose minds he is able to read are stereotypical class portraits; thumb-nail sketches which sweep away the outward personality and reveal what we are invited to assume is the truth beneath. In these portraits we discover a dual fear: the fear of the invasion of the working classes and the fear of the innate indolence of the leisured class to which he belongs. Latimer describes the “narrow thoughts ... feeble regard [and] … half-wearied pity” (43) of his servants as though there was a distinct chance of revolt against his weakening authority. Having set himself against the labouring classes when his clairvoyance became apparent, now, ironically, his clairvoyance allows that class to obtrude upon him. There is no respite to be found in his own class, either, for their thoughts are equally disturbing. Latimer describes his inability to shut out “all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts” (14) that characterize his personal family and acquaintances. These insights reveal the beginnings of a criticism that George Eliot had until now steered clear of making. In lifting the veil from the underside of Latimer’s privileged background the text hints at the vacuous centre of that culture of leisure, financial power and speculative economies within which Latimer and his father play similar and central roles. From this point on the narrative becomes darker and Latimer’s clairvoyance more directed towards economic advancement. Placing himself once more at the centre of his cultural circle Latimer proceeds to carve out a place in the marriage market: yet another speculation on the future which his father had seen only in monetary terms when considering the “match” (13) between Alfred and Bertha. While Latimer’s clairvoyant ability had enabled him to see that Bertha will become his own wife rather than his brother’s, here his knowledge of her is brought to a surprising end. Although almost overcome by the thoughts of others intruding upon his mind, Bertha remains the one exception to his clairvoyant ability. Latimer makes no attempt to understand this phenomenon, and critics have been unable to satisfactorily decipher the meaning ever since. Kate Flint touches upon it in her discussion of blood transfusion, arguing that it is a

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narrative device employed partly to explain Latimer’s fascination with Bertha.24 While there is certainly validity in the practical outcome of this argument, there is a more relevant frame of reference in which to discuss the block on Latimer’s telepathic talent. Clairvoyant literature often describes false, or poor, clairvoyance as often as it does powerful and true clairvoyance. Paschal Randolph, writing in 1870 and looking back on a lifetime of clairvoyant research, tells us that clairvoyance attempted for purposes of “lust ... and pecuniary speculation” is morally bereft and leads to the waning of the talents the clairvoyant has enjoyed. “Remember”, Randolph emphasizes, true clairvoyance is coincident only with normal appetites normally sated. Excess destroys it. Every passion, except the grosser, has a normal sphere.25

This is Latimer’s problem. His passion for Bertha, which he says himself is “not ordinary boyish admiration” (15), is the grosser passion of lust conjoined with economic greed. These excesses cut off Latimer’s ability to read Bertha’s mind. His lust for her, his determination to use his clairvoyance to win her and her wealth means he no longer enjoys the talents that had previously come so easily. However, Latimer does not need to wait long for the return of his clairvoyant telepathy, and it is interesting that this final development in Latimer’s clairvoyance occurs simultaneously with his acquisition of personal wealth. With the death of his father he is able at last to penetrate Bertha’s mind and to inherit the gains of economic speculation. The ability to read Bertha’s thoughts comes to him as a result of the removal of the obstacle set in his path: physical passion. In transferring this passion for Bertha into compassion for his father Latimer restores his physical and mental purity and his clairvoyance spectacularly returns. George Eliot makes very clear the connection between the two events:

24 Kate Flint, “Blood, Bodies, and The Lifted Veil”, Nineteenth-Century Literature, LI/4 (March 1997), 455-73. 25 Paschal Beverly Randolph, Seership! The Magnetic Mirror. A Practical Guide to those who aspire to Clairvoyance-Absolute. Original and Selected from Various European and Asiatic Adepts, Boston, 1870, 17, 3.

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It was the evening of my father’s death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded Berth’s soul from me … was first withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had been watching by my father’s death-bed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life – the last faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand. What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme agony? (31)

Financial security from a father who “had been one of the most successful men in the money-getting world” (27) and a clairvoyance that gives him “complete illumination” are the two related aspects of Latimer’s personality which have now reached their peak. Yet it is at this very point in the narrative that Latimer begins to succumb to the pressures of his clairvoyance and withdraws from “worldly ambitions” and “social vanities” (32). This dialectic of knowledge, power and impotence in the use of clairvoyance can be traced not only to Latimer’s lust for Bertha and for wealth but also to a broader anxiety of rejection on personal and scientific principles. Using clairvoyance for economic gain opens it to charges of malpractice. Without the laborious experimentation required to produce material evidence in support of the veracity of clairvoyant prevision, its use in the acquisition of material wealth can be seen as fraudulent. Financial speculations, we should recall, were also placed under suspicion for exactly the same reasons: a quick accumulation of capital with no noticeable labour involved in its seizure. Latimer’s failure fully to investigate his clairvoyance (mainly because of his disinclination towards labour) makes him wary of revealing it to others: “I shrank from the idea of disclosing to anyone what might be regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after” (13). At another stage, “I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of words ... should have betrayed me as an exceptional being, a sort of quiet energumen, whom every one, Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid” (18). Fearful of discovery, Latimer is also implicitly concerned by the effect of disclosure upon his economic security. In his discussions it is his father and Bertha who receive special attention, not only because they are his closest

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personal acquaintances but also because they represent his financial future. Nineteenth-century proponents of clairvoyance reveal similar fears of rejection and loss of status. Paschal Randolph recognizes the scepticism of the public in the opening sentence to his clairvoyant memoir, where he asks the pardon of the reader in making “another attempt to rescue the subject of somnambulic vision from the charlatanry of the day”.26 In a like-minded vein Mr Brindley, in an 1844 Zoist letter believes Dr Freer to be an exemplar of public opinion in his assessment of clairvoyance as a “gross imposture”.27 Even William Gregory, amongst the most ardent defenders of mesmeric clairvoyance, attests to the public view that “observations are founded on falsehood, deceit, and imposture in the sensitive subjects”.28 From the 1840s through the 1870s, then, one of the popular beliefs was that clairvoyance was no more than fakery, a theatrical perversion of medical mesmerism or misplaced religion. To claim the talent of clairvoyance was to set oneself up to ridicule in the first instance, to questioning of one’s mental fitness in the second, and to demands of proof in the third. Latimer does not wish to lay himself open to any of these challenges. Nevertheless, the calls for clairvoyance to prove itself scientifically were loudest in the years surrounding George Eliot’s completion of The Lifted Veil. Case studies of the time illuminate the determination of investigators to reveal fraudulent clairvoyants and undermine clairvoyance’s claims. This is the case with William Stone in his sittings with Loraina Brackett in 1837 and also with William Edwards in his case studies of 1850. In both these investigations the aim is either to reveal the clairvoyant as a fraud or to disprove that clairvoyant ability is present. Stone takes up a position of immediate authority in his dealings with Loraina Brackett. His descriptions of the first sitting with her in August 1837, attended by ten people, seven of them male, reveal a distinctly patronizing air of patriarchal superiority. His questions, although couched in the rhetoric of friendly conversation, are designed to catch out Loraina Brackett and uncover 26

Randolph, 1. T. B. Brindley, “Mr Brindley’s Cures of Various Diseases and a Case of Apparent Clairvoyance”, The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Applications to Human Welfare, I/4 (January 1844), 467. 28 Reichenbach, xx. 27

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her deceit. Loraina Brackett, even in her mesmeric state, becomes frustrated and annoyed by these persistent interrogations, highlighting the very different dynamic at work in the scientific experiment from that in normal intercourse between the genders. Stone’s constant attempts to pierce the clairvoyant’s visions can be placed alongside William Edward’s final conclusions of his own similar experiences: Often have I listened to the beautiful and eloquent tones of a clairvoyante, whilst in language the most touching and sublime, she has depicted the glories of a future state. Yet around the same has there been cast a veil of obscurity, which I could not penetrate and which she would not unfold.29

Like Stone and Edwards, Latimer also fails to penetrate the mysteries of his clairvoyance. But unlike these investigators he never makes a concerted effort to do so. Latimer has all the tools for a definitive statement on his personal clairvoyant talents: he is educated, wealthy and of significant social status. His family also has access to scientific expertise, as exemplified by his father’s employment of the phrenologist. Further than this, he is able to take himself through all the stages of disbelief and ridicule to which the public clairvoyant is subject, without the involvement of wider society. Yet Latimer does not take this opportunity. Instead he suppresses a desire to lift his own veil in preference to economic gain through his marriage to Bertha and his inheritance of his brother’s more privileged position. George Eliot does not wholeheartedly condemn Latimer’s decision to elude responsibility for his clairvoyance. Rather, she uses the concluding sections of the narrative to explore the problematic position of those phenomena which claim scientific status but whose practices do not conform to mainstream notions of experimental evidence and scientific methodology. The experiment in blood transfusion which Latimer’s friend Charles Meunier attempts on the body of Mrs Archer fulfils this role. Several critics have put forward arguments to account for this rather odd episode. Flint, for example, has shown the relation of Meunier’s experiment to pathological investigations conducted in the mid-nineteenth century, but no one has yet argued that Meunier’s construction of the blood-transfusion 29

Edwards, 93.

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experiment is as important as the experiment itself.30 What George Eliot aims to show here is that an experiment conducted without proper scientific procedures, and which does not lead to material evidence in support of a certain phenomenon, is anathema to the Victorian scientific establishment and to a wider cultural view that privileges material production above esoteric theory. Meunier’s experiment contravenes several statutory practices of authoritative scientific investigation. First of all he engages only Latimer as his assistant, whom we already know is adverse to scientific work of any kind and is also untrained in clinical practice. Yet this is no ad-hoc decision on Meunier’s part. Indeed he seems consciously aware of his disregard for best practice, confessing that he “can’t do without another hand, but it would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistant”. Meunier’s decision is based upon a belief that “a disagreeable foolish version of the thing might get abroad” (39), which calls into question the validity of his experiment within the wider medical and scientific community. The blood transfusion itself takes place, rather typically, at night and is touched by those aspects of the gothic which have infused the entire narrative. Once the macabre scene of revitalization is over the very fabric of science breaks down completely. Meunier, as Latimer narrates, “looked paralysed” and “life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him”. It is little surprise to note that “his lips were sealed” (42) on the subject from that moment. The great scientist of “European reputation” (37) had conducted a new experiment with non-scientific personnel in a domestic space not designed or equipped for investigation of this sort and he had done so without notifying any other scientific authority or complying with sound scientific method. What Meunier does is move the blood transfusion experiment from the realm of the scientific to that of the occult sciences. “Clandestine, hidden from sight … beyond ordinary understanding or knowledge”,31 as the occult is defined, is an apt description of Meunier’s experimental practice. It is also an accurate representation of Latimer’s concealment of his clairvoyance, and this striking comparison is exactly what George Eliot intended. The blood transfusion experiment is not an odd addendum to the narrative but a key symbol of Latimer’s failure to 30 31

Flint, 464-68. OED, Oxford, 1993, II, 1973.

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properly evidence his clairvoyance. Secretive, supernatural, and unverifiable, Meunier’s experiment actively represents the weaknesses in Latimer’s clairvoyance. Forever chasing the material affects of social and financial power, Latimer has misjudged the importance of placing his ability on a solid platform of scientific experimentation and verification. Not to have done so leaves him without any foundation on which to have built his financial and social successes. It is, then, inevitable that his world of economic privilege will come crashing down. By the time we reach the conclusion of Latimer’s narrative, his lack of investigative rigour has indeed rebounded upon him. His detachment from his own abilities leads to a withdrawal of the ultimate clairvoyant act: seeing beyond one’s own death and into the spirit world. It also brings to an end the economic speculations with which Latimer has been associated. Having gained a position of financial importance he is left without an heir who will inherit and continue the family line and he has seen Bertha become “the mistress of half our wealth” (42). Everything that his father had been determined to protect has been undone. Worse than this, his clairvoyance can show him little of his imminent fate: “Darkness – darkness – no pain – nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward” (3). Where once the future had been illuminated now it is nothing but darkness, darkness without end and without the clear sight to which Latimer has become accustomed. This is his final punishment for a lack of vision, or rather for a lack of an appropriate experimental examination of that vision. The scientific labour that may have provided Latimer’s clairvoyance with some evidentiary cultural currency has given way to indolence and selfindulgence. It is telling that as Latimer begs his reader to “remember and pity the toil and the struggle” so that “you may give due honour to the work achieved”, he then reveals that “I shall leave no works behind me for men to honour” (4). The veil which clairvoyance had lifted is brought down once again.

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DAZED AND ABUSED: GENDER AND MESMERISM IN WILKIE COLLINS

SHARRONA PEARL

In The Moonstone (1858) and The Woman in White (1868) Wilkie Collins interrogates the gender politics of the Victorian family through the medium of mesmerism. Mesmerism is his most powerful tool to reinscribe gender ideologies, using it to render active woman passive, and passive men active. This tool of dominance is used by men alone, reinforcing notions of science as masculine and all-powerful. Through his many shifting messages and challenges, one notion emerges unequivocally: women and men can both be mesmerized, bringing out their true and rightful behaviours. This new science thereby supports an older authority, that of patriarchal power. As the mesmerized subject was under the complete control of the mesmerizer, it is unsurprising that it was generally men who were mesmerizing women. Likewise, prevailing medical and popular opinions believed that men’s minds were stronger, leaving women’s volatile nature more subject to this type of influence.1 By providing the means to control women’s bodies, mesmerism also allowed men to control their sexuality. Women entered ecstatic states under male physical direction, leading to potentially compromising situations. Consequently, the intimate relationship between mesmerizer and mesmerized led to suspicion about the morality of the experience. Collins employs this contentious and popular science and its relationship to notions of gender in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. In both, mesmerism is used to question ideas about gender, at times challenging existing norms, but ultimately supporting notions of female passivity and male activity. Mesmerism plays a surprisingly authoritative role in these texts despite its status as an unstable science.2 Since the medium of his 1 See Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 214-15. 2 Ibid., 4.

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examination is itself fraught with tension and surrounded by debate, mesmerism is the perfect tool for Collins to expose and then legitimize gender divisions. Science as the source of power: the medium of mesmerism Despite the clear lack of consensus as to its efficacy or validity, Collins was a serious proponent of mesmerism, using it as a scientifically authoritative solution to the mystery of the Moonstone and as a means of propagating the crime against the Women in White. Collins had been active in supporting the mesmeric sciences, contributing a series of reports on mesmerism in 1852 to the Leader.3 These essays about mesmerism and clairvoyance, written as letters to the editor, George Henry Lewes, were Collins’ longest work of nonfiction. Along with his close friend Charles Dickens, who was a longtime advocate of mesmerism, Collins visited mesmeric practitioners and participants in Genoa in 1853. The pair also spent some time with Mrs de la Rue, whom Dickens magnetized for hysteria.4 As Alison Winter argues, scientific and popular opinion about mesmerism was far from uniform in the Victorian era. Though many challenged the claims of mesmerism’s practitioners and enthusiasts, its later status as a “pseudoscience” was hardly fixed in the mid-nineteenth century.5 Thus, in the 1860s when Collins was writing, mesmerism had many supporters among both scientists and the lay public. His claims regarding the power of mesmerism to control others, foster unconscious criminal behaviour, and even to foretell the future, though contentious, were far from outrageous. However, Collins’ awareness of the controversial nature of mesmerism is reflected in the scepticism of the lawyer Mathew Bruff and the retainer Gabriel Betteredge in The Moonstone, and the doctor Mr Dawson in The Woman in White. Bruff writes a reproving letter to Ezra Jennings, scolding him for attempting something that was “a 3

Wilkie Collins, “The incredible not always impossible”, Leader (3 April 1852), 238-29; and “Magnetic evenings at home”, Leader (17 January 1852), 63-64; (14 February 1852), 160-61; (21 February 1852), 183-84; (28 February 1852), 207-208; (6 March 1852), 321-23; (13 March 1852), 256-57. 4 Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of the Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology, London, 1988, 59. See also Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Princeton, 1975. 5 Winter, 6.

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piece of trickery, akin to the trickery of mesmerism, clairvoyance, and the like”.6 These sceptics are proven wrong at the conclusion of both tales, and the scientific validity of mesmerism is established in the world of texts, if not in reality. Still, Collins’ commitment to novelistic realism is reflected in his depiction of mesmerism. Both Franklin Blake’s trances and Marian Halcombe’s spells are an accurate presentation of prevailing mesmeric practices and uses in the second half of the nineteenth century.7 Mesmerism’s key role in each of these novels is supported against the backdrop of the presence of scientific knowledge more generally. Each text has at least one talented and learned scientist and mesmerist, though The Woman in White’s Fosco is the villain and The Moonstone’s Jennings is cast in a complex and equivocal light. In Fosco’s case, science occupies a highly ambiguous role. His chemical skill is underscored by Marian early in the novel; he is “one of the first experimental chemists living”.8 Fosco is well aware of the power of his knowledge of chemistry: Chemistry especially has always had irresistible attractions for me from the enormous, the illimitable power which the knowledge of it confers. Chemists – I assert it emphatically – might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of humanity .… Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates – the Chemist. (62223)

Scientific knowledge is one of the most significant of the many threats that Fosco poses. He employs his chemical abilities to secretly open and intercept Marian’s letters asking for assistance against his fraudulent plots. However, scientific skill also emerges as one of his greatest virtues as he relies on his chemical knowledge to save Marian, and refrains from using it to kill Laura. Likewise, mesmerism in the text is ambiguous. Though Fosco uses his skills to control Marian, he does so in the name of desire rather than destruction. Sciences such as chemistry emerge in Collins’ interrogation as morally ambiguous. Even a man as villainous as Fosco draws 6 7 8

43.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland, Oxford, 1999, 397. See Winter, 60-108. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, (1868), ed. Julian Symons, London, 1974,

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boundaries around the appropriate uses and abuses of science; he will not use chemistry to commit the ultimate act of destruction, murder, and even applies his knowledge to save lives. He is eager to use mesmerism to the same ends; as Marian’s bumbling doctor notes, scornfully: “This foreign nobleman of yours is dying to try his quack remedies (mesmerism included) on my patient” (387). By contrast, Fosco has no compunction about using science, including both chemistry and mesmerism, to dominate the women around him. To Fosco, such an application of science is neither evil nor inappropriate, as women who succumb to him deserve to be controlled. From this perspective, he applies chemistry and mesmerism to the same end, establishing both as legitimate forms of knowledge and scientific practice. Science in The Moonstone is equally multivalent. Though it provides the means of clearing Blake’s name and solving the theft, it is also the very method by which the crime was perpetrated. The limitations of science are also highlighted, in that although the experimental re-enactment of the night of the theft reveals Blake’s participation in the taking of the diamond, the Moonstone’s location and Ablewhite’s role remain concealed until an outside source concludes the mystery. One aspect of science emerges unambiguously – it has power that cannot be ignored. This message is fittingly the very goal which motivated the initial secret application of opium to Blake, after he stated disdainfully at a dinner party that “a course of medicine, and a course of groping in the dark … meant one and the same thing” (69). Blake’s scientific lesson is learned at great cost, but upon his enlightenment, order is restored. The source of restoration, Jennings, is an example of the advantages and disadvantages of the strength of medical science. A long-time sufferer from some enigmatic disease, Jennings is only able to find relief in the very opium that is the source of the theft’s mystery. This relief has its costs, however, in rendering him an addict who cannot function without his dose, and whose faculties are sadly limited. He dies soon after he saves Blake; and for some unknown past sin, he is beyond personal salvation. Jennings is doctor and detective, patient and hero, who acts as both a door to the unconscious and the reader’s guide through it. He solves the mystery, though he himself remains one, buried by his own wishes with his papers and diaries, with all of the clues to his past rendered irretrievable.

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Jennings’ multiplicity of roles extends to ambiguity surrounding his gender placement. As Tamar Heller explains, as scientist and doctor, he performs important detective work that places him firmly in the role of powerful male.9 Ironically, however, it is through the voice of his own professional power that Jennings speaks to his powerless situation as victim and patient, placing him in the feminized position occupied by women elsewhere in the text. In his words, it is “useless to appeal to my honour as a man” (374). As a scientist, however, Jennings has all the answers. Although his experiment is akin to mesmerism and clairvoyance, these are valid scientific forces, not witchcraft. Jennings’ confidence is meant to reassure not only his opponents but the readers as well. In order to lend more authority to his claims about mesmerism in The Moonstone, Collins has Jennings quote extensively from wellknown medical authorities of the day, specifically William Benjamin Carpenter and John Elliotson, whom he refers to as “one of the greatest of English physiologists” (386). Jennings uses these sources to substantiate his claims about the effects of drugs and hypnosis and his ideas about memory and non-conscious thoughts. These notions underlie the physiological experiment that ultimately provides the solution to the mystery of the theft. The irony is that the novel’s main academic source, Elliotson, was widely regarded, A. D. Hutter notes, as nothing more than a quack even as the work was being published. Despite his reputation, Elliotson’s work, both mesmeric and medical, coincided with Collins’ views. As Hutter argues, “the basis for Collins’s apparently factual authority is itself, thus contradictory – like the testimony of his characters of the confused evidence of his crime”.10 The contested terrain of authority functions not only to reflect debates about mesmerism, but as a plot device that mirrors contradictions in the stories of the characters, emphasized by the technique of multiple narration. Like the potentially positive or negative practice of mesmerism, the multiple voices and their multiple truths reflect ambiguity about traditional domestic space, gender norms, family 9

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: CT, 1992, 128. 10 A. D. Hutter, “Dreams, Transformations and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction”, in New Casebooks: Wilkie Collins, ed. Lyn Pykett, Houndmills, 1998, 181, 82.

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conventions, and, at its core, the nature of self-control and responsibility. The invocation of Elliotson as a scientific authority only underlines the tension surrounding the use of mesmerism as a valid experimental science. Collins would have been well aware of Elliotson’s shattered reputation, but he chose to emphasize the Elliotson model of the mind instead of the work of the more respectable Carpenter. Various scholars have commented that the use of Elliotson was a deliberate ploy to emphasize that the outcome of the experiment was only a matter of chance, thereby underscoring the multiplicity of interpretations and possibilities presented throughout the novel.11 This argument, however, is unconvincing. Collins did not view Elliotson as a fraud, despite popular opinion. In fact, Collins’ goal was the opposite; while acknowledging its possible uses, he attempted to lend authority not only to Jennings and his experiments, but to the project of mesmerism. In Jennings’ eyes, the study of altered states was a legitimate scientific field. By using his characters to present the range of opinions on mesmerism and science, Collins recreates a very real debate about the status of science as it struggled to attain authority in the Victorian era.12 Both The Moonstone and The Woman in White clearly fall on one side of the debate; despite the many interpretations of mesmerism and science that are examined in the novels, the power of science prevails. Likewise, the power of the male scientist is established. Though both Fosco and Jennings die, their legacies live on through their experimental prowess, reinforcing notions of the importance of scientific pursuits. For both characters, science is the mechanism of their corruption, but it also represents their sole opportunity for redemption and reassertion of masculinity. Jennings is destroyed by the very opium that he uses to save Blake, yet in saving him Jennings is allowed to “have seen a little sun-shine” (427) before he dies. By effectively filling the role of detective and scientist, Jennings is able to reclaim some of the masculine identity lost through his disease and his status as an outcast. Even Bruff apologizes for his treatment of Jennings and his suspicion of the doctor’s methods, acknowledging him as a professional and an expert: “I beg your pardon, Mr Jennings, 11

Philip O’Neill, Wilkie Collins: Women, Property and Propriety, Houndmills, 1988,

19. 12

See Winter, 6.

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for having doubted you. You have done Franklin Blake an inestimable service. In our legal phrase, you have proved your case” (424). Jennings asserts masculine dominance over the stubborn Rachel Verinder by taking her knowledge and applying it far more effectively than she had. He gains control over both Rachel and Blake in acting as the director in the re-enactment of the theft – a ploy that provides the solution to the mystery. Meanwhile, Fosco’s ability to find salvation is far more limited. Even his name, “Fosco”, has negative connotations, meaning “creepy” or “dark” in his native Italian. As a master manipulator, his only redeemable features are his love of Marian and his refusal to use science to kill his enemies. Yet his love for Marian may be seen as a challenge to his own masculinity; rather than killing her, he slavishly applies his knowledge to nurse her to health and to spare her and her sister’s lives. However, he uses mesmerism to prevent her, a woman, from triumphing over him, thereby reasserting his masculine prowess and even managing to draw her to him. Knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is neither neutral nor strictly utilitarian in Collins’ work. Rather, values can never be detached from the type of knowledge and the ways in which it can be used. However, science is highly ambiguous, with both good and evil applications. He strongly argues for the necessity of pursuing all types of knowledge, regardless of their implications. In order to emphasize the legitimacy of science in all its forms, Collins specifically uses one of the more controversial forms of science to make his claims about scientific power and efficacy. The use of mesmerism as the means through which Collins interrogates knowledge is neither ironic nor accidental; he deliberately chooses to legitimate a form of science, mesmerism, and a scientific authority, Elliotson, that will encompass all forms of knowledge. Collins’ presentation of male mesmerists who are also skilled male scientists underscores his commitment to scientific pluralism. Despite the challenges Collins presents to mainstream ideas about controversial figures such as Elliotson, the gender of these figures undergoes no similar interrogation. Marian and Rachel may be intelligent and forceful, but at no time are they presented as people engaged in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Such considerations remain the domain of men, whether villains or heroes. These weightier male pursuits are juxtaposed with more flighty female concerns like Laura’s drawings and Rachel’s jewellery. Yet Rachel has knowledge

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and when, after the theft, she mysteriously refuses to speak with Blake and breaks off all relations with him, suspicion rests upon her. The characters are all too prepared to implicate Rachel in another crime, perhaps one equally as damning – Rachel knows too much. Through her silence, she is withholding information, thereby exerting power over those around her. Blake suffers from her strange silence, both in terms of his emotional connection to her, his “own eyes full of tears”, and, more importantly in terms of achieving his quest of finding the thief, due to what he acknowledges as “missing links in the evidence” (292). Though Rachel’s reticence is borne of noble intentions, her stubbornness upsets the balance of power in the domestic space. Her knowledge, though dangerous, provides the clue that eventually allows for the solution and the happy ending. Had she spoken sooner, much pain and hardship, both to herself and to her husband-to-be, would be avoided. Hence, though Rachel does act courageously and unconventionally, it is ultimately demonstrated that she also acts unwisely. It is only when she speaks, and the balance of power is restored to its conventional setting, that the mystery can be solved and gender equilibrium and domestic peace can be attained. Initially in the text, the uncertainty regarding mesmerism as a science translates into uncertainty regarding masculinity, particularly in Jennings’ case. This uncertainty provokes a crisis of order that can only be solved by reinstating traditional gender divisions; by the end of the two novels, Marian and Rachel are thoroughly domesticated and under the control of the men around them. Collins uses mesmerism to play with gender ambiguities, but as mesmerism is ultimately validated, so too is the masculinity of the males who both practice it and participate in it. Fainting women and fighting men: gender and mesmerism In The Woman in White, Marian’s inability to overcome Fosco independently demonstrates both to readers and to her that she needs the help of others, particularly male others, in order to triumph over the powers that challenge her and the ones she loves. Marian must come to that realization in stages. Fosco’s mesmeric influence over her is presented in increments, from prying into her mind, which results in a terrible “strange condition, which was not waking … and not sleeping”, “a trance, or day-dream” (295), to far more treacherous

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domination of her once very controlled nervous system and her very capable brain: His eyes seemed to reach my inmost soul through the thickening obscurity of the twilight. His voice trembled along every nerve in my body, and turned me hot and cold alternately. The mystery and terror of my dream, which had haunted me at intervals all through the evening, now oppressed my mind with an unendurable foreboding and an unutterable awe. (310)

Fosco attains power not only over Marian’s mind, but also over her body, as she has “no choice but to give it up again and return to the sofa, sorely against my will” (295). The slow, subtle, and gradual nature of Marian’s capitulation is deliberately designed by Fosco in order to render her surrender all the more genuine, much like her path to domesticity. The incremental nature of Fosco’s control over her forces her to become an agent in her own downfall, as she refuses to conform until the situation becomes dire. Had she capitulated earlier, she, and those she loved, would not have come under as lethal a threat. Fosco’s power over Marian culminates after what the critic Peter Thoms sees as the apex of Marian’s acts of rebellion, during which she crouches outdoors in the rain for hours on end in order to eavesdrop on the pivotal conversation of Fosco and Glyde.13 As a result of her exposure and possibly due to her already weakened state, Marian becomes dangerously ill with what Fosco alone recognizes as typhoid fever. It is her unresponsive and passive state that gives Fosco and Glyde the confidence to carry out their plan without fear of detection from this very worthy nemesis. However, Fosco tends to her heroically throughout her illness. Though his chance of success would be increased tremendously by killing both Marian and her sister, Fosco refuses to use his great chemical knowledge for ill ends. Although this shows how Fosco is hesitant to illicitly abuse science; he does not harbour such reservations about mesmerism. This may imply that Fosco does not view mesmerism as a science equal to his beloved chemistry; it is also possible that he views his control of Marian as a labour of love rather than a technique of crime. It is Marian’s position as a woman, one to whom he is greatly attracted, that makes her vulnerable to his power. That Fosco uses mesmeric 13

Peter Thoms, The Windings of the Labyrinth, Athens: OH, 1992, 71.

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attraction as a medium through which he expresses his emotional attraction is supported by an examination of the methods he uses to control others around him. Taylor points out that Fosco uses various psychological codes to manipulate everyone in his household: his wife and Glyde are controlled through moral management, and Laura and Anne through the incompetence of the medical establishment.14 It is Marian, and Marian alone, who is manipulated by mesmerism. By practising mesmerism only on Marian, he links its use to both love and morality, an application he refuses when considering his other scientific skills. His “chemical resources” cannot be used for evil; they were cultivated for the pure pursuit of knowledge and for actions “harmless to the individual on whom I practised”, as befits rational science. Only in such situations, “two occasions only” did Fosco “summon to [him]self the assistance of chemical knowledge” (622). By contrast, mesmerism has romantic and thus irrational ramifications, thereby distinguishing it from what he sees as pure, objective, irrational, and amoral science. However, the pursuit to control a woman emerges as both an appropriate use for science and as an effective means of demonstrating masculinity. Thus, though Fosco’s behaviour may interrogate the scientific status of mesmerism, he ultimately affirms it. This ambiguity towards mesmerism, a non-traditional scientific practice, parallels the ambiguity inherent in Marian’s character. Though she is a strong, intelligent, unconventional woman whose maverick behaviour allows her to save her loved ones, she must be tamed in order to achieve the happy, domestic ending. It is fitting that mesmerism is the mechanism by which she is tamed and forced to seek the help of male others, for both its status and its power are equally ambiguous as those on whom it is applied. In a sense, Fosco’s greatest victory over Marian is his love-induced mercy for her. His feelings towards her cause her great shame, not just due to Fosco’s criminal character, but also because these feelings are based on parts of herself with which she constantly struggles, those which she finds to be too masculine. Marian’s early power over Fosco, based on his attraction to her, is itself one of the challenges. This type of power of a woman over a man is not unconventional, but the basis on which it rests is itself unacceptable, making the 14

Taylor, 120.

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relationship as ambiguous as the power by which it is resolved. In order for domestic balance to be restored, Fosco must, even in his downfall, triumph over Marian. In allowing her to live with the knowledge that her life rested on the most feminine of wiles, the love of a man, gained through the most masculine of ways, her attempts to save others through her own cunning, Fosco retains the ultimate control over Marian. He may die, but as long as Marian is alive, she lives with the knowledge of her indebtedness to her greatest enemy. The Moonstone too makes use of mesmeric techniques for criminal gain, but in a dramatically different fashion; here, mesmerism is twice part of the crime yet also twice part of the solution. Rather than applying mesmeric techniques to weaken a potential foe, they are used to unconsciously assist Blake in a theft. Futhermore, mesmerism is deployed as a clairvoyant mechanism by the Indians who wish to steal back their rightful property. A young British boy is unwillingly placed in a mesmeric trance that enables him to foretell the future for the Indians who are stalking the diamond. To solve the case, Jennings recreates the conditions that caused Blake to fall into the original trance. The key to these conditions is found in the fevered ramblings of the doctor, Candy. Jennings faithfully copied down the unconscious fragments of the doctor, piecing together the words to create a complete story. He assembles written and verbal texts and the working of the unconscious to unlock the mystery of the Moonstone. In the case of both Blake and the boy, mesmerism is used to represent consciousness as order and control, and unconsciousness as vulnerability to the control of others; so too with Candy, whose words seem beyond comprehension and whose mind seems beyond control. By applying his knowledge of mesmerism and trance-states, Jennings is able to penetrate Candy’s mind and to make sense of his words. The Moonstone itself becomes a physical manifestation of the occult, whose powers are unleashed as it is pursued by mesmerism. The distinction between the physical and the ephemeral is thus destabilized, as are the boundaries between unconsciousness and imagination, and intention and effect. Reality itself becomes challenged; readers do not know who to trust and who to suspect, both in commission of the crime and its narration. Even as Blake’s guilt is revealed, readers are led to question an individual’s control over his own mind and body. Both criminal actions and guilt are ambiguous. Authority itself becomes contested terrain as the truth seems elusive,

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and the methods of its attainment, absurd. Mesmerism is initially dismissed as “hocus pocus”, a practice “often seen done in the East” (39). Instead we are asked to put our faith in the somewhat repellent Jennings, about whom the normally kindly Betteredge states that “Nobody likes” (320), the ill Candy, who “lost his memory in the fever and ... has never recovered more than the wreck of it since” (320), and the whimsical Blake, who “seemed to pass his life in a state of perpetual contradiction with himself” (43). Likewise, we are invited to accept the claims of Rachel, whose motives and whose very voice we have been trained to mistrust, as she is suspected of having “deceived her own mother … by a series of abominable lies” (176). As such, detection itself becomes destabilized, as does the domestic order. Betteredge warns against “the weakness of believing in facts” (309). The major providers of clues, the narrators, and indeed the mastermind behind the solution, Ezra Jennings, all present challenges to traditional equilibrium through their status as outsiders. Jennings and Blake, fulfilling the masculine roles of detectives, are both highly feminized characters. The stubbornly silent Rachel, who provides the crucial piece of information, the witnessing of Blake’s theft, is herself suspect. As her silence upsets expectations, so too does her speech; she implicates the very character the readers have grown to trust, and he can only be vindicated by the use of mesmeric techniques, themselves the source of ambiguity and confusion in the novel. In addition, Rachel’s revelations place guilt firmly in the family sphere, negating all possibility of the theft being committed by an external foe. The Moonstone serves both to undermine and affirm oppressive Victorian stereotypes, particularly those relating to family and respectability. As Lyn Pykett notes, the crimes of the novel (robbery and murder) are committed by the family on the family. Rather than providing protection and support, the family is actually the source of danger.15 In fact, one of the great attractions of the sensation novel lies in its use of the family as a site of threats and thrills.16 Similarly, Collins uses the family system to link respectable and upstanding Victorian members of society to the lowest and most criminal 15

Lyn Pykett, “Introduction”, in New Casebooks, 21. Lyn Pykett, The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone, Plymouth, 1994, 6. 16

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elements.17 In The Moonstone, family honour is immediately interrogated, as the origin of the Moonstone is itself criminally suspect. Stolen by Rachel’s uncle John Herncastle, known as “one of the greatest blackguards that ever lived” (30), the unlucky gem is left to his niece as a gift of reconciliation, although far darker motives are suggested. Thus, the tone of family mistrust is established at the very outset. It is significant that whereas Marian is effectively disabled through mesmerism, Blake is enabled; his tendency towards equivocation is overcome as he is spurred to action. Early in the novel, Blake comments on himself that “I never settle on anything” (28), a conclusion Betteredge supports by facetiously mentioning his “universal genius, dabbling in everything” (51). Like many of his schemes, his attempts to secure the Moonstone backfire; in his unconscious state he hands over the stone to the intrepid Ablewhite, only promptly to lose all recollection of the act. However, the legacy of action remains with him as he spearheads attempts to track down the diamond. Jennings’ recreation of the night of the theft may demonstrate Blake’s clear guilt in taking the Moonstone, however, he is cleared of all malicious motives. Heller notes that Blake carries no moral responsibility, not only because he was unconscious while taking the diamond, but because he was taking it in order to protect Rachel from the threat of other thieves.18 Gender ideologies are reinforced; Blake protects the defenceless Rachel, who repays his gallantry by becoming his wife. In both of these texts, the mesmeric sciences are used as part of a criminal technique, though with very different and highly gendered goals. In The Woman in White, mesmerism is used to subdue the dangerously masculine Marian from discovering too much, rendering her insensible and inactive. Likewise, the fraud perpetrated on the gentle Laura is only possible by exploiting her already weak constitution and fragile state of mind. The crime of The Moonstone is ultimately committed by men, through the use of mesmerism. However, the mesmerized subject, Blake, plays an active rather than passive role in the mesmeric state. Jennings is also active in using mesmerism to solve the mystery. Where Marian and Laura are 17 Richard Barickman et al., Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, and the Victorian Sexual System, New York, 1982, 27. 18 Heller, Dead Secrets, 146.

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rendered passive to allow the crime, Blake’s masculine strength is exploited to commit the theft. Thus, these novels use mesmerism to reinforce notions of active men and passive women. Though The Moonstone interrogates questions of class and gender relationships, its main message is one that reinforces traditional power structures of men over women. Much of the novel is concerned with finding out what Rachel is hiding; her silence, as Heller points out, initiates a battle over the control of knowledge as power, with Blake seeking to repossess Rachel’s inappropriate advantage.19 Given the context of courtship and detection, Blake’s relationship to Rachel and his ultimate victory over her, both in terms of breaking her silence and winning her hand, accentuate the importance of male control over female deviance. With its emphasis on a single correct story with a master narrator in possession of all the facts, The Moonstone affirms bourgeois hegemony and the surveillance of class morality.20 The novel can thus be read as the process by which the male narrator acquires the knowledge that is his power, at times peacefully and at other times through violence. As such, women’s voices are silenced as the powerful master narrative prevails, successfully revealing the reactionary gender philosophies of Collins’ work. Manly-women and womanly-men: Collins and gender-bending At the outset of the novels, both Marian and Rachel exhibit unconventional behaviour and are marked as unlike other women. The ambiguities surrounding their femininity open up a number of questions regarding notions of gender, but these questions are eventually resolved as both women are rehabilitated into the Victorian domestic ideal. In The Moonstone, Rachel’s life-long deviance reaches its peak when she remains stubbornly silent. The only explanation that could be found for Rachel’s behaviour, in the words of her mother, is that The loss of the Diamond seems to have quite overwhelmed Rachel …. She shrinks, in the strangest manner, from speaking of it, even to me. It is impossible you can see her for the present. (80) 19

Tamar Heller, “Blank Spaces: Ideological Tension and the Detective Work of The Moonstone”, in New Casebooks, 253. 20 D. A. Miller, “From Roman Policier to Roman Police: The Moonstone”, in New Casebooks, 218.

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Rachel must be confined as a result of her odd behaviour. Her silence becomes her insanity, and her bedroom an asylum. Her mother continues to say that “The loss of her jewel seems almost to have turned her brain” (81). Betteredge fails to understand her outbursts, in which she is “In a rage, one moment; in tears, the next!” (86). Women’s speech becomes marked as defective, thereby normalizing the male voice. The effect of Rachel’s passion is to cause Blake, her intended partner and representative of Victorian domestic life, to break down into tears. As Betteredge observes the tears in Blake’s eyes, he notes that “Miss Rachel had completely unmanned him” (151). Thus gender roles are blurred as one of the mysteries becomes Rachel’s silence itself.21 An unconventional woman described as “odd and wild” (217) with an “absence of all ladylike restraint in her language and manner” (200) who is “unlike most other girls of her age, in this – that she had ideas of her own” (52), Rachel must be tamed. Her self-isolation and later her removal from her house upset domestic order. By becoming both witness and clue, Rachel becomes an authority figure who controls knowledge. She has the power to do what the men surrounding her do not: solve the mystery of the Moonstone. This power is dangerous and inappropriate, and the story cannot be resolved until the situation is reversed. As Rachel witnesses Blake in a mesmeric trance, yet another destabilization occurs as gender roles are reversed; the mesmerized subject is almost always female, controlled by a male operator. In this case, as Rachel watches Blake, she attains knowledge that gives her power over him, and in a sense, she becomes one of the people dominating him, truly unmanning him. Throughout Blake’s trance, he acts without consciousness, while she is fully awake and in control. The rest of the novel is a story of Blake’s attempt to regain the control that was taken, unbeknownst to him, by his loved one. Mesmerism and love are again linked, but in this case, total resolution comes only when Rachel agrees to relinquish all control when witnessing the re-enactment of the crime. She begs permission to witness Blake, thus demonstrating that she recognizes that the role of witness is not rightfully hers: “Oh, Mr Jennings, if you were me, only think how you would long to sit and look at him. Say, yes! Do!” (425) 21

Pykett, The Sensation Novel, 32-33.

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Rachel triumphantly returns home to participate in the mystery’s solution and to take her natural role as wife, replacing her dead mother as mistress of the house. Sexual difference prevails as Rachel’s silence is broken and her motives revealed; she remained silent to protect her lover Blake, but her misplaced and misgendered actions only served to prolong the agony. Rachel’s silence represented her exclusive knowledge, a power that was inappropriate, and, as demonstrated throughout the course of the novel, destructive. Had she spoken sooner and relinquished the power of her knowledge, resolution would have been achieved far earlier.22 In The Woman in White, Collins plays with gender in a number of characters, though none so strongly as Marian. It is Marian’s masculine qualities and decidedly un-Victorian behaviour that have caused many readers to see Collins as subverting traditional notions of gender. Marian is indeed a fascinating character who epitomizes the debates of Collins’ scholarship. Does she represent a direct challenge to Victorian stereotypes? Are her repeated references to the limitations of women in general intended as tongue-in-cheek critiques of notions of femininity? Even the reader’s first introduction to Marian is fraught with ambiguities and mixed messages regarding her femininity. The initial description of her appearance is seen through the eyes of the first narrator, Walter. He begins by discussing at great length the incomparable beauty of her form and figure: The instant my eyes rested on her, I was stuck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays.

Only in the last line is there a hint of Marian’s unconventional nature in her refusal to conform to the traditional confinement of stays. Walter’s tone gradually changes as he catches sight of the face of his vision:

22

Heller, in New Casebooks, 254.

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She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail to express), The lady is ugly! (58)

The readers are then treated to a detailed picture of Marian’s various shortcomings, which include “dark down on her upper lip [which] was almost a moustache”, and a “firm, large, masculine mouth”. It is significant that our first glimpse of this unusual woman is through the eyes of Walter, foreshadowing her eventual voluntary confinement in his house. Even as he presents a woman who challenges traditional Victorian notions, he subjugates her by subjecting her to masculine control; in defining her, Walter is also confining her. The conflicts that Marian undergoes throughout the novel between her female limitations and her masculine inclinations are represented by this physical description. Her body, the purely physical aspect of her being, is depicted as a feminine ideal. Even her deviance from confining stays is seen as a virtue, for it exemplifies the perfection of her womanly form. However, Marian’s mind is far more deviant than her waistline. Her face, her head and, indeed, brain, are criticized for their masculine appearance, as are her “prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes” and “bright, frank, and intelligent” expression. Marian’s mind is too intelligent, too aggressive, and indeed too masculine for her feminine form. Walter comments on this startling juxtaposition even before he has spoken with Marian: “Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted – never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it” (58). The conflict between her emotions and her logic is represented in the conflict between her body and her head. Poor Marian has to live with this internal conflict that serves to contradict not only the maxim about nature, but many expectations placed upon Victorian women. Far from being a conventional, passive “angel in the house”, Marian acts more like a devil, at least in the eyes of Glyde and Fosco. Despite her foiling their plans, however, Fosco alone of the men in the novel sustains an appreciation of Marian’s attractions. She too feels unwillingly drawn to him when she first meets him: I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two

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Marian’s fear of confession may stem from anxiety about maintaining her own morality. Here, Collins addresses contemporary concerns with the relationship between the mesmerizer and his subject. As Marian feels her mind and body begin to acquiesce to Fosco’s control, she recognizes that the connection he has established between them could easily be abused. As such, her admiration soon turns to hatred: “That innocent familiarity turned my blood as if it had been the vilest insult that a man could offer me” (328). Through such unwomanly behaviour as challenging the men of the house, taking initiative in business, performing challenging physical feats, taking dangerous risks to save her sister, and living with the unmarried Walter, Marian proves to be far from the Victorian ideal. Her comments throughout the novel express her disdain for this feminine construct which she freely admits soon after meeting Walter: “How can you expect four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel? We are such fools, we can’t entertain each other at table. You see I don’t think much of my own sex, Mr Hartright.” (60)

Indeed, Marian conflates desirable behaviour with masculine behaviour, ironically entreating Walter to behave in a more masculine fashion. In his moments of failure or doubt, Marian warns Walter not to “shrink under it like a woman”, but instead to “Tear it out; trample it under foot like a man!” (96). However, by the end of the novel Marian is transformed into an angel in the house, holding Laura’s and Walter’s child and promising them her lifelong companionship. As Walter comments, Marian has found her rightful place as “the good angel of our lives” (646). This final capitulation is foreshadowed in the text many times, not only through Marian’s domestic love of her half-sister and her personal struggle with her masculine characteristics, but also through her tangible defeat by Fosco and his mesmeric power, she can ultimately only overcome with the help of two men, Walter and Pesco. Despite the many poignant critiques that Collins raises in The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both novels eventually present

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an ideal Victorian domestic scene of marriage and family. Collins, however, does not expose issues such as the mistreatment of wives, the inadequacy of gender roles, and the threats of malignant scientific practices, only to dismiss them as secondary to the pursuit of domestic bliss. Rather, Collins’ treatment of these notions is as ambiguous as many of the other themes of his novels; not only does he present mixed messages; he equivocates about acting as a serious social critic. However, the lack of a decided approach on most issues is far from misplaced, as the topics he interrogates were themselves highly contentious. The one question on which a clear stance emerges, that of the contested status of science in general and mesmerism in particular, is the medium through which he investigates, challenges, and reifies notions of power and gender in The Woman in White and The Moonstone. With Marian, Collins presents a powerful challenge to traditional Victorian ideals: a masculinized female who constantly struggles with her own contradictory nature, a person with the body of a woman and the mind and face of a man. Even Marian, however, can be overcome through the power of mesmerism as practised by the villain who is her scientific superior. Science is marked as the domain of men, a tool which they can use to conquer unconventional women. Fosco is eventually defeated through the auspices of the men to whom Marian has promised her future; by the end of the novel she has become fully domesticated – that is to say, rehabilitated. Likewise, the unladylike Rachel finds herself returned to her home and to the centre of domestic ideal at the conclusion of The Moonstone. Her major source of power, her silence, has been broken by her eventual husband and master. Blake only earns the right to be her partner through mesmerism, which grants him back his reputation and his potency, re-establishing him as a protective male figure. His masculinity had been in doubt due to his failure to conquer Rachel, but his role in the theft of the jewel returns his power by taking it from her. Both texts interrogate the stability of the family, examining the dangers that it posed to those it was supposed to protect. Collins concludes by reinscribing the desirability of the Victorian norm, but only after exposing the threat of the ideal gone wrong.

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MARIE CORELLI’S MAGNETIC REVITALIZING POWER

ALISHA SIEBERS

When Marie Corelli died in 1924, newspapers offered a variety of answers to the question “Who was Marie Corelli?” The question was prompted by the discovery that Corelli had obscured the circumstances of her birth – that she had changed her name, her age, her parentage – in order to create an idealized persona. When George Bentley requested biographical details to advertise her first novel, Corelli generated an exotic lineage: My history is very simple; I am Venetian and can trace myself back to the famous musician Arcangelo Corelli; and I have a godfather residing in Rome to whom I owe the exceptional severity of the education I have had, first in Italy, next in France, and last and longest in England, which I have learnt to love with a melancholy affection as my mother died here .... My godmother is a dame d’honneur to Queen Margharita, to whom I have been presented and who honours me with her interest, because once as a small child I contemporised a short poem in her presence.

This fanciful genealogy was created by Minnie Mackay, the illegitimate daughter of Charles Mackay, a composer of ballads and well-known figure in literary circles, and Mary Elizabeth Mills, a woman of “Italian colouring”.1 Corelli’s self-fashioning did not end with the idealized biography she provided her publisher. A second answer to the question “Who was Marie Corelli?” can be found in her use of hypnotic trance in her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which helped her establish her unique public image as a spiritual writer. Here Corelli develops an elaborate revision of the typical late Victorian medical view that hypnotism was a purely physiological process that healed by

1

Brian Masters, Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli, London, 1978, 57.

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inducing rest. Her new “Electric Creed”2 posits that worn-out bodies and souls can be rejuvenated by self-sacrifice and spiritual, rather than physical, electricity. By experimenting with trance, the main character of A Romance of Two Worlds mends her shattered nerves, transforming into a healthy, inspired concert pianist. Corelli’s explanation of her creed, both in her Preface and within the novel, helped her create a unique persona as an inspired conduit of heavenly ideals. As she launched her writing career with A Romance, Corelli presented to her new audience the possibility that if one renounces one’s imperfect body for the truths of the ideal realm found in trances, one is rewarded with rich, authoritative writing. However, even as she espouses the power of inspired writing, Corelli also incorporates the gothic side of hypnotism into A Romance in order to explore the darker sides of inspiration and asceticism. The literature of mesmerism frequently investigates gothic thematics such as imprisonment, relinquishment of will, and loss of self. As the narrator experiences these feelings, Corelli dramatizes concerns about whether inspired trance truly offers transcendence or merely another form of entrapment. The electric Marie Corelli In A Romance of Two Worlds Corelli lays out her conviction that true artists are “Chosen Vessels”. The novel tracks how a sickly and nervous pianist is drawn to, and healed by, Heliobas, an “electric physician” (78) who teaches her the true spiritual nature of electricity. By inducing a trance, he helps the pianist embark on a spirit journey in which she converses with angels, tours the entire universe, and creates her own world so that she can understand the Creator better. After her journey, she becomes a conduit for angelic melodies, eventually enjoying religious conviction, suspended youth, perfect health, and full concert halls. Corelli introduces her second edition of A Romance of Two Worlds with an outline of the doctrine of her new Electric Creed, distinguishing it from occult beliefs and practices. She complains that ever since her novel was published, she has been approached with questions about occultism and clairvoyance by inquirers hoping to meet her “in the expectation of being initiated into something very 2

Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, New York, 1886, 5.

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strange and mysterious”, something “vulgarly melodramatic” about the spiritual world. She wryly comments that “their disappointment is always extreme when they learn that my creed has its foundation in Christ alone” (5). Corelli’s theory could be described as an amalgamation of Eastern religion, spiritualism, and evolutionary theory, but while it does combine these elements, it is above all a rather tame attempt to make Christianity more scientific by reframing it in mesmeric terms. The Electric Creed offers a Mesmer-like cosmology that assumes that electrically-charged rings emanate from God. Corelli believed that Christ, the Creator, resides on a central planet surrounded by these rings of powerful electric atmospheres. These forces are “perpetually creative and perpetually absorbent” (115) as planets are sometimes drawn apocalyptically within God’s central force field and then rereleased, transformed by God’s love. In the novel, the mystical character Heliobas, who operates as Corelli’s mouthpiece, explains how this “mathematically correct” cosmology concerns human spirituality and he begins by outlining that “every human being is provided internally and externally with a certain amount of electricity”. He defines the internal electricity as: the germ of a soul or spirit, and is placed there to be either cultivated or neglected as suits the will of man. It is indestructible; yet, if neglected, it remains always a germ; and at the death of the body it inhabits, goes elsewhere [to another planet] to seek another chance of development. If, on the contrary, its growth is fostered by a persevering, resolute WILL, it becomes a spiritual creature, glorious and supremely powerful, for which a new, brilliant, and endless existence commences when its clay chrysalis perishes. (115)

Unlike the internal electricity, which can be shaped by willpower, external electricity is simply physiological and is bound by fixed laws. Corelli expands her theory by elucidating that these human electric rings can repulse or attract one another, which explains how sometimes “two absolutely sympathetic souls” can “labor and love together with perfect faith in each other” (116). Those who cultivate their germ of electric Divinity by living “a careful, self-denying life”, are awarded “the highest clairvoyance and spiritual ability” (7). Corelli promises in her Preface that:

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Alisha Siebers Such spirituality, the outcome of the electric spirit of Divinity in man, corresponding to the supreme center of Divinity in the Creator, can see and converse with angels – can heal the sick and console the afflicted – can preserve health in the body and beauty in the face and form – can even retain youth much longer than materialists dream of – can meet misfortune as though it were joy, and can triumph in death, knowing Death to be but this world’s name for Life. (12-13)

In A Romance, Heliobas exemplifies this kind of highly advanced soul who enjoys perfect health and extended youth. He has developed his human electricity to the extent that “his mere touch, his lightest glance, have healing in them, or the reverse, as he chooses to exert his power”. He can convey his thoughts to others without speaking and “cause them to design and carry out certain actions in accordance with his plans” (78). However much these claims mirror traditional mesmeric claims for healing and rapport, Corelli asserts that Heliobas’ power is based upon “neither mesmerism nor magnetism – nothing but a purely scientific fact” (95). She emphasizes that while mesmerism is a merely physical process, the inspired trance influenced by human “electric force” (7) is purely spiritual. In an odd twist of logic she argues that bodily health proves her type of electricity is spiritual rather than physical: Hypnotism ... has nothing whatever in common with what I may designate spiritual electric force ..... The trance of hypnotism is a stupor, – in it the patient sees nothing worth remembering, even if he could remember, which he never does. This is a positive sign that hypnotism pertains to the material side of existence, and has nothing to do with the spiritual. Many persons – particularly women – who are highly nervous and in a debilitated condition of mind and body, imagine their state of chronic hysteria to be one of supernatural inspiration; and several such overwrought beings have been introduced to me as “wonderful spiritualists,” whereas they are only sickly and morbid. True spiritualism is above all things healthy. (7-8)

Unlike weak hysterics, those who cultivate “spiritual electric force” enjoy “buoyancy and tireless energy of the body” (7). Such energy and youth are the distinguishing marks of true spiritualists – they are the rewards of a self-rejection in which “self stands on one side, as it were, and is no longer allowed to obscure the Soul’s view of the splendid universe to which it belongs” (12).

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Corelli’s brand of mesmerism is based on a kind of asceticism that rejects the body, not because it is inherently impure, but because it is limited in its capacity. This is revealed in A Romance in which the narrator’s soul embarks upon her out-of-body tour of the universe. As her soul is released from her body, she observes her physical form from a new heavenly perspective: I ... saw as a passing shadow in a glass, or sort of blurred miniature painting, the room where Heliobas stood, watching some strange imperfect shape, which I seemed faintly to recognize. It looked like a small cast in clay, very badly executed .... “Did I dwell in that body?” I mused to myself, as I felt the perfection of my then state of being. “How came I shut up in such a prison? How poor a form – how destitute of faculties – how full of infirmities – how limited in capabilities – how narrow in all intelligence – how ignorant – how mean! (174-75)

That entranced subjects could transcend their bodies to access a greater truth was nothing new – it was one of the key tenets of the mesmeric handbooks of the 1840s. For example, Joseph Philippe Francois Deleuze’s Practical Introduction in Animal Magnetism (1850) claimed that during “magnetic somnambulism” – the special mesmeric state: the external organs of sense are all, or nearly all, asleep; and yet [the somnambulist] experiences sensations, but by another means. There is roused in him an internal sense, which is perhaps the centre of the others, or a sort of instinct, which enlightens him in respect to his own preservation.3

Some experimenters such as Baron Dupotet and Dionysius Lardner claimed that somnambulists’ sensations could be displaced to other parts of the body, as if the internal sense would migrate to another organ when the typical one was blocked. Similarly, in public demonstrations at University College London, Elizabeth O’Key claimed to see or hear with her stomach or the back of her hand.4 3

J. P. F. Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, trans. T. C. Hartshorn, New York, 1850, 168. 4 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 54.

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During the highest form of trance, Deleuze theorized that the spirit withdraws from the organs and the somnambulist becomes independent of the magnetizer’s will. He characterized the elevated thoughts as an ascetic freedom from worldly teachings and cares that distract from elemental truths: It is the absolute indifference to what appertains to terrestrial objects, to the interests of fortune or of reputation .... It is the little interest that they take in life; it is a novel manner of viewing objects; it is a quick and direct judgement, accompanied with an intimate conviction ... during the silence which he observes in regard to what is foreign to his soul, he feels within himself the development of a new light, whose rays are darted upon all that excites in him a real interest.5

Like the narrator of A Romance, Deleuze believes ascetic distance offers a conviction of higher truths – conveys a new authority based upon transcendence. Corelli’s invention, then, of a healthy spiritual electric power creates an effective niche for her authorial persona. Moving in the opposite direction from a tradition that claimed that authors were naturally unhealthy, Corelli unyokes neurasthenia – the belief that creative thought drains the nerve force – from genius. The consequence of this reversal is a new energetics of trance, in which energy abounds for both body and mind because vitality can be transfused through inspiration. Corelli’s cure for depleted nerves Corelli’s disassociation of sickliness and spirituality resulted from her attempt to distance herself from her own symptoms of poor health, which were described as neurasthenic. The condition became widelyknown after the publication of George Miller Beard’s, American Nervousness (1880). Beard’s text evidences a growing transatlantic perception that nervousness was increasing in more civilized cultures. Defining neurasthenia with the sweeping description of a “lack of nerve force”, Beard suggested that the new modern illness triggered mental symptoms which were seen as manifesting a paralysis of the will.6 At the beginning of her career, Corelli interpreted her own life 5

Deleuze, 92. T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, Chicago, 1994, 50.

6

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and infused her first novel with the typical neurasthenic assumption that excessively civilized brainwork is fuelled by nervous energy. A Romance reads as a kind of self-help manual for exhausted geniuses who have depleted their nervous resources. Indeed, it could be argued that Corelli wrote it in a therapeutic attempt to ennoble her own exhausting and failing efforts to become an inspired musician. In 1884, Corelli made her début as an improviser and her first concert programme announced that a Signorina Marie Corelli would perform an Improvisazione – fifteen original pieces of music that were composed as they were played. In a review, the Theatre critic admitted that some would suspect that Corelli had planned her pieces before her performance, but acknowledged: “those who know her are well aware that this is just what she cannot do” and “considering the physical exertion she went through, and the immense strain on the nerves that it must have been to absorb her whole being into her music as she undoubtedly did, her performance was certainly remarkable”.7 However, interest in her performances dwindled within a few months and Corelli attributed this to her frail physique, which, she confessed, had collapsed under the “rush and fatigue of the musical profession”.8 It was at this point that she began revising her draft of A Romance. The novel’s main plot concerns the cure of a neurasthenic musician. Corelli’s narrator (who, because she remains unnamed throughout the novel, led many readers to wonder whether A Romance was autobiographical) suffers from insomnia, depression and anxiety. She visits Cannes to convalesce, but, although she enjoys the landscape and new sights during the day, at night she experiences “nervous terrors” that “shook me from head to foot, fragments of my own musical compositions hummed in my ears” (21). An Italian painter named Cellini, a kindred artist who also had once suffered from artistic frustration and over-stimulated nerves, provides the narrator with a neurasthenic framework to understand her invalidism. Like most late nineteenth-century commentators on nervous prostration, he attributes her illness to the struggle to earn a living in a culture that demands more and more intellectual strength and skill:

7 8

Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend, London, 1953, 64. Ibid., 65.

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He attempts to convince her to visit Heliobas by noting that she is so driven by her music, she will continue to decline unless she receives help from an “electric physician” arguing that as her “powers in music grow, so will [her] health decline” (79). At this point, Corelli’s depiction of lonely, sensitive, suffering neurasthenic artists is conventional, but her subsequent spiritual prescription to cure overstrung nerves is more indicative of her personal narrative style. The rest cure, designed by the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell in order to relax over-stimulated nerves, was based upon the assumption that individuals had a limited supply of nervous energy that could be overdrawn by excessive stimulation or saved up by relaxation. Rather than banking scarce psychic energy, Corelli believed that her characters could access psychic abundance from an external, metaphysical source. Her metaphysical version of the rest cure promised an experience of weightlessness that she equated with release from heavy imprisonment generated by both bodily and worldly demands. These releases were augmented by infusions of spiritual electricity that regenerated and rejuvenated the body. In A Romance, the artists recover their creative powers through a cure that mixes an entranced release from the body with a new sense of belonging to an elite coterie. When the narrator moves into Heliobas’ residence to undergo treatment, he prepares her for an outof-body experience that will enable her to rest from her soul’s struggles against its temporal limitations. At first, Heliobas’ prescription of magnetic elixirs and healing baths seems merely conventional mesmeric therapy, but his treatments are designed to simulate the weightlessness of out-of-body experiences. Heliobas supplies his patient with a vial of magnetic essence that relieves the narrator of the burden of physicality. The improvisatrice reports: I uncorked the glass tube No. 1, and poured the colourless fluid it contained into the water, which immediately bubbled gently as though beginning to boil. After watching it, for a minute or two, and observing that this seething movement steadily continued, I undressed

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quickly and stepped in. Never shall I forget the exquisite sensation I experienced! .... If my body had been composed of no grosser matter than fire and air, I could not have felt more weightless, more buoyant, more thoroughly exhilarated than when, at the end of the prescribed five minutes, I got out of that marvelous bath of healing! (98)

When the artists are physically and spiritually prepared, Heliobas heals them by launching them out of their bodies on spiritual tours of the universe. Cellini recounts how Heliobas entranced and released him: Heliobas drew himself up to the full stateliness of his height and bent his calm eyes deliberately upon me. A strange thrill ran through me; I still held his hand. “Rest!” he said in slow and emphatic tones. “Weary and overwrought frame, take thy full and needful measure of repose! Struggling and deeply injured spirit, be free of thy narrow prison! By that Force which I acknowledge within me and thee and in all created things, I command thee, rest!” Fascinated, awed, overcome by his manner, I gazed at him and would have spoken, but my tongue refused its office – my senses swam – my eyes closed – my limbs gave way – I fell senseless.

Cellini returns to “mortal existence” with “a delicious sense of tranquillity and youthful buoyancy” (76). His rest from worldly cares, along with his initiation into metaphysical mysteries, restores his health and creativity. In addition to this release from physicality, Corelli’s artists are relieved by deep rapport with communal spirits. On his ecstatic journey, Cellini recovers creativity when he discovers that he has a spiritual wife waiting for him on the other side. Likewise, Heliobas is betrothed to a spirit named Azul who assists him with his healing work. While the narrator does not find her soul mate on her ecstatic journey, she is initiated into an elite spiritual coterie of artists who share the same circle of electricity. For example, when she questions Heliobas’ motivation for curing her, he responds that he is compelled to assist her because his “inner self” is connected to her “inner self”. To prove this, Heliobas reveals to her his spiritual face which is described as at once strange and familiar:

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This is the first of many uses of the uncanny throughout Corelli’s novels. She repeatedly suggests that a partially recognizable world hides behind this familiar one. Discomfort in this world stands as evidence of another, more comfortable spiritual domain just beyond our awareness. In A Romance, Corelli’s artists’ spiritual superiority is marked by their loneliness in the worldly crowd. In a sense, they withdraw to an anchorage of soul mates who truly understand them. Gothic secrets in the studio Although A Romance of Two Worlds promises that artists can be transformed into conduits of inspiration through ascetic withdrawal, Corelli is aware that the inspiration afforded by trance has a darker side of self-erasure. The unique cure Corelli dramatizes in the text would have been nothing more than a smug call for self-renunciation and a hint that the average reader is denied access to an esoteric world of Gnostic mysteries, if the novel did not entwine its prescription for neurasthenia with a sensitivity about the drawbacks of inspiration. The driving interest of Corelli’s novels lies in her characters’ temptation to resist containing the self. She dramatizes this conflict between pride and selflessness by exploring how inspiration’s submission of the will can degenerate into mere somnambulism or demonic possession. Corelli models A Romance around a framework of gothic images of entrapment, relinquishment of will, and loss of self – images that are often found in the literature of mesmerism. These gothic and mesmeric thematics act out concerns about both the inspirational process and entranced withdrawal as forms of empowerment. Experimentation with mesmerism can be seen as evidence of dissatisfaction with and desire to withdraw from the everyday world. The gothic aspect of sequestering oneself away from the world comes into high relief in A Romance when the narrator meets the sculptress

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Zara, Heliobas’ beautiful sister, who begs the narrator for her friendship: “Be my friend,” she said, with a caressing inflection in her rich voice. “I have no friends of my own sex, and I wish to love you. My brother has always had so much distrust of the companionship of women for me. You know his theories; and he has always asserted that the sphere of thought in which I have lived all my life is so widely apart from those in which other women exist – that nothing but unhappiness for me could come out of associating us together. When he told me yesterday that you were coming to see me to-day, I knew he must have discovered something in your nature that was not antipathetic to mine; otherwise he would not have brought you to me. Do you think you can like me? – perhaps love me after a little while?” (104)

Such a seductive passage alerts readers to the gothic possibility that Heliobas might be too controlling, or that his sister could be luring the narrator into his trap. Corelli underscores the gothic sequestration and seduction in this passage by invoking the Bluebeard motif. Zara and Heliobas offer the pianist free range of their home, setting her up in an ideal room next to Zara’s that is outfitted with “a choice selection of books; music, including many of the fascinating scores of Schubert and Wagner; writing materials; and a pretty, full-toned pianette” (124). However, one morning Zara informs the narrator that she intends to work in her studio, announcing: “you must know I like to work quite alone, and though it may look churlish, still not even you must come into the studio.” The narrator, like Bluebeard’s wife, responds that she has plenty to occupy her while Zara is away. Zara replies: I hate to appear inhospitable, but I know you are a real friend – that you will love me as much away from you as near you and that you have none of that vulgar curiosity which some women give way to, when they desire to see what is hidden from them. You are not inquisitive, are you?

When the narrator laughingly answers that “Blue-Beard’s Chamber would never have been unlocked had I been that worthy man’s wife”, Zara seriously counters: “I always think those wives of Blue-Beard

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deserved their fate for not being able to obey him in his one request” (128). By linking Zara’s studio with Bluebeard’s secret chamber of dead wives, Corelli prompts suspicions about the household. In particular, the Bluebeard myth connects the female gothic’s dramatization of entrapment and domination to Heliobas’ method of teaching the narrator the art of entranced inspiration.9 Even though he may be healing the narrator, one wonders whether sequestration and containment of curiosity are necessary. Is Heliobas’ instruction to contain worldly desires leading the narrator to a broader spiritual world beyond, or merely entrapping her within this one? The premise that mesmerism offers transcendence is questioned when Corelli deploys the female gothic mode. However, Corelli invokes these concerns only to defuse them as merely selfish. The novel gives the final impression that there are no real dangers to be alert to – only the inconvenience of the burdens of the flesh, which can be alleviated, not by opening a locked, secret door in a domestic interior, but by exploring the beckoning, mysterious realm of metaphysical outer space. In other words, as Corelli invokes readers’ curiosity and offers them insights about the universe, her story, like the female gothic mode, follows the Bluebeard archetype. Readers, like Bluebeard’s wife, are put in a dangerous position. Their curiosity may reveal to them that those who sequester themselves away from a contaminated world are really trapped. However, in Corelli’s novel, when the secret door is finally opened, the only lesson found in the Bluebeard chamber is a call for self-restraint. In Corelli’s fictional world, the greatest danger is Zara’s zealous asceticism and over-devotion to an unearthly lover. In the end, these prove to be unfounded dangers because Zara and the readers’ curiosities are rewarded with encounters with ideal realms. In addition to defusing concerns about ascetic withdrawal, Corelli also brings out and solves a new problem concerning the self9

The term “female gothic” was coined by Ellen Moers in Literary Women: The Great Tradition, New York, 1976. See also Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imgaination, New Haven: CT, 1976; Claire Kahane, “The Gothic Mirror” in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, eds Shirley Nelson Garner, Clarie Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether, Ithaca: NY, 1985. For a summary of the history of the term, see Sarolta Marinovich, “The Discourse of the Other: Female Gothic in Contemporary Women’s Writing”, Neohelicon, XXI/1 (1994), 189-205.

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relinquishment. In addition to withdrawal, Corelli’s Electric Creed instructs that humble submission is the route to inspiration. One wonders, though, whether relinquishing the self will lead to a loss of authentic creative powers. The narrator of A Romance receives the power to channel pure music directly from a heavenly muse through trance, but, Corelli dramatizes, such inspiration is still not authentic enough because the narrator does not create the music she channels. Indeed, the driving interest of many of Corelli’s novels is found in her sensitive treatment of the temptations of pride and fame, for she is aware that becoming a medium of inspiration is far from easy. When her characters take on the mantle of inspiration, they sense that they risk the erasure of their individual identities. In A Romance, Corelli’s narrator struggles with relinquishing the ownership of her creative powers. Heliobas trains her to channel music from angels, but, after her first experience channelling “the sound of Song” – a song “transcendently lovely”, of “delicate and entrancing tenderness, infinite purity”, with a melody “like a flower, fresh and perfect”, she bursts into tears of regret. She laments to Heliobas: “It is lovely, all that music; but it is not mine. Oh, if it were only mine – my very own composition.” Heliobas responds: It is as much yours as anything belongs to anyone. Yours? Why what can you really call your own? Every talent you have, every breath you draw, every drop of blood flowing in your veins, is lent to you only; you must pay it all back. And as far as the arts go, it is a bad sign of poet, painter, or musician, who is arrogant enough to call his work his own. It never was his and never will be. It is planned by a higher intelligence than his, only he happens to be the hired laborer chosen to carry out the conception. (138)

Towards the beginning of the novel, the narrator dreams three visions that suggest that she will not accept Heliobas’ call for selfrenunciation easily. Her visions, which reveal to her Heliobas’ name before anyone has spoken it to her, include claustrophobic, fatalistic overtones alongside soothing images of natural and ritualistic beauty. As the visions reveal to the virtuoso her spiritual destiny, they convey the message that as an inspired vessel subdues her will, her subjectivity is reduced and contained. In a sense, the visions contradict Corelli’s claims that inspired trance will heal nervous complaints, for

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they figure inspiration as neurasthenia’s main symptom – an absence of willpower. In her first dream, the narrator is enclosed in progressively reduced and abstracted spaces. This reduction of the world into a simplified abstraction models the mesmerized subject’s progressive withdrawal from the sharp outlines of this world into the abstract, idealized interior domain. Indeed, many of the earliest accounts of the mesmeric state describe it as a blurring of everyday details as the world transforms into a luminous ideality. Consider, for example, Harriet Martineau’s description of her first trance: Something seemed to diffuse itself through the atmosphere, – not like smoke, nor steam, nor haze, – but most like a clear twilight, closing in from the windows and down from the ceiling, and in which one object after another melted away, till scarcely anything was left visible before my wide-open eyes. First, the outlines of all objects were blurred; then a bust, standing on a pedestal in a strong light, melted quite away; then the opposite bust; then the table with its gay cover, then the floor, and the ceiling, till one small picture, high up on the opposite wall, only remained visible, – like a patch of phosphoric light. I feared to move my eyes, lest the singular appearance should vanish; and I cried out, “O! deepen it! deepen it!” supposing this the precursor of the sleep. It could not be deepened, however .... The busts reappeared, ghost-like in the dim atmosphere, like faint shadows, except that their outlines, and the parts in the highest relief, burned with the same phosphoric light.10

Here mesmerism seems to enact an idealizing process as the room melts away and reappears filled with radiant forms stripped of their usual details. In A Romance the narrator’s first dream links her to this tradition of seeing mesmeric withdrawal as a transformation of the world into an abstraction. She first sees an “interminable chain” of red and white roses “wreathed by the radiant fingers of small rainbow-winged creatures as airy as moonlight mist, as delicate as thistledown”. The delicate fairies typify the weightlessness promised through inspiration, but they do create a chain – it may be of roses, but it threatens bondage, nevertheless. The fairies urge her to follow the chain, which winds “through a labyrinth of trees, whose luxuriant branches quiver 10

Harriet Martineau, Letters on Mesmerism, 2nd edn, London, 1845, 7-8.

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with the flight and song of birds”. Nature closes around her as she passes a thundering waterfall, then wanders into a dense, dark forest. She sees “a golden crescent that seems suspended by some invisible thread in the air” that breaks apart into a “thousand points of vivid light like wandering stars”. The chain breaks and disappears and all falls into utter silence, as the lights form into one name – HELIOBAS – “burning gold on the blackness of the heavens” (39). In this surreal image, the natural world is replaced by a stagey golden crescent that comes across as a rickety prop on the set of a melodrama. This artificial representation of the natural world is reduced and replaced by an abstract world. This vision of the beautiful world is further reduced down to the hypnotist Heliobas, leading the reader to wonder whether trances open up new vistas to mesmerized subjects or whether they close the somnambulists’ eyes to everything but the hypnotist. Is the trance a removal of distracting details so that the somnambulist can experience the ideal, as in Martineau’s description, or is it merely an experience of monomania or infatuation with the hypnotist? The narrator’s second vision suggests that artistic destiny will require a loss of individuality and of self-control. She finds herself inside a vast cathedral, listening to an organ and hearing singing of “silver, trumpet-like notes fall from the immense height of the building like a bell ringing in a pure atmosphere”. The music ceases as “twenty maidens, clad in white and crowned with myrtle, pacing two by two, approach” her. These maidens, who are all alike, recognize the dreamer as part of their elect group, but such election signals a loss of individuality and will. They murmur “Art thou also one of us?” and one of them hands her a pencil, instructing her to “write quickly! For whatsoever thou shalt now inscribe is the clue to thy destiny”. The narrator feels impelled by a “powerful force acting within and around” (39) her to trace a name that startles her as she writes it down – HELIOBAS. After she channels the automatic writing, one wonders whether Heliobas is dangerous, for after she writes his name the beautiful setting is obscured as a cloud veils the cathedral and the maidens vanish. In her final dream, the narrator faces Heliobas. Corelli’s interest in the conflict between selflessness and pride is dramatized by the narrator’s ambivalence about her hypnotist’s call for asceticism. He is portrayed as both a liberator and a jailor. The partially contained

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spaces of the dense and winding forest in the first vision and the vast cathedral of the second are replaced by a “small room sparsely furnished” with a table covered with books and manuscripts. She sees a man “in the full prime of life” and with eyes of a “penetrating blue”. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he is aided by an invisible spirit, whom he commands: Azul, messenger of my fate, thou who art a guiding spirit of the elements, thou who ridest the storm-cloud and sittest throned on the edge of the lightning! .... I ask of thee to send me this one more poor human soul; let me change its unrestfulness into repose, its hesitation into certainty, its weakness into strength, its weary imprisonment to the light of liberty! (42)

However, even as Heliobas seeks to liberate the narrator by helping her see the real spiritual world hidden beyond the earthly one, when he turns to face her, she strives to look away from his “magnetic gaze”, gasping for breath. The liberty he promises invokes a claustrophobic silencing of her own voice and a heavy burden of fatalism, as she concludes: I would shriek, but cannot, for a heavy hand seems to close my mouth, and an immense weight presses me down. I struggle violently with this unseen Power – little by little I gain the advantage. One effort more! I win the victory – I wake! (43)

These visions prove that entranced inspiration requires containment on several levels. Metaphorically, the idea that the narrator is entrapped by a dream image that she herself constructs suggests that inspiration manifests itself within a series of compressed, nestled interiors. This image of inspiration appearing only within corresponds with Corelli’s ascetic call for self-renunciation. For although she advocates inspiration as a release from physical limits, her asceticism requires a psychological reduction of the self. In order to receive her art, she must contain her natural desire to take credit for her creative work. In addition to raising the spectre of self-reduction, the gothic mode in A Romance of Two Worlds underscores the loss of will. Disregard of this world in favour of the next is represented as a kind of demonic possession rather than as a healing trance. Corelli’s gothic flourishes

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figure asceticism as a life-in-death state, so concentrated upon an ideal realm that the ascetic sleepwalks through this world. The novel’s first connection between extreme asceticism and possession is found in the narrator’s first meeting alone with Cellini. She goes to his studio to have her portrait painted, and while she sits for him, he gives her some ascetic propaganda, “Letters of a Dead Musician” – an unusual text which impresses the narrator with its “tone of absolute joy and contentment that seemed to light up every page”. Devoid of “wailings over disappointed ambition” or “regrets for the past”, the letters model the proper humble and cheerful attitude toward inspiration: Music, thou Sweetest Spirit of all that serve God, what have I done that thou shouldest so often visit me? .... I am too feeble to tell the world how soft is the sound of thy rustling pinions, how tender is the sighing breath of thy lips, how beyond all things glorious is the vibration of thy lightest whisper! Remain aloft, thou Choicest Essence of the Creator’s Voice, remain in that pure and cloudless ether, where alone thou art fitted to dwell. My touch must desecrate thee, my voice affright thee. Suffice it to thy servant, O Beloved, to dream of thee and die! (34)

In this passage, even an abstract art like music risks contamination by the limitations of earthly flesh. The musician feels that he should not frighten his muse (which Corelli envisions as a real angel) by direct contact with his coarse, limited flesh, and therefore calls for indirect contact through dreams and visions. A hint of a gothic threat surfaces in this section of the novel when Cellini describes to the narrator how the musician died suddenly while playing the organ. In eerily positive terms, Cellini concludes: “His loss was regretted by all, save myself and one other who loved him. We rejoiced, and still do rejoice, at his release” (35). Still the impulse to transcend this world is coded as dangerous: as Cellini tutors her in how to embrace death, the narrator’s eyes grow heavy and the printed letters in the musician’s text ominously “dance before [her] sight like active little demons with thin waving arms and legs” (36). This subtle linkage between demons and longing for the next world becomes overt in the narrative depiction of Zara’s death. Here Corelli outlines and criticizes the worldly view of asceticism that would interpret Zara’s rejection of the world as the unhealthy result of Heliobas’ manipulation. Zara becomes aware that she will be released

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from this world soon and begins to say her farewells to her brother and the narrator. Zara’s calm preparations for her death, however, do not go uncriticized by other characters. Just before the narrator moves into Heliobas’ residence, her landlady warns her: Oh, mademoiselle, have you not dread of that terrible man? Is it not he that is reported to be a cruel mesmerist who sacrifices everybody – yes, even his own sister, to his medical experiments? (123)

Drawing upon a gothic trope deployed by Horace Walpole in the Castle of Otranto (1764), Corelli uses comical servants to relay superstitious, but also possibly true, lore. Her landlady reports that her friend, a former maid in Zara’s household, saw her mistress standing with her arms outstretched and surrounded by “a ring of light like a red fire, which seemed to grow larger and redder always. All suddenly, madame grew pale and more pale, and then fell on her couch as one dead, and all the red fire went out” (123). Prince Ivan, who frequently visits Heliobas’ home and who broods about his unrequited love for Zara, echoes the rumour that Zara’s heart is possessed by a spirit. He reveals Zara’s secret to the narrator: Did you ever hear that line of poetry which speaks of ‘A Woman wailing for her demon-lover?’ That is what Zara does. (149)

Later, when Ivan confronts Zara, he voices the worldly and gothic interpretation of Heliobas’ philosophies and cures: I am no dreamer; no speculator in aerial nothings; no clever charlatan like Casimir [Heliobas], who, because he is able to magnetize a dog, pretends to the same authority over human beings, and dares to risk the health, perhaps the very sanity of his own sister, and that of the unfortunate young musician whom he has inveigled in here, all for the sake of proving his dangerous, almost diabolical experiments.

Ivan continues by pleading with Zara to “wake up” from her brother’s trance so that she will love him rather than a spirit: Let me tear the veil of incredulity from your eyes. Let me teach you how good a thing it is to live and love and laugh like other people, and leave electricity to the telegraphy-wires and the lamp-posts. (153)

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After this speech, Ivan reaches to claim Zara by force, but when he seizes her waist, she delivers him an electric shock that sends him to the floor senseless. In her study of the archetypal theme of the Demon Lover, Toni Reed concludes that such tales subtly control women by teaching them that ignoring the accepted norms of society leads to destruction.11 Corelli, by contrast, inserts the spirit lover motif in order to argue that the accepted norms of worldly society cannot compare to the ideal spiritual realm. While it is true that Zara is destroyed by her love for the spirit, Corelli attempts to frame this as a triumphant transcendence. However, it remains to be seen whether Zara’s death is good ascetic propaganda. Her complete detachment figures her as an automaton and her early death is tragic, not triumphant. By the time Zara is preparing for her demise, the gothic has served its purpose and has supposedly vanished from the novel. The reader has followed the narrator on her spiritual journey and has received several explanations from Heliobas about the true nature of spiritual electricity and the next world, which convey to readers that self-renunciation is safe and unthreatening. Nevertheless, despite the novel’s beautiful depictions of the spirit world, Ivan’s criticism of asceticism haunts the account of Zara’s journey. Just before she and the narrator descend for dinner, Zara, dressed like a bride, calmly informs her only friend that she believes she will be compelled to undertake an imminent journey. She asks the narrator for a favour during her absence – to destroy a statue that she had attempted in her studio that has disappointed her. As the narrator has just been reading “Pygmalion in Cyprus” before she meets Zara for dinner, Corelli leads the reader to infer that Zara has attempted to reproduce the form of her spirit-lover, but, in failing to provide an earthly form for him, she is instead to join him in the spirit realm. And indeed, after dinner, Zara exits onto the balcony to watch a rainstorm and is killed by lightening. In her use of the typical gothic motifs found in mesmeric literature, Corelli dramatizes the benefits and drawbacks of her unique version of spiritual electricity. If readers believed that Corelli, like her narrator, experienced inspired trances because of her ascetic attitudes, she would have maintained the spiritual authority granted to women by 11

Toni Reed, Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction, Lexington: MA, 1988, 116.

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the Victorian tradition of separate spheres. Even though Corelli did participate in the market through her writing, she could have upheld her feminine purity because of her spiritual withdrawal from worldly interests: the inspiration of her novels, after all, proves her spirituality. Indeed, this separation from the commercial sphere would have been seen, not only as proof of ideal femininity, but also as a sign of true genius. As Penny Boumelha notes, in many fin-de-siècle novels, commercial success was coded as a sign of failure because the characters assumed that only inauthentic authors who “sell out” win large audiences.12 In these novels, true geniuses write because they are compelled to create, usually at the cost of self-sacrifice. In A Romance of Two Worlds, the narrator could be seen as the ultimate authentic feminine genius; the self-sacrificing, will-less heroine transports herself to heaven to converse with angels-out-of-the-house, thereby moving from one separate sphere – the home – to another more remote and spiritual one. However, as Corelli’s gothic framework indicates, this persona of the inspired writer may not be completely authentic, since the inspiration comes from outside her self.

12

Penny Boumelha, “The Woman of Genius and the Woman of Grub Street: Figures of the Female Writer in British Fin-de-Siècle Fiction”, ELT, XL (1997), 164-80.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE: CRIME AND HYPNOTIC FICTIONS OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

MARY ELIZABETH LEIGHTON

In November 1888, The Times reported on an Algerian murder trial that had divided British public opinion. In January of the same year, the wounded twenty-three-year-old Henri Chambige had been found prostrate alongside the body of Madame Madeleine Grille. She had been shot twice in the head by Chambige, who claimed they had undertaken a murder-suicide pact. He insisted that she was determined to elope with him or to die. Friends and family of the married Mme Grille were outraged, declaring that “her character was above all suspicion”.1 They vehemently denied his allegations and protested that he had mesmerized his victim and then murdered her. Chambige refuted the allegations of mesmerism, but was found guilty under extenuating circumstances and sentenced to five years in prison. Two years later, in December 1890, The Times reported on the first day of the Eyraud-Bompard murder trial in Paris, which became a cause célèbre in both the French and English press from December 1890 to February 1891. Twenty-two-year-old Gabrielle Bompard was accused of colluding with her middle-aged lover Michel Eyraud to rob and murder a wealthy bailiff in Paris. Charged with murder, Bompard claimed that “she had acted under a post-hypnotic suggestion implanted by her former lover”.2 French experts were called upon to examine Bompard’s susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion and to testify about the viability of her story. Eyraud, in his turn, insisted that he had been subjected to the nefarious influence of Bompard – specifically her “youth, beauty, and insatiable appetites” – and had thus been compelled to participate in the murder.3 Eyraud was 1

“Tragedy in Algeria”, The Times, 9 November 1888, 5. Ruth Harris, “Murder Under Hypnosis in the Case of Gabrielle Bompard: Psychiatry in the Courtroom in Belle Époque Paris”, in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, eds W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, 2 vols, London, 1985, II, 197. 3 Harris, 200. 2

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guillotined in 1891; Bompard escaped capital punishment, although not imprisonment, and was out on early parole by 1903. These two narratives are typical of popular late-Victorian representations in their linkage of crime and hypnotism. As Alan Gauld notes, “in the second half of the 1880s, and for much of the 1890s, no aspect of hypnotism attracted greater interest, popular, medical, scientific and literary, than that of its possible adaptation to criminal ends”.4 In the medical and mainstream presses the topic of hypnotism, already hotly contested, accrued even more urgency as medical men and laypeople debated its potential role in criminal activity. The common features of the newspaper reports on the Chambige and Eyraud-Bompard cases neatly encapsulate the central preoccupations in these late-Victorian debates about the relationship between crime and hypnotism: Could a person be held responsible for actions performed under hypnosis? How could the abuse of hypnotism be prevented? And if the hypnotist could exert his power either to violate the subject or to control the subject’s actions, then what were the implications for the implementation of hypnotism by the medical profession? In this essay I examine how these questions circulated in lateVictorian debates about the value and function of hypnotism, concentrating specifically on the figure of the hypnotist in order to explore why it became such a contested identity for both medical men and the lay public in the late 1880s and 1890s. I focus initially on arguments in the medical and mainstream presses, where concern centred on the dangers posed by unqualified hypnotists and the hypnotized subject’s vulnerability to crime as either an unwitting accomplice to or victim of the hypnotist. I then consider how fictional representations of the malevolent hypnotist registered popular anxieties about the power of the hypnotist and challenged the implementation of hypnotism as a viable medical therapy. My analysis of a sample of novels involving hypnotism suggests that these popular representations of the hypnotist as criminal rendered problematic any advocacy of hypnotism by the medical profession at the fin de siècle. As I show, medical men strove to appropriate hypnotism as the exclusive purview of their profession. Their efforts to establish their legitimacy to this claim, however, could not ultimately legitimize the 4

Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge, 1992, 494.

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figure of the hypnotist. Represented as a threatening criminal, the hypnotist of late-Victorian fiction exceeded the medical profession’s ability to recuperate this role for themselves. Hypnotism on trial As Ruth Harris has shown, the Eyraud-Bompard case put on trial not only the alleged murderers, but also contemporary medical theories about hypnotism. In the Paris courtroom, proponents of the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools opposed each other as expert witnesses, each providing an explanation for Bompard’s behaviour based on their respective theories of hypnotism.5 The Salpêtrière school, primarily identified with Jean-Martin Charcot, held that hypnosis was merely a symptom of hysteria.6 According to Charcot and his followers, there were three states of hypnosis: catalepsy, in which the immobile subject’s muscular rigidity was heightened and her sensitivity to pain might be nullified by the operator; lethargy, in which the subject was in a state of sleep and her relaxed musculature rendered sexual violation possible; and somnambulism, in which the subject was in a “magnetic sleep” and therefore highly suggestible. Each of these states represented an increasingly vulnerable situation for the hypnotized subject.7 By contrast, the Nancy school, primarily identified with psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim and Administrative Law Professor Jules Liégeois, held that hypnosis was not a symptom but a temporary state induced by suggestion. Liégeois supported Bompard’s defence by claiming that “anyone with a sufficiently impressionable nature could be prevailed upon to act unconsciously under the influence and power of external suggestion”.8 Forensic psychiatrists of the Paris school testified for the prosecution, insisting that hysteria was a requisite condition for hypnosis and that Bompard had failed to provide adequate evidence of full-blown hysteria which would diminish her capacity for judgment or her criminal responsibility. Just as Bompard’s claim to have been 5

Robert G. Hillman, “A Scientific Study of Mystery: The Role of the Medical and Popular Press in the Nancy-Salpêtrière Controversy on Hypnotism”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXXIX/2 (1965), 163-82. 6 Michael Roth, “Hysterical Remembering”, Modernism/Modernity, III/2 (May 1996), 1-30. 7 Harris, 206-207. 8 Ibid., 198.

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hypnotized by Eyraud was subject to opposing interpretations by the Paris and Nancy experts, so too was her behaviour, during and before the crime. Was she, as she claimed, an innocent victim who had been taken ruthless advantage of by the brutish Eyraud? Or was she “a Parisian gavroche who lied, cheated, and stole to satisfy her sensual appetites”?9 These conflicting interpretations of Bompard’s morals figured the primary anxieties about hypnotism at the moment of the trial: first, that hypnotism rendered the female subject prone to the predations of malevolent operators; second, that hypnotism could redirect the subject’s moral compass, subjecting her to the will of the operator and removing all moral and sexual inhibitions; and third, that hypnotism, like lunacy, could become an alibi for the commission of crime, relieving the criminal of legal responsibility. In the first two scenarios, the operator successfully rendered the subject an automaton to be violated or commanded according to his will. In the third scenario, the criminal claimed to have been rendered an automaton in order to avoid prosecution. All three interpretations turned on the possibility of will transference and its abuse for criminal purposes. They also pointed to the thorny issue of criminal responsibility in cases of crimes perpetrated by or on the hypnotized subject: did hypnotism divest the subject of her waking moral sensibilities and therefore render her not responsible for offences committed against or by her while hypnotized? Or did hypnotism enable the hypnotist to perform or command only activities that the waking subject would normally consider morally acceptable? If the hypnotized subject was a slave to the hypnotist’s will, as popular representations suggested, then criminal responsibility lay squarely with the hypnotist as a criminal. As we shall see, the conflation of the hypnotist and the criminal boded ill for medical men who were eager to investigate the therapeutic potential and scientific value of hypnotism. In the early 1880s, when Charcot’s experiments consecrated hypnotism as a legitimate object of scientific investigation, British medical men tentatively expressed interest in the therapeutic possibilities of the practice. At the Annual Meeting in 1880, members of the Physiology section of the British Medical Association welcomed a German professor who spoke on the subject of sleep and 9

Ibid., 202.

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hypnotism. To the assembled crowd of medical men, Professor Preyer remarked: “So far as we know – and thousands of experiments have been performed – hypnotism is entirely harmless, at least if not practised to excess.”10 By the late 1880s and early 1890s, however, articles warning against the dangers of hypnotism had become a commonplace in the annals of the British Medical Journal.11 Although the cautionary injunctions against the use of hypnotism became more frequent throughout the 1880s, it would be wrong to suggest that the practice of hypnotism was widely accepted as a legitimate medical procedure when Charcot undertook his investigations. On the contrary, hypnotism had fallen out of favour as a legitimate focus of medical and scientific investigation because of its pedigree. Since surgeon James Braid had named and developed his theory of hypnotism in the early 1840s, the practice had been irrevocably associated with mesmerism.12 Braid’s valiant efforts to distinguish theoretically between mesmerism and hypnotism, and thereby to dispel any whiff of fraudulence or charlatanism from hypnotism, went largely unheeded. When Charcot’s experiments revived medical interest in hypnotism in the late nineteenth century, hypnotism was linked to mesmerism by both supporters and detractors of the practice.13 Historians of hypnotism have acknowledged this slippage, identifying the end of the century as the period during which “mesmerism became known as hypnotism”.14 As the 1880s progressed, hypnotism’s implication in criminal acts also threatened to undermine the validity of medical investigations of hypnotism. Even as hypnotism was increasingly discussed as a motivation for criminal activity, its medical proponents hypothesized that hypnotism could serve as a means of correctly identifying 10

“Discussion on Sleep and Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (4 September 1880), 381-83. 11 “Dangers of Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (17 September 1887), 636; “Dangers of Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (28 March 1891), 714. 12 Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998, 184-85; Gauld, 279-87. 13 “Mesmerism and Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (3 April 1886), 654; Ernest Hart, “The New Mesmerism”, British Medical Journal (14 January 1893), 77-78; (21 January 1893), 127-30; (28 January 1893), 198-200; (4 February 1893), 261-63; (11 February 1893), 301-03; (18 February 1893), 362-64. 14 Eric J. Dingwall, Introduction, in Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena: A Survey of Nineteenth-Century Cases, 4 vols, London, 1968, IV, vii.

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criminals and discovering their mode of operation.15 This defence of hypnotism was difficult to maintain given the increasingly specific dangers enumerated by sceptical medical men. Detractors of hypnotism within the medical community voiced two main arguments against the scientific investigation of hypnotism. First, they claimed that hypnotism was morally and physically degrading to both the hypnotized subject and the general public that witnessed exploitative performances of hypnotism. Second, they warned that the practice of hypnotism was “attended with many dangers”16 for the hypnotized subject, on whom it acted as a “dangerous mental poison”.17 In the late 1870s and early 1880s, neither of these criticisms found expression in concrete examples. Correspondents and journalists in the British Medical Journal warned vaguely against the demoralizing effects of hypnotism and the nebulous dangers that it held for subjects. It was not until the mid1880s that these dangers were made explicit: the danger of sexual assault on the one hand, and enforced criminality on the other. Anticipating mainstream coverage of the Chambige and EyraudBompard cases, the British Medical Journal emphasized the potential danger of crimes perpetrated under hypnotic influence. Rather than providing detailed coverage of actual sexual assaults on hypnotized female subjects, however, the British Medical Journal described the mock commission of crimes by hypnotized subjects under the watchful eye of medical investigators. Experiments on mesmerized subjects had long involved instruction to commit acts inimical to the waking subject’s moral sense.18 In the earlier phase of mesmeric investigation by the medical community this instruction often involved, for example, requiring the subject to drink a glass of water which the subject understood to be a glass of alcohol. The subject would then usually display symptoms of inebriation. In this earlier moment, the subject’s misapprehension of the water as alcohol was not understood as a consequence of suggestion, but was interpreted as the ability of the mesmerist to 15

Donald Dale Jackson, “You Will Feel No Pain”, Smithsonian, XXIX/12 (March 1999), 126-40. 16 “Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (5 May 1888), 962. 17 “Restriction of Hypnotic Performances”, British Medical Journal (31 May 1890), 1264. 18 Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis, London, 2002, 225.

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mesmerize the water and to impose his or her will on the subject. In the 1880s and 1890s, these instructions assumed increasingly sensational proportions. Subjects were frequently commanded to perform violent and criminal acts – albeit acts that resulted in no ultimate harm to their victims. Instructions to imbibe water mistaken for alcohol were abandoned and subjects were instead respectfully requested to murder their friends and family with fake pistols in the presence of fascinated audiences. On 26 January 1886, the British Medical Journal reported a case of “Telephonic Hypnotism” by Liégeois, who had been experimenting with giving suggestions over the telephone to hypnotized subjects who then proceeded to commit the recommended crime.19 In this instance, Liégeois instructed the young man to fire a revolver and steal a five franc piece, which offences he duly committed upon waking from the hypnotic sleep. Outlandish suggestions involving crime and violence became increasingly de rigueur in both medical investigations and public exhibitions of hypnotism, so much so that the British Medical Journal condemned public lectures and experiments by non-medical practitioners because they often involved the moral degradation of the hypnotized subject. On 21 May 1887, for example, the British Medical Journal condemned “the abuse of hypnotism” at a Paris exhibition where a hypnotized woman exposed herself “for the pleasure and entertainment of a public eager for a new sensation”.20 And on 24 November 1888, the British Medical Journal lambasted a London entertainment during which a self-proclaimed “Belgian professor” hypnotized his subject and implanted a post-hypnotic suggestion that he murder his father. Upon awakening, the stage subject “[took] his neighbour for his father [and] enjoyed killing him in cold blood”.21 Despite these imaginary crimes committed by hypnotized subjects, the British Medical Association concluded that “we have not yet sufficient proof that post-hypnotic suggestion has led to actual crime”.22 Yet medical men worried about and warned against the 19

“Telephonic Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (23 January 1886), 164. “The Abuse of Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (21 May 1887), 1121. 21 “Public Exhibitions of Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (24 November 1888), 1176. 22 “The Investigation of Hypnotism”, British Medical Journal (28 February 1891), 476. 20

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dangers of hypnotism. In response to editor Ernest Hart’s condemnation of hypnotism in the British Medical Journal as “almost invariably useless and often dangerous”,23 one proponent of the practice responded: “How are we to eliminate this uncertainty [about the adaptability of hypnotism to criminal ends] when we are frustrated by so-called scientists … hounding us down and holding us up to public opprobrium as dangerous characters?”24 For medical advocates of hypnotism, the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for hypnotism’s relationship to criminal activity and the recurring concern about hypnotism’s adaptation for dangerous purposes was key. In numerous articles and letters to the editor of the British Medical Journal, medical men construed the danger of hypnotism not as the nefarious influence of a malevolent operator, but as experimentation with and public demonstrations of hypnotism by unqualified practitioners. The reaction of the medical community to these shows demonstrates how such entertainments threatened to impugn the credibility of medical proponents of hypnotism.25 And they had reason to worry: these entertainments were enormously popular with audiences, and “one of the most attractive features of the shows” was the mock commission of violent crimes.26 But the adaptation to criminal ends of hypnotism was not the only public concern the medical community needed to address. Since Charcot’s experiments on hypnotism in the late 1870s, allegations of sexual offences committed by hypnotists had appeared routinely in the press. Medical proponents of hypnotism might contest the validity of these stories, but they needed to protect themselves from such accusations. Medical lecturers on hypnotism advised their “hearers never to hypnotize a stranger without a witness, and under no circumstances to hypnotize a female except in the presence of a

23 Ernest Hart, “Hypnotism, Animal Magnetism, and Hysteria”, British Medical Journal (3 December 1892), 1220. 24 Albert E. Davis, “Hypnotism, Hysteria, Etc.”, British Medical Journal (17 December 1892), 1375. 25 Paul Lerner, “Hysterical Cures: Hypnosis, Gender and Performance in World War I and Weimar Germany”, History Workshop Journal, XLV (Spring 1998), 79-101. 26 George Kingsbury, “Public Hypnotic Demonstrations”, British Medical Journal (14 February 1891), 391.

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reliable third person, preferably the husband in the case of a married woman”.27 Whereas French medical men took advantage of the debates about criminal responsibility to stake a claim to medico-legal authority in the courtroom, British medical men claimed professional authority by laying criminal responsibility at the feet of charlatans and unqualified practitioners. The stories of sexual license taken by hypnotists threatened to implicate medical men in a criminal role they were eager to refute. In response to the criminalization of the hypnotist, the British medical community’s strategy was twofold: first, to vilify unqualified practitioners of hypnotism and charlatans alike; and second, to construe doctors undertaking experiments on hypnotism as the victims of duplicitous female subjects. In both cases, doctors managed to figure themselves not as the agents of crime but as its victims. The primary social danger was not hypnotist doctors but impostors seeking to profit by exploiting the public fascination with hypnotism. Indeed, argued some medical men, these cases of hypnotism by unqualified and untrustworthy operators claimed the attention not merely of the medical profession but also of the law. One outraged doctor writing in the British Medical Journal noted, “the majority of alleged cases, which are probably wholly impostures, require the supervision of the police more than that of the physician”.28 Although this strategy effectively enabled medical men to disavow any associations with the figure of the criminal hypnotist, it required them to avow their potential impotence in the hands of wily female subjects. Criminal or dupe: the role of hypnotist seemed to offer no tenable position for medical men beyond this crude opposition. Moreover, while medical men sought to construe themselves as victims of hypnotized subjects and charlatans alike, readers of fiction increasingly associated the figure of the hypnotist with the criminal. It was a conflation that became harder and harder for medical proponents of hypnotism to surmount.

27

“Clinical Society of Manchester”, British Medical Journal (29 November 1890), 1243. 28 H. Donkin, “Correspondence. Psychology: Or What?”, British Medical Journal (13 August 1881), 306.

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Reading the hypnotist as criminal Reading assumed an important role in explaining both the causes and potential dangers of crimes in mainstream and medical press coverage of hypnotism’s adaptation to criminal ends. In its coverage of the Chambige trial, for example, The Times insisted that Chambige’s reading habits had contributed to his criminal behaviour: “It is clear that Chambige, whose head had been turned by reading unhealthy novels, was bent on creating a sensation and on imagining himself a kind of hero.”29 “Unhealthy novels”, the newspaper suggests, served as negative models for criminal behaviour that was glorified rather than vilified in such fiction. The prosecution even invoked Chambige’s interest in decadent literature as evidence of his moral corruption and argued that this literature had influenced his behaviour. The concern was that such reading would prompt a mimetic response from readers. This argument also extended to the medical and scientific communities which worried about the threat of theatricals and fictions providing criminal examples to vulnerable audiences and readers. In a chapter on “Criminal Literature and Art” in The Criminal (1890), Havelock Ellis argued that “it is youths and children who are especially prone to the imitation of criminal events from books or from real life”.30 Likewise, the Lancet warned against “stage spectacles” in which scenes of deliberate destruction were portrayed because “certain forms of mental disease are known to be mimetic, and there seems to be reason to suppose that in one case at least a morbid mind has been so influenced as to perpetrate what, if it were not madness, would be an atrocious crime”.31 Proponents of hypnotism like George Kingsbury and A. Taylor Innes also emphasized the dangers of reading. As advocates of the medical investigation of hypnotism, however, they focused their criticism on inflammatory misrepresentations of hypnotism in fiction and the press. For Kingsbury and Innes, as for so many other proponents of medical hypnotism, fictional representations were pernicious not only because they modelled how hypnotism might be adapted to criminal ends, but also because they inflamed public anxiety about the practice even as they got the science of hypnotism wrong. Innes decried the insistence of “our novelists and poets” on the 29 30 31

“Tragedy in Algeria”, The Times, 9 November 1888, 5. Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 1890; rpt., Montclair, 1973, 220. “Crime or Madness”, Lancet (8 November 1884), 839.

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mechanism of will-force, for which no evidence existed.32 In a similar vein, Kingsbury blamed “alarmist writers” for scaremongering and setting the public against any further legitimate investigation of hypnotism by medical men.33 And in an article in 1890 on “Hypnotism and Crime”, Charcot himself made clear that the medical community was the victim of “exaggerated and distorted” accounts of “frauds and crimes” involving hypnotism.34 The lay public was less convinced that medical men posed no threat to their hypnotized subjects, as press accounts of doctors’ assaults on hypnotized subjects seemed to confirm. What is more, medical men had not yet reached a consensus on the question of posthypnotic suggestion and the hypnotist’s ability to force the subject into criminal activity against his or her will. During the late 1880s and 1890s, as the debate on hypnotism and criminal activity reached its height in both the medical and mainstream presses, authors churned out novels on the subjects of hypnotism and mesmerism in great numbers.35 That authors, like medical men, grappled with the relationship between the mysterious power of hypnotism and legitimate medical authority is rendered explicit in a sample of novel titles from this period: Doctor Caesar Crowl: Mind-Curer (1887); The Doctor’s Secret (1890); Memoirs of a Physician (1890); Hypnotized: or, The Doctor’s Confession (1891). While these titles do not necessarily indicate whether the eponymous doctors appropriate hypnotism for criminal purposes, they do suggest that the practice of hypnotism and the profession of medicine were linked in the popular imagination, and that medical authority did not necessarily transcend the threatening potential for abuse that hypnotism was perceived to hold. Other titles, like The Slave of His Will (1891) and In His Grasp (1887), make clear the greatest fear about hypnotism among lay readers and the public at large: that the hypnotist possessed the power to control absolutely the hypnotized subject’s actions and thoughts, banishing her will and replacing it with his own. 32 A. Taylor Innes, “Hypnotism in Relation to Crime and the Medical Faculty”, Contemporary Review, LVIII (October 1890), 560. 33 George Kingsbury, “Hypnotism, Crime, and the Doctors”, The Nineteenth Century, XXIX/167 (January 1891), 148. 34 Jean-Martin Charcot, “Hypnotism and Crime”, Forum (March 1890), 165. 35 Donald Hartman, “Hypnotic and Mesmeric Themes and Motifs in Selected English-Language Novels, Short Stories, Plays and Poems, 1820-1983”, Bulletin of Bibliography, XLIV/3 (September 1987), 156-66.

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Late-Victorian popular fiction tends to represent the figure of the hypnotist as a criminal, although novels often cast the hypnotist as either a charlatan seeking financial profit or a villain seeking control over his victims. Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886) is a good example of the representation of the hypnotist as fraud. Although Verena Tarrant initially derives the strength to address audiences on the subject of women’s emancipation from the mesmeric passes that her father performs over her, the narrative explicitly reveals him as an old-fashioned huckster. The more common representation, however, is of the hypnotist as dangerous master of his victims’ wills. In novels ranging from Esmé Stuart’s In His Grasp to Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), the hypnotist is represented as a threatening, and often foreign, figure. In these novels, hypnotism figures variously as a powerful physiological and psychic phenomenon, a dubious practice with connections to the questionable rituals of spiritualism, and an illegitimate means of exacting profit from vulnerable hypnotized subjects. Despite the differences in such representations of hypnotism, there remain generic continuities among the novels. That is, regardless of whether the author represents hypnotism as a legitimate and scientifically demonstrable practice, or as one more example of the charlatan’s skills of legerdemain and suggestion, the novels share common features which distinguish them as an identifiable sub-genre of late-Victorian fiction. These features are most usefully described as a set of debates in which these novels participate: the question of the scientific legitimacy of hypnotism and who is authorized to determine this; the dangers posed by hypnotism, most notably to women who may be subjected to the hypnotist’s will; the relationship of hypnotism to contemporary fringe scientific practices such as spiritualism; and the characterization of the hypnotist. As my allusion to The Bostonians has already suggested, the question of hypnotism’s scientific legitimacy is undermined in novels, like James’, in which the hypnotist is revealed as no more than a glorified showman. But even in such narratives, in which the hypnotist is ultimately revealed as a criminal cheat, the practice, possibilities, and potential danger of hypnotism often transcend the shabbiness of the ends that it is made to serve. Hypnotism is construed as a potentially dangerous tool that can subject its victims to crimes of theft or sexual assault. It can also render them the instruments of

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crime willed by the hypnotist. In fiction, therefore, the medical profession’s effort to promulgate a counter-narrative to enable the scientific investigation of hypnotism thus found its most intractable challenge. Hypnotic fictions By 1895, the generic features of novels about hypnotism were recognizable to readers. As one reviewer lamented of “hypnotic fiction”, a term he coined to describe representations of hypnotism in fiction, the predictability of the genre was its shortcoming: For artistic reasons too obvious to need pointed out, the hypnotizer in these stories is always the villain of the piece. For the same or similar reasons, the “subject” is always a person worthy of our sympathy, and is usually a woman. Let us suppose it to be a good and beautiful woman – for that is the commonest case. The author gives us to understand that by hypnotism this good and beautiful woman is for a while completely in the power of a man who is ex hypothesi a beast, and who ex hypothesi can make her commit any excesses that his beastliness may suggest. Obviously we are removed outside the moral order altogether; and in its place we are presented with a state of things in which innocence, honesty, love, and the rest are entirely at the disposal and under the rule of malevolent brutality, the result, as presented to us, being qualified only by such tact as the author may choose to display.36

For this reviewer, as for subsequent critics, the exemplary “hypnotic fiction” was George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). But Trilby was not unique in its portrayal of the hypnotist; nor was it unique for the commentary it occasioned in the medical press on the subject of hypnotism and the powers of the hypnotist. Indeed, Trilby appeared at the tail end of the bulk of novels and medical tracts devoted to the question of hypnotism, and drew on earlier literary representations of the practice. One of these was Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus: His Rise, His Greatness, and His Fall (1888).37 This novel traces the fortunes of a failed author who achieves renown as a Prophet of Spiritualism in 36

Arthur Quiller-Couch, “A Literary Causerie: Hypnotic Fiction”, Speaker (14 September 1895), 316. I am grateful to Kirsten MacLeod for this reference. 37 Walter Besant, Herr Paulus: His Rise, His Greatness, and His Fall, London, 1888.

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London after he is tutored in sleight of hand and mesmerism by a professional medium. Herr Paulus arrives at the home of the wealthy Augusta and Cyrus Brudenel, enthusiastic advocates of Spiritualism, and delights followers with his miracles: the manifestation of an Indian newspaper a month before its date of publication; his prediction of a stock market crash that saves the family fortune; and his divination of the love between two of the secondary characters. Before long he has “conquered the whole house” (78). Yet his ability to wield such power comes, we discover, from his hypnotism of patriarch Cyrus Brudenel: As he spoke he leaned over and met his pupil’s eyes with his own, black and lustrous, commanding and compelling. In less than a minute, Mr Brudenel’s head bent forward, his face grew rigid, his eyes dilated, and his frame stiffened. Paul stood up and breathed deeply; then he pushed up an eyelid and looked at the glazed eye, as one who administers chloroform and wishes to ascertain if it has yet taken full effect. (88)

During Mr Brudenel’s daily hypnosis, Paul takes advantage of his state to open and read his mail, to peruse the documents in his desk, and thereby to apprise himself of useful information. Only sceptics Tom and Sibyl worry about the extent of Paul’s control over the household. Tom warns: “This is a dangerous state of things, Sibyl. In the hands of an unscrupulous person it would be very dangerous. The man has opportunities which no one should be allowed to have” (143). Fortunately for the Brudenel family, Paul is not “unscrupulous” but merely ambitious to achieve “the glory of the new-made reputation” (218). Much to the chagrin of his mentor, he refuses to use his hypnotic powers for criminal ends. When he becomes enamoured of Hetty and declares his love for her, he finds he can no longer influence others with the power of his piercing glances. His mentor, Professor Melchers, reprimands him: “You have lost your power because you have neglected my warning, and suffered your mind to become wholly occupied with a woman” (256). Paul refuses to be lured back into a life of deception. He rejects the offers of both Professor Melchers and Hetty’s parents, who are themselves fraudulent mediums, to earn a living by participating in their spiritualist scams. Although Paul takes the moral high ground and abandons hypnotism and its associated practices altogether,

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Besant’s conclusion to Herr Paulus suggests that Paul’s role as prophet to the Brudenel’s spiritualist circle has not been unique to him; it may be occupied by anyone who earnestly stakes a claim to it. Although Paul has confessed the fraudulence of his “miracles” and how they were performed, the Brudenels are not so much desperate to believe in the possibility of a spirit world as they are reluctant to give up their social sphere of influence among their fellow spiritualists. The novel ends with a scene that recreates precisely the scene of Paul’s introduction into the Brudenel household. The same characters are present as invited guests when Princess Olga Alexandrovna, a follower of Madame Blavatsky, proposes to dazzle them all with her connection to the spirits. By referring to Blavatsky, Besant represents hypnotism as part and parcel of a spurious set of practices that become associated under the rubric of spiritualism. As Besant wrote in his Autobiography (1902): “Herr Paulus is a story of spiritualistic fraud – I have always rejoiced to think that the story was considered a great blow to Sludge and his friends.”38 This allusion to Robert Browning’s fictional medium indicates Besant’s antipathy toward the spiritualist movement. Although modern spiritualism claimed an altogether different genealogy than that of hypnotism, the practices were just two among many that were conflated in the popular imagination by the 1880s. This conflation of distinct practices was especially prevalent among sceptics who sought to undermine the validity of these movements and the authority of their leading practitioners. As we have seen in Herr Paulus, scepticism typified fictional representations of the hypnotist as fraud. And yet, despite Besant’s explicit desire to expose the spiritualistic fraud of Paul, the novel endorses hypnotic phenomena as possible. Hypnotism functions as the viable explanation for Paul’s knowledge of Brudenel family finances. Ultimately, Paul is a successful fraud as a medium because he has mastered the practice of hypnotism; his real ability to hypnotize facilitates his feigned role as medium. The Charlatan (1895), by Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray, similarly describes a discontinued hypnotic fraud. With this novel, the authors aimed to contribute to “the elimination of humbugs and charlatans from the ranks of the faithful”. Although a “Note” at the 38

Walter Besant, Autobiography of Walter Besant, New York, 1902, 209.

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beginning of the novel insists that “‘The Charlatan’ is not an attack upon theosophy nor a satire against hypnotism”, theosophy and hypnotism certainly bear the brunt of Buchanan’s and Murray’s satirical ire.39 Woodville, a celebrated Theosophist and guest at the home of the Earl of Wanborough, is the charlatan of the title. Unlike the narrative strategy of Herr Paulus, which reveals Paul’s fraudulence towards the conclusion of the novel, The Charlatan explains Woodville’s imposture even before he arrives on the scene. His fellow criminal, Madame Obnoskin, reveals his plan to take advantage of the Earl, and revenge himself upon Colonel Arlington’s daughter Isabel, with whom Woodville had had a past relationship in India. Although Isabel was then attracted to Woodville, her companions convinced her to reject him. Later in the novel Woodville explains the reasons for his revenge: Once I thought I had won her heart. Had I, indeed, done so, I would have been her servant, her slave, till life was done. Then, through the calumny of evil tongues, she learned to despise me. She drove me from her with insult. I pursued her; I accepted humiliation upon humiliation. Her door was closed in my face. My letters were returned unopened. At last, to avoid me, she came to England. I followed her; and I am here! (101-102)

However, Woodville’s plans hit a snag when he encounters Isabel in a hypnotic trance. She has sleepwalked onto the terrace and from there wends her way to the turret room in which he is staying. When she admits, in her somnambulant state, that she loves him, Woodville finds himself in an ironic reversal of their previous relationship. Whereas his unrequited passion for Isabel had rendered him her “slave” in India, now Isabel becomes a slave to his hypnotic will. Yet it is at this point that Woodville realizes he cannot follow through on his plan to take advantage of her vulnerability: Aware of his evil command over her, he had expected to find himself face to face with a helpless, will-less woman, spell-bound beyond the power of resistance, physical or moral – a woman who, in her waking moments, felt for him nothing but distrust and even dread, and who, even when hypnotized and powerless to resist him, would be conscious only of a dull, numb sense of pain. How different was the 39

Robert Buchanan and Henry Murray, The Charlatan, Chicago, 1895, n. p.

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reality! Had he been her dearest and nearest friend, instead of her most dangerous enemy, the sound of his voice could not have awakened in her a more subtle sense of pleasure. (163-64)

Moved by “the girl’s perfect trust and utter surrender, her complete unconsciousness of any evil, her helplessness, her divine gentleness and affection” (167), Woodville sends her back to her own rooms to avoid impugning her reputation. That Woodville decides not to avail himself of this opportunity does not render Murray’s and Buchanan’s representation of the hypnotist any less threatening. It is only the whim of the hypnotist, the narrative suggests, that determines the fate of the hypnotized subject. Inspired by Isabel’s purity and love for him, Woodville reveals his deception to the Earl of Wanborough before departing forever, leaving Isabel free to marry her intended suitor. Despite Woodville’s reformed character and good intentions, however, his departure does not sever his hypnotic connection with Isabel. Her engagement broken and her constitution weakened, she becomes ill and listless, causing anxiety for her concerned friends. Their concern is further aroused when Isabel, with her resolute antipathy for the city, accompanies the Earl’s entourage to London, where, unbeknown to her, Woodville is preparing his embarkation to India. One evening he is mysteriously compelled “by some occult influence” (206) toward the Drury Lane theatre. After the opera, “he was startled by a voice moaning in his ears, ‘Philip, Philip!’” (207) Looking around, he glimpses Isabel in a box seat. Woodville’s disavowal of hypnotic influence over Isabel has had no material effect; she continues to waste away and, what is more, he now finds himself subject to her desires. Woodville’s concerted decision to abandon his claim on Isabel’s affections cannot break the hypnotic connection they now share, which draws them together not only at the theatre but also at sea, as Woodville unwittingly takes the same steamer to India. Realizing that only his death will free Isabel, Woodville nobly perishes when the ship sinks, but not before he has declared his love for Isabel and secured her safety in a lifeboat. Hypnotism is dangerous, the novel suggests, not only because it initially subjects Isabel to Woodville’s will, but also because it ultimately exceeds his control. If even a reformed villain fails to control his hypnotic powers, to what nefarious ends might an unrepentant criminal use such powers?

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E. H. C. Oliphant’s The Mesmerist (1890) responds to this question, which preoccupied both the medical profession and the lay public, presenting us with a criminal hypnotic subject other than a hypnotist. Deriving important circumstances of plot and narrative techniques from Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), The Mesmerist uses an amateur detective, Val Medway, to investigate the murder committed by Allan Campbell. After Allan’s family experiences the tragic loss of one of his sisters and her baby in a boating accident, his brother Hugh, the lone survivor, hires a mesmerist to cure his physical pain “by scientific means”.40 Allan adapts the mesmerist’s techniques to self-induce sleep when he is troubled by his inappropriate love for Hugh’s betrothed. When Hugh is found dead of strychnine poisoning, Allan escapes censure at the inquest but increasingly comes under suspicion by his friends and family: Hugh’s fiancée, to whom he revealed his love before Hugh’s death, breaks contact with him, and his family and friends shun him, with the exception of his remaining sister’s husband, Cecil Wilson, and his friend Val Medway, who determines to discover the real murderer. Medway uncovers the unfortunate history of the mesmerist’s daughter, abandoned at a tender age by a ruthless Lothario. A fallen woman, she then gained employment as a barmaid and had a brief sexual relationship with Hugh, who eventually ended the affair and encouraged her to return to her father. The mesmerist therefore harboured ambivalent feelings toward Hugh, who both corrupted his daughter and restored her to him briefly before she died. Yet the mesmerist strenuously proclaims his innocence to Medway, who enlists him to entrap the true criminal – Cecil Wilson. Allan, we discover, was under mesmeric influence at the time of the murder and therefore ignorant of his actions. Wilson took advantage of his susceptibility to suggestion, ordering him to murder his brother. Wilson reveals that he hoped Allan would then commit suicide out of guilt, leaving the only remaining Campbell – Wilson’s wife – to inherit the family fortune. The novel’s title ultimately alludes not only to the charlatan who aims to alleviate Hugh’s debilitating pain, but also to Cecil Wilson, the criminal responsible for orchestrating Hugh’s murder. The 40

E. H. C. Oliphant, The Mesmerist, London, 1890, 56.

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Mesmerist thus construes mesmerism as a real phenomenon and a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. As one of the characters wonders, “What crimes might not a man with such power make an unfortunate commit?” (66). As Wilson impudently observes to the charlatan and Val Medway of the mesmerized Allan: “I could twist the ass round my little finger” (248). Even the murder of one’s brother, the novel suggests, is made possible under the influence of mesmerism. These four fictions are consistent in representing hypnotism as dangerous. What separates, say, Svengali from Buchanan’s and Murray’s charlatan is moral conscience; whereas Svengali uses Trilby to fulfil his own musical aspirations (and, the narrator implies, his sexual desires), Woodville declines to seize sexual advantage of Isabel’s trance state. That Isabel is not the object of sexual interference in no way diminishes the threat that hypnotism represents in these novels. Rather, it confirms the power that the hypnotist holds over his subject either to exploit or to respect the subject’s sexual or moral integrity. The exploitation of the hypnotized subject is similarly the common element in Herr Paulus and The Mesmerist. Although Besant set out to condemn spiritualism as a mere fraud perpetrated upon gullible victims, his novel posits hypnotism as a real phenomenon and the hypnotist as a real threat to the Brudenels’ financial security. Paul is a charlatan as a spiritualist, but his hypnotic abilities are real. Just as real, if not more threatening, is the villainous Cecil Wilson’s hypnotic power over Allan Campbell. This hypnotic power enables Wilson to command Allan’s murder of his own brother and to keep the knowledge of this crime from Allan’s waking conscience. These novels, among many others, provide various models of the hypnotist: as power-thirsty exploiter of vulnerable female subjects; as money-grubbing faux spiritualist; as vengeance-seeking charlatan; and as innocent-seeming, clandestine schemer. Regardless of the details of the authors’ characterizations of the hypnotist, however, the broad strokes remain consistent. In each novel, the hypnotist is construed as a criminal: a representation that figured in the press of the 1880s and 1890s as well as in fiction. Medical proponents of therapeutic hypnotism responded by painting medical men as the victims rather than the perpetrators of crime. They argued that unqualified practitioners, charlatans, and emotionally unstable female subjects were the genuine criminal threats in hypnotic treatments and

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demonstrations. This counter-narrative became necessary because of the force of popular representations of the hypnotist as criminal. But it was also inadequate to the task of redeeming the figure of the hypnotist as a trustworthy, reliable medical expert. The authority of these popular fictional representations of the hypnotist in the late nineteenth century made impossible the recuperation of the hypnotist by the medical community. Indeed, the medical community’s turn away from hypnotism remains as a legacy of the power of these lateVictorian popular fictions.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’S DOMESTIC DESIRES: MESMERISM, MEDIUMSHIP AND FEMMES FATALES

CATHERINE WYNNE

In 1894, Arthur Conan Doyle was immersed in mesmeric research and psychic inquiry. He published The Parasite in which a female mesmerist subjugates a young male scientist in her home, and the Society for Psychical Research summoned Doyle and two of its leading investigators, Frank Podmore and Sydney Scott, to examine alleged poltergeist activity in a house in Dorset. Doyle had observed psychic phenomena and had engaged in mesmeric inquiry since his time as a doctor in Southsea in the early 1880s.1 Initially, his usefulness rested on his scientific training and Frederic Myers encouraged his participation, noting in an 1887 letter that Doyle’s profession had “doubtless accustomed [him] to weighing the evidence”.2 By 1894, Doyle was also the celebrated author of the empirical detective and domestic concerns form a significant part of his fiction. Consequently, the supposedly haunted house of the retired Colonel Elmore, his wife and adult daughter provided the ideal environment to conjoin science and detection. This research stimulated the literary and spiritual dimensions of Doyle’s work. On the second night of their vigil at Elmore’s home Doyle and Podmore (Scott had returned to London) experienced “tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a table with a stick.” Doyle confirms: “We had, of course, taken every precaution, and we could not explain the noises; but at the same time we could not swear that some ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us.”3 On examination, however, the kitchen, which was the apparent site of the activity, seemed undisturbed and its doors and windows remained locked. According to Doyle’s subsequent account of the incident in 1 Geoffrey Stavert, A Study in Southsea: The Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, Portsmouth, 1987, 91-119. 2 Pierre Nordon, Conan Doyle, trans. Frances Partridge, London, 1966, 150. 3 Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation and the Vital Message, London, 1938, 22-23.

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The New Revelation, the investigation was inconclusive; the psychic detectives failed to yield any explanation as to the nature of these “ghostly” intrusions. “There”, Doyle records, “the matter ended for the time”.4 Yet, according to Jerome K. Jerome, Doyle had confided in him shortly after the event that Elmore’s daughter had caused the manifestations. Jerome recounts in his autobiography that on the second night the woman burst into tears: Doyle’s medical training came to his aid. The next night they laid their plans: and discovered, as Doyle had suspected, that the ghost was the daughter herself.5

Podmore’s report to the Society for Psychical Research General Meeting in May 1896 corroborates this result: “Representatives of the society have investigated with some care eleven cases of this kind [and] in none of these cases was satisfactory evidence obtained pointing to abnormal agency.”6 These “meaningless acts of mischief” emerge, Podmore reasons, from “the excessive love of notoriety which is occasionally associated with other morbid conditions, especially in young girls”.7 Whatever the truth of the haunted house at Dorset, such conflicting accounts reveal the ongoing contested nature of psychical and, indeed, mesmeric research, and the incident epitomizes another dimension of nineteenth-century investigations in these phenomena. It reflects the centrality of female engagement in mesmerism and mediumship, practices that were interrogated by mainly male investigators.8 Such investigations had precedents in the studies on mesmerism conducted by John Elliotson on the O’Key sisters, illiterate Irish servant-girls who could diagnose their own and other patients’ illnesses at 4

Doyle, The New Revelation, 23. In another Doylean account, the house is occupied by a mother, a married daughter and a son. The immediate result is also inconclusive. (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Edge of the Unknown, London, 1930, 163-65). 5 Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times (1926), London, 1983, 133. 6 Frank Podmore, Journal of the Incorporated Society for Psychical Research, VII (May 1896), 247. 7 Frank Podmore, Studies in Psychical Research, London, 1897, 160. 8 William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London, 1874, 102-12; Podmore, Studies, 137-55; Charles Richet, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, trans. Stanley De Brath, London, 1923, 454-545; W. J. Crawford, The Psychic Structures of the Goligher Circle, London, 1921.

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University College Hospital whilst in mesmeric trance and who were generally believed to be tricking the misguided doctor.9 They were also anticipated by the investigations of the scientist William Crookes into the beguiling mediumship of Florence Cook.10 Such mesmeric and spiritual women represent the potential for a subversive movement beyond the restrictions of class and domesticity and temporarily threaten to usurp a scientific elite. The haunted house unveils another narrative strand central to nineteenth-century social norms by demonstrating how the sanctity of the home as the domain of contained feminine experience is undermined by the eruption of an uncontainable female desire – a desire that is figured both in terms of knowledge and sexuality – that threatens to destabilize gender relations and domestic roles, just as it imperils a professional (mainly scientific and exclusively male) corps. That such preoccupations permeate Doyle’s writing is hardly surprising – he was after all a medical doctor, detective and occultist writer, psychic investigator and spiritualist. Such incarnations are embodied in writings that often betray common conceptual themes – an ontological anxiety concerning women and an epistemological doubt regarding female mesmeric knowledge. The home is central to almost all of Doyle’s work, within which the safe containment of middle-class domesticity is a predominant theme. In Doyle’s early mesmeric fictions, the domestic is often a troubled space dominated by female figures with mesmeric or arcane knowledge. Their threat lies in that they can operate both inside and without and their places cannot be prescribed and restricted within the home. This essay draws the eruption of the mesmeric femme fatale in “John Barrington Cowles” (1884) and The Parasite (1894) into dialogue with scientific explorations of female mediumship in the nineteenth century. It proceeds to examine Doyle’s spiritualist writings which revise the role of the female medium in the domestic space and the scientific order. Doyle’s sanctified reconfiguration of female mediumship provides an antidote to his sexually charged mesmeric fictions. Ultimately, for Doyle, female mesmeric knowledge is dangerous and his spiritualist writing seeks to re-establish an overtly 9

Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, 1998,

79. 10

Crookes, 102-12.

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benign, but reactionary Victorian patriarchy: homes haunted with destabilizing female knowledge must be exorcized. “The home of knowledge”: the medical and the mesmeric Questions regarding the moral implications of mesmerism sustained the science’s controversial status in medical discourse of the late nineteenth century. Doyle, “as a deeply involved observer of his own time”, engaged in extensive research on the subject.11 In particular, Alfred Binet’s and Charles Féré’s Animal Magnetism (1887) stirred his thinking and fiction. For Binet and Féré susceptibility to mesmeric influence imperilled individual autonomy: Some of our patients are hypnotized at once by a single abrupt gesture, and at any hour of the day. If we meet one of these subjects crossing the courtyard, an exclamation or abrupt gesture will cause her to stop short and become motionless in catalepsy. She may be instantaneously awakened by breathing on her forehead and eyes. The hypnotic sleep may, therefore, be produced and brought to an end in an extremely short time, we might even say during the passage from one door to another.

Even more troubling is the notion that the female in trance becomes a potential object of control and violation: a subject of profound hypnotism may undergo all sorts of violence without retaining any recollection or consciousness of it .... We even think it possible that a subject might be violated in the hypnotic state, in which she would be unable to offer any resistance.12

In Doyle’s unpublished essay on mesmerism written in 1888, the endangered subject is male and the problem moves beyond the scientific to a contemplation of free will: A man is impelled to do some act by the irresistible action of a hypnotic suggestion which may have been made some months before. Yet to him the action appears to emanate from himself and however outré it may be he will always invent some plausible reason why he has done it. He would scout the idea that the impulse came from 11 12

Nordon, 150. Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, Animal Magnetism, London, 1887, 364-65, 367.

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without, and yet we know that it is so. How can we tell that all our actions are not of this nature? What appears to us to be our own choice may prove really to have been as unalterable and inexorable as fate – the unavoidable result of the sum total of suggestions which are acting upon us.13

The anxieties expressed in this excerpt are popularized and domesticated in all their perilous potential in some of Doyle’s early fictions. Of these, “John Barrington Cowles” represents the most hazardous exposition of mesmeric abilities. Here the faculty emerges from the home but fatally extends beyond its precinct. The beautiful Kate Northcott is a mysterious figure whose name has been linked to a number of young, handsome and talented men at Edinburgh University. John Barrington Cowles is a rising young scientist who fatally succumbs to the voracious Northcott’s charms. The narrator, Bob Armitage, is explicit in his representation of Cowles’ physical attributes: Cowles was a tall, slim young fellow, with an olive, Velasquez-like face, and dark, tender eyes. I have seldom seen a man who was more likely to excite a woman’s interest, or to captivate her imagination.14

Northcott first encounters him at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1879. The location emphasizes the centrality of the gaze. When her current fiancé, Archibald Reeves, leaves her side Northcott significantly turns away from the pictures and passes the time “in taking a deliberate survey of the company” until her attention is arrested by Cowles who was standing before a painting: His profile was turned towards us, and never have I seen him to such an advantage. I have said that he was a strikingly handsome man, but at that very moment he looked absolutely magnificent. It was evident that he had momentarily forgotten his surroundings, and that his whole soul was in sympathy with the picture before him. His eyes sparkled, and a dusky pink shone through his clear olive cheeks. She continued to watch him fixedly, with a look of interest upon her face, until he came out of his reverie with a start, and abruptly turned round so that his gaze met hers. (193) 13

Nordon, 151. A. Conan Doyle, “John Barrington Cowles”, in The Captain of the Pole-Star, London, 1914, 191. 14

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Northcott, whose eyes are of a “penetrating intensity” (192), summons his attention and “the picture was forgotten already, and his soul had come down to earth once more” (193). Cowles’ correlation with paintings – he is after all, “Velasquez-like” (191) – both renders him an object of the desiring gaze and predicts his future entrapment. Northcott’s origins are unknown but she maintains a façade of respectability by residing with a chaperone. The pale and bloodless Mrs Merton is supposedly Northcott’s aunt. The young woman is very obviously revealed as a sexual predator yet her desire for male companionship, for a husband, operates within the margins of conventional, if rather tainted respectability. She is described as “the most unlucky girl in the world” (195) when her first fiancé, William Prescott, is found floating in a lake just three days after Northcott summoned him to her home late at night. Her second discarded fiancé, Reeves, “who had once been famous as one of the most dressy and particular men in the whole college” (196), is discovered by Armitage in a degraded state outside a gin-palace. However, Northcott’s danger is not only conveyed in the rapid degeneration of her former lovers, her overriding desire for power is revealed in an encounter with a stage mesmerist: [Messinger] was a man whose performance, such as it was, had been again and again pronounced to be genuine by competent judges. He was far above trickery, and had the reputation of being the soundest living authority upon the strange pseudo-sciences of animal magnetism and electro-biology. (207)

After a series of mesmeric feats at a public performance, Messinger’s finale is to demonstrate how a subject can be completely dominated by the will of the mesmerizer to the extent that the subject loses all power of volition. For his subject Messinger chooses Cowles, and he informs the audience that he intends to compel him to come to the platform. Under the influence of the mesmerist’s gaze Cowles “made one or two spasmodic motions of his hands, as if to grasp the sides of his seat, and then rose, but only to sink down again, though with an evident effort” (208). All the while, Northcott’s gaze is fixed on Messinger and eventually her superior power thwarts the mesmerist who is exhausted by the protracted struggle and forced to abandon his performance for the evening. The encounter is an interesting one –

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Northcott has “mesmerized the mesmerizer” (209) and assumed complete control of the body and mind of her fiancé. This fictional incident has an interesting biographical precedent. In 1889, Doyle attended a demonstration by a travelling mesmerist, Milo de Meyer. De Meyer’s performance followed the conventions of the stage-mesmerist, but akin to the fictional Messinger, De Meyer valued his abilities and arranged a private demonstration for Southsea’s journalists and professionals. He successfully mesmerized a volunteer from the audience but his attempt to mesmerize Doyle failed and De Meyer, much to Doyle’s delight, conceded that the process would take too long.15 Indeed, susceptibility to mesmeric trance is sexually determined in Doyle’s fictions. As Alex Owen argues: The vocabulary of trance mediumship oozed sexuality. Mediums surrendered and were then entered, seized, possessed by another. In this sense mediumship was a re-enactment of prescriptive notions of the female sexual role.16

Similarly, Cowles’ swarthy good looks and intellectual vigour are accompanied by an imaginative and feminine disposition. As he proceeds with his engagement, Northcott reveals a secret to him the nature of which is never conveyed but its import causes Cowles to recoil from her in terror. He is destined to undergo the fate of her previous fiancés and although he hides with Armitage in a remote Scottish retreat, he believes that Northcott’s eyes are summoning him to his death over the cliffs and into the sea. The narrative’s strength lies in the manner in which the unknowable quality of the encounter is sustained. Northcott is an ambiguous figure whose powers extend beyond mesmeric boundaries to occupy an occultist space associated with a military uncle who was rumoured to have been a “devil-worshipper” (205) in India. She is described as a “devil” (209) and a “fiend” with a “vampire soul behind a lovely face” (213) as she saps the life energy from the men with whom she becomes involved and renders them insane. Despite the ambiguity surrounding Northcott’s occultist affiliations, she undisputedly invades the scientific domain. Cowles’ medical potential 15

Stavert, 141. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, London, 1989, 218. 16

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is established early in the story. He was “one of the foremost men of his year, taking the senior medal for anatomy and the Neil Arnott prize for physics”. A distinct asceticism or possible homosexuality is associated with his studies; before his encounter with Northcott, he had “led a solitary life, avoiding female society” (191). Northcott appropriates male scientific space embodied in Cowles, and equally undermines the powers of the mesmerist – the image of the exhausted Messinger leaning against the table is indicative of sexual as well as physical depletion. Ultimately, she exerts sexual control and exploits the scientific and the quasi-scientific. After the performance, Cowles is delighted that he has not succumbed to Messinger’s will: “He didn’t succeed with me …. I think he caught a Tartar that time” although he admits that “all the strength seemed to have gone out of me – especially just before he collapsed himself” (209). The medical and the mesmeric are established as distinct domains and Northcott’s intrusion into both highlights the dangerous limitations of their mutually exclusive confinement. Although Northcott successfully wields her powers beyond the home, the domestic sphere represents both the site of her desire and her impotence as her fiancés ultimately choose mortality over marriage. The narrative leaves us with a troubling question – what is the exact nature of the secret that causes the males to choose death over domesticity? On one level, Northcott operates as the conventional femme fatale luring men into a dangerous sexual subordination; on a second level, the fatal knowledge is also sexual, but the text with its implicit homoerotic thematics – Cowles’ beauty, Messinger’s exhaustion, the male narrator’s jealousy – underscores the secret’s forbidden nature. Certainly, Northcott’s secret knowledge aligns her with the mesmeric Dorian Gray with one exception – it is the heterosexual nature of Northcott’s desires that destroy her fiancés.17 While this knowledge remains undisclosed, one thing is certain – Northcott’s mesmeric influence intensifies the sexual. Comparably, in The Parasite (1894), the mesmeric threat emerges from the domestic space and its object is to destroy household harmony and scientific validity. The young and talented Professor 17

In August 1889 Doyle first encountered Wilde when they were both commissioned by Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine to produce stories. Wilde produced The Picture of Dorian Gray and Doyle followed with The Sign of Four. Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (1924), Oxford, 1989, 78-79.

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Gilroy is initially dismissive of mesmeric potential until he is called on to witness his fiancée, Agatha Marden, placed in trance in a colleague’s home by a crippled West Indian mesmerist, Miss Penelosa: She looked down at Agatha with an expression which I resented from the bottom of my soul – the expression with which a Roman empress might have looked at her kneeling slave. Then, with a quick commanding gesture she tossed up her arms and swept them slowly down in front of her. I was watching Agatha narrowly. During three passes she seemed to be simply amused. At the fourth I observed a slight glazing of her eyes, accompanied by some dilation of her pupils. At the sixth there was a momentary rigor. At the seventh her lids began to droop. At the tenth her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slower and fuller than usual. I tried as I watched to preserve my scientific calm, but a foolish, causeless agitation convulsed me. I trust that I hid it, but I felt as a child feels in the dark. I could not have believed that I was still open to such weakness.18

The battle between medical orthodoxy and mesmerism that had inundated scientific debate since mesmerism’s arrival in Britain with Richard Chenevix in 1829 is played out here rather conventionally over the body of a woman.19 However, it is Gilroy, not Agatha, who is debilitated by the encounter. He is “puzzled and disconcerted” whilst Agatha is summoned from her sleep by the “sharp tap of [Penelosa’s] crutch upon the floor” (18). Agatha is “none the worse for her strange excursion” but the Professor is “nervous and unstrung” (19). Penelosa, as femme fatale, operates from within the confines of the home and, as evidenced by her control over Agatha, can penetrate the home. Her interest is sexual and possibly marital: “Frankly, Professor Gilroy,” said she, “I am not at all interested in science, nor do I care whether it can or cannot classify these powers.” 18

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Parasite, Westminster, 1897, 16-17. For Chenevix’s account of mesmerism, see Richard Chenevix, “On Mesmerism, Improperly Denominated Animal Magnetism”, The London Medical and Physical Journal, LXI/361; VI/33 New Series (March 1829), 219-30; “Mesmerism. Observations and Experiments on Mesmerism”, The London Medical and Physical Journal, LXI/364; VI/36 New Series (June 1829), 491-501. 19

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Gilroy becomes the subject of mesmeric experiments that are conducted in Professor Wilson’s home under the latter’s scientific observation. Initially, the investigation is designed to examine the “phenomena of suggestion and lucidity” in line with the work undertaken “upon women at Nancy and the Salpetrière” (10). “It will”, Gilroy believes, “be more convincing when a woman demonstrates it upon a professor with a second professor as a witness” (43). However, test conditions are compromised when Wilson is called out of town and leaves the experiments under the supervision of his wife until finally mesmerist and subject are left alone.20 On one such occasion, Gilroy awakens to discover that he is grasping Penelosa’s hand. Repulsed by the encounter, he is determined to stay away, but soon realizes that he is powerless to do so. Penelosa summons him from his fiancée’s home to her side. However, she eventually becomes exhausted by her efforts and Gilroy takes the opportunity for his temporary release from thraldom to scorn her sexual advances: “You vile woman,” I said, “if I did my duty to society, you would never leave this room alive!” “I love you, Austin; I love you!” she wailed. “Yes,” I cried, “and Charles Sadler before. And how many others before that?” “Charles Sadler!” she gasped. “He has spoken to you? (80-81)

The spurned Penelosa seeks her revenge whilst Gilroy seeks the advice of a fellow scientist. But his consultation with Haldane is futile: I looked at his heavy set features, his slow eyes, and the ponderous study furniture which surrounded him, I could hardly tell him what I had come to say. It was all so substantial, so material. (93) 20 This case inverts the gender of Charcot’s theatrical experiments at the Salpetrière. See Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, New York, 1985, 147-50.

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Gilroy believes that his condition is beyond scientific and material understanding, a realisation that is seemingly underlined by Haldane’s substantial furniture. The point is highlighted in another observation: Here I sit in a commonplace English bow-window, looking out upon a commonplace English street with its garish buses and its lounging policeman, and behind me there hangs a shadow which is out of all keeping with the age and place. In the home of knowledge I am weighed down and tortured by a power of which science knows nothing.

Gilroy is alienated from the “home of knowledge” (100). He loses his university post due to Penelosa’s interference as she takes possession of his mind when he commences a lecture and reduces him to idiocy. This intellectual degradation is compounded by attempted social disgrace and criminalization as she engages him in crimes of sexual jealousy. Towards the end of the narrative, Gilroy awakens from trance in his fiancée’s boudoir, “a small chamber …. It was cosy and bright, with chintz-covered settees, coloured hangings, and a thousand pretty little trifles upon the wall” (119). Then, he discovers a bottle of sulphuric acid in his pocket intended, no doubt, as a target for his fiancée’s face. Fortunately, his release occurs at the precise moment of Penelosa’s death. The mesmerist’s control of him has finally ended but Gilroy is left to contemplate his precarious experience with a “power of which science knows nothing” (96). For Gilroy, the difficulty arises when mesmeric powers are wielded from the confines of the home and thereby threaten scientific impartiality: With the paid performer you may pounce upon him and expose him the instant that you have seen through the trick. He is there to deceive you, and you are there to find him out. But what are you to do with the friend of your host’s wife? Are you to turn on a light suddenly and expose her slapping a surreptitious banjo? Or are you to hurl cochineal over her evening frock when she steals round with her phosphorous bottle and supernatural platitude? There would be a scene and you would be looked on as a brute. (10)

The home, the locus of the female, precludes intrusion. It is figured as a contested space of mesmeric and mediumship practice and of

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subversive knowledge. Binet and Féré remind us, however, that Gilroy as a willingly hypnotized subject “must be held responsible for having voluntarily alienated his free will”.21 Moreover, he may awaken in the sexual neutrality of his fiancée’s “cosy” sitting-room, but his experiments with Penelosa had been conducted in the mesmerist’s “little boudoir” (76). As Gilroy’s attempts to lock himself in his bedroom fail he envisages the eventual necessity of having the “doors and windows screwed up and six stout men to hold [him] down in [his] bed” before he will “surrender [him]self to be hag-ridden in this way” (65). The text is a narrative of sexual repression in which the monstrous feminine is uneasily quelled.22 Both The Parasite and “John Barrington Cowles” examine the interface of sexuality and science, of the domestic and the professional. In “John Barrington Cowles” the mesmeric exchanges are aligned with gothic territory as the secret, fatal knowledge is ostensibly occultist but covertly sexual, while The Parasite’s intrusion of the mesmeric into the quotidian also renders it a sexually troubling text. Both narratives probe the destabilization of orthodox science: Cowles, a brilliant young scientist, is destroyed while Gilroy’s reputation is impaired. It is noteworthy that Penelosa comes from the West Indies while Northcott’s origins are unknown. Both have colonial or imperial affiliations, both also operate as itinerant figures that penetrate the confines of the British home and challenge the boundaries of medical orthodoxy, race, and class.23 Both texts can also be aligned with fears in the medical sphere concerning female mediumship. The experimentations on the O’Key sisters at University College Hospital in the late 1830s are instructive in this regard. Whilst in mesmeric trance, the uneducated servants threatened to undermine and ridicule the medical establishment with their ribaldry and coquetry.24 The trance operated in a manner similar to Bakhtin’s carnival which “celebrated the temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order”. It licensed the 21

Binet and Féré, 376. On this point, see Anne Cranny Francis, “Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite: The Case of the Anguished Author”, in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle, eds Clive Bloom et al., New York, 1988, 64-79. 23 Catherine Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic, Westport: CT and London, 2002, 158-65. 24 Winter, 95. 22

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unacceptable – the momentary profanation of authority and class.25 Whilst in trance, Elizabeth O’Key diagnosed patients’ illness and could predict imminent demise as she claimed to see “an image of death wrapped in white clothes, standing by the side of the patient”. Elizabeth’s knowledge, therefore, transcended the material to embrace a spiritual authority. Meanwhile, her sister, Jane, entered an aesthetic state: “in this state her countenance is truly heavenly; such as enraptures painters and every one who has a feeling for painting and poetry.” At once objects of the gaze and cultivators of their own display, the O’Keys threatened prevailing medical and cultural hierarchies. Elliotson’s experimentations on the O’Key sisters extended beyond the domain of the hospital. He moved them into his own house for four months at a time where they remained under the watchful gaze of its inhabitants but the O’Key sisters managed to penetrate and to subvert both the medical domain and the middle-class home without demonstrating “a shadow of inconsistency”.26 Chenevix, who had introduced Elliotson to the science in 1829, had also instigated the democratization of mesmeric powers. In The London Medical and Physical Journal, he describes how he had not only cured Irish peasants in their own cabins but had taught them how to mesmerize and cure each other as well. He records how on 2 December 1828, Catherine Nicolson, a woman of the very lowest class of Irish peasantry, brought me, on her back, her daughter, aged nine, dreadfully afflicted with scrofula. She had seven sores near her knee. I instructed this woman how to mesmerise her child.

“Everyone”, Chenevix propounds, “can mesmerise, though not with equal effect, and practice increases the power”.27 The practice of mesmeric healing by uneducated, working-class females in their own homes threatened the boundaries of gender, class and medical orthodoxy. The hazards of unregulated female knowledge permeate Doyle’s fiction. A Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Illustrious 25 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky, Cambridge: MA, 1968, 10. 26 John Elliotson, Human Physiology, 5th edn, 1835, 1167-68, 1168, 1166. 27 Chenevix, “On Mesmerism, Improperly Denominated Animal Magnetism”, 226, 227.

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Client” (1925), explores mesmerism’s intensification of sexual and class anxieties. Here Baron Adelbert Gruner, “the Austrian murderer”, captivates Violet de Merville.28 He admits that his influence is hypnotic: You have heard of post-hypnotic suggestion, Mr Holmes? Well, you will see how it works, for a man of personality can use hypnotism without any vulgar passes or tomfoolery. (17)

Gruner’s defeat occurs when Holmes joins forces with the underclass, in other words with Gruner’s former victim, the prostitute Kitty Winter. The sexual knowledge of the fallen woman is necessary to combat Gruner’s charms and the threatened defilement of the home and its resident angel. Not content that his marital prospects have been ruined, Kitty flings sulphuric acid in her former lover’s face as vengeance for her own downfall, and thereby eradicates Gruner’s future threat to other women. Gruner’s eyes, the source of his hypnotic power, are destroyed: “One eye was already white and glazed. The other was red and inflamed”. In a description reminiscent of Dorian Gray’s portrait, Watson notes how the “features that [he] had admired a few minutes before were now like some beautiful painting over which the artist has passed a wet and foul sponge. They were blurred, discoloured, inhuman, terrible” (34). However, it is Holmes’ disclosure of Gruner’s “lust diary” (35) that brings Violet de Merville “back to earth” (36). Ultimately, Holmes re-imposes order and reinscribes a controlled domesticity as he appropriates female knowledge that exists outside middle- and upper-class domestic respectability. The detective, then, preserves the home, chastens female desire and re-establishes the boundaries of class. Meanwhile, in Doyle’s mesmeric writings, the home, the space of supposed female constraint, antithetically operates as a site of subversion. Eventually, these mesmeric dangers and domestic anxieties seek resolution in Doyle’s reconfiguration of female knowledge in his spiritualist writings. These provide the antidote to his eruptive mesmeric fictions and offer, for Doyle at least, a spiritual alternative to the cold reasoning of Holmes.

28

Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Penguin edn, London, 1951, 11.

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Angels in the home In his 1924 autobiography, Doyle reflects on his gradual shift to the spiritualist cause and his public pronouncement of his conversion in 1916, “in the days of universal sorrow and loss”. He describes how “for thirty years” he had “trained” himself “exactly for the role”. By linking the struggle with recent history, Doyle also reveals a conservative notion of gender roles: “The greater the difficulty in breaking down the wall of apathy, ignorance and materialism, the more it is a challenge to our manhood to attack and ever attack in the same bull dog spirit with which Foch faced the German lines.”29 Given Doyle’s belligerent stance, it is hardly surprising that his post-war spiritualist writings revisit the narrative of the haunted house in Dorset as a potential weapon in his crusade. By 1918, the events of 1894 are assigned a fresh significance as the inexplicable rapping sounds of twenty-four years earlier could be now attributed to a resident ghost: Some years afterwards …. I met a member of the family who occupied the house, and he told me that after our visit the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been dug up in the garden. You must admit that this was very remarkable. Haunted houses are rare, and houses with buried human beings in their gardens are also, we will hope, rare. That they should have both united in one house is surely some argument for the truth of the phenomena. It is interesting to remember that in the case of the Fox family there was also some word of human bones and evidence of murder being found in the cellar, though an actual crime was never established .... It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly and violently short had some store of unspent vitality which could still manifest itself in a strange, mischievous fashion.

The haunted house in Dorset is endorsed by the Hydesville connection. The Fox daughters instituted modern spiritualism when they decoded the rappings that invaded their home as messages from the spirit domain. Modern mediumship, then, was instigated by two ordinary American girls in their own home in 1848 while their father and neighbours duly began digging in the cellar to reveal human remains. In this biographical narrative mediumship became the sphere of the 29

Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 395-96, 396, 399.

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female, just as its interrogation was appropriated by the patriarch. In this way, it mirrors much nineteenth-century mesmeric investigation. Unlike the femmes fatales of Doyle’s mesmeric fictions, however, the female medium of his spiritual writing is untainted. He is keen to establish the sanctity of the Fox home: Some artist of the future will draw the scene – the sitting-room of the wooden, shack-like house, the circle of half-awed and half-critical neighbours, the child clapping her hands with upturned laughing face, the dark corner shadows where these strange new forces seem to lurk – forces often apparent, and now come to stay and to effect the complete revolution of human thought.30

Doyle’s proposed pictorial homage to Hydesville focuses on the knowledge of the girl child but elevates it to a mystical sphere and thus aligns it with conventional Victorian notions of the female role in the domestic space. Women’s aptitude for trance-states and mediumship emerged at a time of increased female domesticity and containment. Female mesmeric knowledge and mediumship offered, then, a potential, if unconscious, response to entrapped creativity and desire. Yet Doyle’s imaginative reconstruction of Hydesville endows the females with power, but at the same time defuses this power by relocating it the spiritual realm. Furthermore, Doyle re-appraises female mediumship in his writing on Florence Cook. This medium’s achievement lay in her facility to bring about a full-figure materialization. Whilst Cook was in trance in a cabinet, a visible figure purporting to be a spirit form and calling herself Katie King temporarily materialized and on occasions walked around the room and conversed with the sitters. Cook’s powers emerged in 1872 when as a “very pretty” teenager she commenced sittings in her father’s house in Hackney.31 However, in December 1873 Cook was exposed at a sitting when a Mr Volckmann became suspicious and seized the hand and then the waist of the spirit. The medium’s friends intervened, extricated the spirit from the investigator’s grasp and the white-robed Katie retreated to her cabinet. The incident prompted Crookes to intervene and detail the experiments that he had conducted on the medium in his own home. 30 31

Doyle, The New Revelation, 23, 89. Booth, 123.

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What is remarkable about Crookes’ involvement with the medium is his sexual fascination with Katie King, and by implication, Florence Cook. He frequently comments on the spirit’s beauty: “photography is as inadequate to depict the perfect beauty of Katie’s face, as words are powerless to describe her charms of manner.” His physical contact with both medium and spirit indicates more than scientific interest. He recalls how he clasped Katie King in his arms: On several occasions she took my arm when walking, and the impression conveyed to my mind that it was a living woman by my side, instead of a visitor from the other world, was so strong that the temptation to repeat a recent celebrated experiment became almost irresistible. Feeling, however, that if I had not a spirit, I had at all events a lady close to me, I asked her permission to clasp her in my arms .... Permission was graciously given, and I accordingly did – well, as any gentleman would do under the circumstances.32

This account, published in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874), evokes a sense of sexual excitement and anticipation which can hardly be shielded by the terminology of scientific experimentation. However, for the middle-aged scientist, sexual desire for a ghost, albeit unconventional, maintains prevailing Victorian rectitude as the other world ostensibly offers no challenge to Mrs Crookes and to Victorian domesticity. At the same time, the depiction of Crookes in the darkened cabinet in Cook’s bedroom seeking the supine medium in order to validate her authenticity compromises scientific endeavour. Indeed Cook’s mediumship transcends the mere spiritual and embraces an altogether more worldly, material and dangerous knowledge. For Doyle, however, Cook’s mediumship is apparently beyond doubt. After her alleged exposure by Volckmann, Doyle posits that Cook “placed herself entirely under the protection of Mrs Crookes, declaring that her husband might make any experiments upon her powers under his own conditions, and asking for no reward save that he should clear her character as a medium by giving his exact conclusions to the world”. Like Holmes’ rationalistic defence of the imperilled female, Cook’s defence is in the hands of “a man of unswerving intellectual honesty”. 32

Crookes, 110, 106.

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Doyle’s commentary on photographs of Crookes with Katie King is also revealing: “surely there is no more wonderful impression upon any plate than that which shows Crookes at the height of his manhood, with this angel – for such in truth she was – leaning upon his arm.” Doyle even deliberates over the term “angel”: “The word ‘angel’ may seem an exaggeration, but when an other-world spirit submits herself to the discomforts of temporary and artificial existence in order to convey the lesson of survival to a material and worldly generation, there is no more fitting term.” Despite his spiritual posturing, Crookes’ “sensational” experiments with Cook, Doyle vaguely acknowledges, seem “vulnerable to attack”.33 When Doyle returns to the subject, however, in The Edge of the Unknown (1930), the experiments are thoroughly domesticated as Florence Cook is seen as maternal while Katie King becomes the angel in the home: [Cook] lies with an occasional animal moan upon the sofa. From her there drains the vital ectoplasm, forming a cloud of viscous substance, a pattern and finally a form. The form disengages, the cord breaks, and Katie King infusing her spirit into this reconstruction of what was probably a simulacrum of her earthly body walks forth to spend her strange brief hour upon earth, conversing with Professor Crookes, playing with his children, telling them stories of older days, and finally, with the words, “My mission is finished,” leaving them forever.”34

The scene is a sanitized duplication of birth. Purged of the sexual, Doyle’s representation of Cook’s mediumship reproduces a purified domestic fantasy. It is hardly surprising then that for Doyle, the spiritual plane is entirely desexualized: “There is no physical side to love and no childbirth, though there is close union between those married people who really loved each other.”35 The marital union of couples on earth does not necessarily survive in spiritland:

33

Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols, London, 1926, I, 240, 244, 251. 34 Doyle, The Edge of the Unknown, 229-30. 35 Doyle, The New Revelation, 123.

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there is one man, and only one, for each woman, and one woman only for each man. When those two meet they fly together and are one through all the endless chain of existence. Until they meet all unions are mere accidents which have no meaning. Sooner or later each couple becomes complete. It may not be here. It may be in the next sphere where the sexes meet as they do on earth. Or it may be fully delayed. But every man and every woman has his or her affinity, and will find it. Of earthly marriages perhaps one in five is permanent. The others are accidental.36

Domestic harmony is attainable in this “workaday and homely” heaven.37 In Memories and Adventures, Doyle describes the “information” that the spiritualists have received is of a “heaven of congenial work and of congenial play, with every mental and physical activity of life carried on to a higher plane”.38 Scientific endeavour, presumably conducted in the right spirit, is also continued. In The History of Spiritualism (1926), a dead student confirms that his scientific engagements are “concerned with the study of the vapours and fluids forming the barrier which, we feel, by dint of profound study and experiment we may be able to pierce”. While he is busy trying to “open the door of communing between earth and these spheres” he lives in a “home of [his] own, delightful in the extreme, complete with library filled with books of reference – historical, scientific, medical – and, in fact, with every type of literature”. However, his spirit home lacks a domestic angel: “I am living here alone at present, but friends frequently visit me as I do them in their homes, and if a faint sadness at times takes possession of me, I visit those I loved most on earth.”39 Just as Florence Cook’s subversions of sexual and scientific norms are chastened in Doyle’s version of the events, the controlled and desexualized nature of the spirit home can be read as an antidote to his charged mesmeric narratives where home is a site of danger and desire.40 36

A. Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist, Leipzig, 1926, 66. Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, II, 291. 38 Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 406-407. 39 Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, II, 285. 40 On the séance’s inversion of “the normal sexual hierarchy of knowledge”, see Roy Porter, “Introduction – Georgina Weldon and the Mad Doctors”, in Women, Madness and Spiritualism, eds Roy Porter, Helen Nicholson and Bridget Bennett, 2 vols, London, 2003, I, 5. 37

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Exorcizing the home: from mesmerism to spiritualism Doyle’s anxieties concerning his mesmeric fictions are underscored by his later suppression of The Parasite. He disowned the novella and had it removed from listings of his collected works.41 Biographical and social tensions certainly converge in this text: Doyle was locked in a celibate marriage due to his wife’s tuberculosis – the home, then, was the locus of sexual repression.42 His complicated response to changing gender roles is evident in his campaign for the reform of the divorce laws and concomitant refusal to endorse female suffrage.43 The novella was considerably less popular than George Du Maurier’s study of mesmeric power which was published in the same year. At the same time, Trilby’s focus on the mesmerized female is a more conventional fictional representation of mesmeric subordination. In The Parasite, the mesmerized subject is a male scientist and the mesmerist invades the middle-class homes of a university town. Gilroy is finally saved from annihilating home, profession and future marital happiness by the timely, but accidental intervention of the vicar, who causes Agatha’s delay and saves her face from destruction. This attempt to exorcize sexual threat is reproduced in Doyle’s creation of home in the spirit world. Despite Doyle’s attempts to chasten the sexual in his writing, his preoccupation with mesmerism and sexual obsession formed a longstanding fascination. “John Barrington Cowles” represents, on one level, the fear of female sexuality in excess as the vampiric creature consumes a life force that emasculates and destroys, while on a second level, Northcott’s secret revelation to her fiancés resonates with overtones of homosexuality. Similarly, Gilroy cannot resist Penelosa’s sexual overtures, but his mesmeric subordination is compounded by self-disgust. Both are narratives of betrothal, not consummation. Both reveal that male scientific materialism is impotent and danger may lie in an uncontrolled female mediumship and both warn that this site of female power must be contained. It is hardly surprising that, for Doyle, home and marriage in the spirit world are absolved of the sexual:

41

Martin Booth, The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1997, 225. 42 Louise Conan Doyle was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1893. See Nordon, 37. 43 Wynne, 116.

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Real marriage is of the soul and spirit. Sex actions are a mere external symbol which mean nothing and are foolish, or even pernicious, when the thing which they should symbolize is wanting.44

Twenty-four years after its investigation, the unexplained haunted house at Dorset is reinterpreted as the burial place of an unhappy ghost, rather than an unhappy, desiring and living female. Doyle attacks Podmore’s rejection of poltergeist activity as “fraud”. It is fitting, then, that Jerome, who was a vehement opponent of Doyle’s spiritualist conversion, sends a message through to Doyle at a séance after his death: “Tell him from me that I know now that he was right and I was wrong.”45 As with his famous detective’s fictional resolutions, Doyle was, in his spiritualist work, putting the house in order. The angel in the home seeks to replace the femme fatale yet the potency of Doyle’s mesmeric narratives prevails in the females who challenge gender roles and disrupt orthodox scientific order by wielding their knowledge from the confines of the home. Doyle may try to establish a safe domesticity in the spirit world, but the desires unleashed by his mesmeric fictions ultimately refuse to be contained.

44 45

Doyle, The Land of Mist, 66. Doyle, The Edge of the Unknown, 165, 155.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Gavin Budge is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central England in Birmingham. He has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century topics, and an article on the best-selling Victorian novelist Charlotte M. Yonge, in Victorian Literature and Culture. He is currently expanding this into a book about Yonge, and working on a study of Romanticism, Medicine and the Gothic. Tiffany Donnelly has a doctorate in English from the University of Queensland, Australia. Her thesis was on Caroline Harper Dexter’s Australian career, and she has published articles on Harper Dexter’s journalism and Bloomerism. She is former editor and reviews editor of the Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, and is currently Vice Principal of the Women’s College, University of Sydney. Anthony Enns is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. His work on literature and media has appeared in such journals as Culture, Theory & Critique, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Popular Culture Review, Studies in Popular Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Currents in Electronic Literacy, Science Fiction Studies, and in the anthology Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto Press, 2004). He is also co-editor of the anthology Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (University Press of America, 2001) and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Louise Henson was recently a Senior Data Developer at the Old Bailey Proceedings Online at the University of Sheffield. She edited the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Index: An Electronic Subject Index of Science, Technology, and Medicine in NineteenthCentury British Periodicals which will be published by ChadwyckHealey. She has published academic papers in specialist journals, such as Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and the Gaskell Society Journal. She is an editor of Culture and Science in the

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Nineteenth-Century Media (Ashgate, 2004), and is also a contributor to The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Ilana Kurshan is a graduate of the History of Science Department at Harvard University where her work examined the inter-relationship between literature, mesmerism and phrenology in the nineteenth century. After leaving Harvard, she took up a position in publishing with Alfred Knopf. Mary Elizabeth Leighton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her publications have focussed on the Victorian periodical press, including articles on the hypnotism controversy in the medical Press (Victorian Periodicals Review), Zola’s reception in the British press (Excavatio), poet Pauline Johnson in the late nineteenth-century Canadian press (Essays on Canadian Writing), and literary and press representations of the crocodile (with Lisa Surrige in Victorian Animal Dreams, forthcoming from Ashgate). Her current research examines the professional relations among lateVictorian men of letters, including Andrew Lang, George Saintsbury, and John Churton Collins, who vied for university appointments in the newly emergent discipline of English. Sharrona Pearl has recently completed her PhD in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. Her dissertation, entitled “Plain as the Nose on Your Face: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century England”, examined the relationship between culture and entertainment and the formation and communication of physiognomic ideas. She currently holds a joint lectureship in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature in the Department of the History of Science. Her interests include nineteenth-century visual culture, science and literature and science and theatre history. Her current project is an examination of the relationship between imperial exploration and notions of beauty in the British Empire. Alisha Siebers completed her dissertation “Popular NineteenthCentury British Novelists’ Encounters with Hypnotism and Ascetic Trance” at the University of California-Berkeley. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County where she teaches courses on surrealism, antimodern protests, and Victorian Science and Literature. Her two most recent research projects include investigating literary responses to nineteenth-century

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psychologists’ discussions about hallucination and writing about Marie Corelli’s resistance to connecting insanity with genius. Angelic Rodgers, an instructor at Auburn University since 1999, received her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi. Her areas of concentration include nineteenth-century American regionalist writers and utopian literature. Currently, she is exploring the connections between turn-of-the-century utopian texts and contemporary feminist science fiction. Martin Willis is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glamorgan. He has written widely on Victorian literature and science, especially on science and the Gothic, and is presently writing a book on how literature responds to science’s alteration of vision in the nineteenth century, entitled: Hoodwinked: The Power of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Recently, he has published a monograph with Kent State University Press, Monsters, Mesmerists and Machines, and has co-edited two collections of essays, Sidelined Sciences (Anthem Press) and Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (Manchester UP). More of his work on George Eliot and heterodox science can be found in the Journal of Victorian Culture. Catherine Wynne is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Hull. She is author of The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (2002). She has published in journals such as Victorian Review, Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies and History of Photography. She has also published a number of book chapters on late nineteenthcentury fiction and twentieth-century literary and visual culture. She is currently working on a monograph on Bram Stoker.

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INDEX

Abercrombie, John, 47, 53 Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers, 53 Abernethy, John, 48 Ackland, Michael, 118 Ackroyd, Tabitha, 96 American Magazine, 77-78 American Phrenological Journal, 65 Armstrong, Nancy, 135, 137, 138 Ashburner, John, 36 Australian Dictionary of Biography, 123 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 234-35 Balzac, Honore de, 40-41, 49 Barthes, Roland, 72 Basham, Diana, 54-55, 112-13, 116, 124 Beard, George Miller, 188 American Nervousness, 188 Bellis, Peter, 132 Bentley, George, 183 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 205 Besant, Walter, 215-17 Autobiography, 217 Herr Paulus, 215-17, 218, 221 Binet, Alfred, 226, 234 Animal Magnetism, 226 Blackwood’s Magazine, 145 Blavatsky, Madame, 217

Bloomer, Amelia, 108 Bloomerism, 108, 117 Bodin, Felix, 33-34 Bompard, Gabrielle, 203-204, 205, 206, 208 Boumelha, Penny, 202 Brackett, Loraina, 146, 158-59 Braid, James, 46, 48, 63-64, 207 Brewster, David, 94 Natural Magic, 94 Brigham, Dr, 146 Brindley, Mr, 158 British Medical Association, 206, 209 British Medical Journal, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211 Broca, Paul, 81 Brodhead, Richard, 139 Brontë, Charlotte, 96-97 Brontë, Patrick, 96 Brown, Gillian, 135 Browning, Robert, 217 Brunonianism, 50-51, 55 Buchanan, Robert, 217 The Charlatan, 217-19 Bull, Malcolm, 145, 147 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 10, 19-20, 39-59, 83 Coming Race, 59 Last Days of Pompeii, 39 Strange Story, 10, 39-57, 59 Zanoni, 10, 39-41, 44, 47,

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Zanoni (continued) 48, 50-51, 56-59 Burns, Robert, 31 Bush, Rev. George, 73 Byron, Lord, 31 Carpenter, William Benjamin, 86-88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 16768 Chambige, Henri, 203-204, 208, 212 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 30 Charcot, Jean-Marie, 3, 205, 206, 207, 210, 213 Chenevix, Richard, 231, 235 Chivers, Dr Thomas H., 76 Clarke, Marcus, 123 Clarke, Patricia, 114 Clay, Anne, 115 Clisbie, Harriet, 122 Cobbett, William, 30 Coleridge, S. T., 47, 59 Friend, 47 Collins, Wilkie, 13, 83, 163-81 Moonstone, 13, 163-70, 173-8, 180-1, 220 Woman in White, 13, 16366, 168-73, 175, 178-81 Collyer, Robert, 73, 75, 129 Combe, George, 31 Communications technologies, 61 Cook, Florence, 225, 238-40, 241 Corelli, Marie, 14, 183-202 Romance of Two Worlds, 14, 183-202 Cornhill Magazine, 102 Cowper, William, 24 Crabbe, George, 24 Crary, Jonathan, 63-64

Crichton, Alexander, 44-45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 58 Crookes, William, 225, 238-40 Cruikshank, George, 1 Cushman, Philip, 127, 133 Constructing the Self, Constructing America, 127 cybernetics, 61 cyberspace, 62 Darwinism, 39 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 74, 75 Deleuze, Jean-Philippe Francois, 14, 187-88 Practical Introduction in Animal Magnetism, 187 Descartes, Rene, 82 Dexter, Caroline Harper, 12, 105-25 Miss Madeline Smith, 11920 Dexter, William, 109, 110, 111, 113, 123 Dibdin, Charles, 33 Waterman, 33 Dickens, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 41, 42, 83, 88, 164 Household Words, 41, 88, 91, 97 Mystery of Edwin Drood, 3 Oliver Twist, 2, 42 Doctor Caesar Crowl, 213 Doctor’s Secret, 213 Dods, John, 133 Dorian Gray, 230, 236 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 15, 22327, 229, 235-43 “Adventure of the Illustrious Client”, 235-36 Edge of the Unknown, 240

Index

History of Spiritualism, 241 “John Barrington Cowles”, 227-30, 234, 242 Memories and Adventures, 241 New Revelation, 224 Parasite, 15, 223, 225, 230-34, 242 Du Maurier, George, 215, 242 Trilby, 215, 221, 242 Dupotet, Baron, 187 Edison, Thomas, 11, 64-66, 77-82 Edwards, William, 148, 15859 electro-biology, 85, 86, 88 Eliot, George, 13, 145-52, 155-56, 158-61 “The Lifted Veil”, 13, 145-61 Elliotson, John, 1, 2, 4, 21, 22, 23, 39, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 83-84, 167-68, 169, 224-25, 235 Ellis, Havelock, 212 Criminal, 212 Elmore, Colonel, 223, 224 Engledue, William, 21 Evans, D. Morier, 151 evolutionary theory, 185 Eyraud, Michel, 203-204, 205, 206, 208 Falk, Doris, 65 Falkner, Alexander, 26 Faraday, Michael, 84, 94 Féré, Charles, 226, 234 Flint, Kate, 155-56, 159-60 Fox, Eliza, 96

269

Fox, Kate, 129, 237-38 Fox, Margaret, 129, 237-38 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 130 Franklin, Bejamin, 61 Freer, Dr, 158 Froude, James Anthony, 88 Gall, Franz Joseph, 19 Garber, Marjorie, 29 Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 29 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 11, 83, 8586, 88-103 Cranford, 11, 88-91 “Doom of the Griffiths”, 97-100 Life of Charlotte Brontë, 96, 97 “Lois the Witch”, 11, 9194 Mary Barton, 102-103 Wives and Daughters, 100-3 Gaskell, Marianne, 96 Gaskell, William, 86 Gauld, Alan, 204 Glendwr, Owain, 98 Godden, Richard, 153 Gray, Beryl, 145 Greenwood, Frederick, 102 Gregory, William, 145, 147, 148-50, 158 Letters to a Candid Inquirer on Animal Magnetism, 145, 150 Grille, Madeleine, 203 Hall, Spencer T., 19, 20, 35 Harbinger of Light, 118 Harris, Ruth, 205

270

Victorian Literary Mesmerism

Hart, Ernest, 210 Hatch, Cora, 129-30 Hatch, Dr B. F., 130 Hawkins, Dr, 21-2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 12, 13, 127-43 American Notebooks, 128 Blithedale Romance, 129 House of the Seven Gables, 12, 127-28, 13043 Heller, Tamar, 175 Heyvaert, Theodore, 109 Hill, Christina, 6 Hobsbawm, Eric, 152 Holland, Henry, 93, 98 Homer, 18, 21, 22, 23 Iliad, 21 Hume, David, 26 Hutter, A. D., 167 hypnotism, 15, 62, 65, 183-84, 186, 203-22 Hypnotized, 213 hysteria, 115

Kay-Shuttleworth, Lady, 97 Kendall, Henry, 123 Kerner, Justinus, 69 Key, 150 King, Katie, 238-40 Kingsbury, George, 212-13 Kittler, Friedrich, 81 Kuhn, Thomas, 19

In His Grasp, 213 Innes, A. Taylor, 212-13 Inquirer, 96 Interpreter, 118-19, 122, 123, 124 internet, 62

La Rue, Madame de, 3, 164 Ladies’ Almanac 1858, 113, 120-21 Lancet, 1, 27, 212 L’Angelier, Pierre Emile, 119 Lardner, Dionysius, 84,187 Leader, 164 Levine, Stuart, 76 Lewes, George Henry, 164 Liebeg, Justus, 55 Organic Chemistry, 55 Liégeois, Jules, 205, 209 Lind, Sidney, 75 Literary Institution, 108 Locke, John, 30, 70-71 London Medical and Physical Journal, 235 London Popular Record of Modern Science, 65 Lott, Eric, 134 Lowell, James Russell, 75 Lynch, William, 124

James, Henry, 214 Bostonians, 214 James, William, 77 Jerome, Jerome K., 224, 243 Jim Crow, 127, 133-34, 135 Johnson, Paul, 134 Kahn, Douglas, 80 Kant, Emmanuel, 26 Kaplan, Fred, 6

Mackay, Minnie, 183 Mackay, Charles, 85, 89 Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 85 Marsh, Richard, 214 Beetle, 214 Marshall, Edward, 77 Martineau, Harriet, 8, 88, 97, 116, 196-97

Index

Martineau, James, 86 McLuhan, Marshall, 82 Medico-Chirurgical Review, 26, 30 mediumship, 224, 225, 233, 234, 237-40, 242 Melbourne Directory, 109 Memoirs of a Physician, 213 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 3, 8, 40, 61, 65, 128, 145, 185 mesmerism and clairvoyance, 34, 36, 112, 117, 124, 145-61, 184-85 and class, 7-8 and crime, 9, 14-15, 20322 and electricity, 11, 62-65, 77-82, 114, 133, 183-88 and gender, 8-9, 163-81 and medicine, 39-59 and phrenology, 9-10, 1737 Meyer, Milo de, 229 Michaels, Walter Benn, 140 Mill, Dr John, 116 Use of Clairvoyance in Medicine, 116 Mills, Mary Elizabeth, 183 Minchin, Mrs, 114 mississippi scheme, 85 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 190 Moncel, Count Theodore, 72 Moore, Joseph Sheridan, 109, 123 Motherwell, J. B., 116 Müller, J., 49 Physiology of the Senses, 49 Murray, Henry, 217 Myers, Frederic, 223

271

Nancy School, 205 necessitarianism, 85 New York Daily Tribune, 75 Nicolson, Catherine, 235 O’Key Sisters, 1, 4, 8, 84, 187, 224-25, 234-35 Oliphant, E. H. C., 220 Mesmerist, 220-21 Ollivier, John, 32 Phrenology, 32 Owen, Alex, 62, 229 Owen, R. Dale, 28 Paracelsus, 61 Peabody, Sophie, 128, 132, 141 People’s Phrenological Journal, 21, 22-23 Perkins, Maureen, 121-22 Peters, John Durham, 61-62, 72, 80 Phrenological Almanac, 20, 26 Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 17-18, 20, 23, 24-25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33 phrenology, 63, 120 Phreno-Magnet and Mirror of Nature, 20, 28, 34 phreno-mesmerism, 63 Pick, Daniel, 6 Podmore, Frank, 223, 224, 243 Poe, Edgar Allan, 11, 64-77, 79, 82 Broadway Journal, 73-74 “Eureka”, 67 “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, 71-75 “Mesmeric Revelation”, 68-71, 72“Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, 66-68

272

Victorian Literary Mesmerism

Pope, Alexander, 21, 22 Porter, Roy, 241n Poyen, Charles, 128-29 Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, 128-29 Psychodinamist, 129 Preyer, Professor, 207 Prideaux, Thomas Symes, 32 Priestley, Joseph, 85-86, 87, 103 psychography, 73 Pykett, Lyn, 174 Quarterly Review, 87 Randolph, Paschal, 156, 158 Reed, Toni, 201 Reichenbach, Karl Von, 14546, 147, 148-49 Physico-Physiological Researches, 148 Researches on Magnetism, 145-46 Rice, Thomas, 133 Richardson, Henry Handel, 105, 118 Fortunes of Richard Mahony, 118 Richardson, Mary, 105, 117, 118 Richardson, Walter, 117, 118 Rosenheim, Shawn, 74, 76 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 30 Royal British Institution, 108 Ruskin, John, 154 Russell, Norman, 152 Salem Witch Trial, 91, 92 Salpêtrière, 205 Schurmann, Anna Maria, 122 Scientific American, 78, 79

Scott, Sydney, 223 Shakespeare, William, 10, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 198 Coriolanus, 28 Macbeth, 28, 29-30, 32 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 25, 27 Othello, 27-28 Romeo and Juliet, 17, 2425, 28 Shelley, Percy, 32 Prometheus Unbound, 32 Sherlock Holmes, 235-36, 239 Showalter, Elaine, 115 Small, Helen, 145-46, 147 Smith, Madeline, 119-20 Society for Psychical Research, 15, 223, 224 somnambulism, 15 South Sea Company, 85 spiritualism, 85, 86, 89, 93-94, 106, 111, 117, 124, 185, 215, 236, 237, 241-43 spiritualists, 74, 77 stage mesmerism, 129-30 Staite, Opie, 36-37 Stevenson, William, 95 Remarks on the Very Inferior Utility of Classical Learning, 95 Stoehr, Taylor, 74 Stoker, Bram, 3 Dracula, 1, 3-4 Famous Impostors, 3 Lair of the White Worm, 4 Stone, William, 146, 152, 15859 Stuart, Esmé, 214 Slave of His Will, 213 Swedenborgians, 74, 75 Sydney School of Arts, 107

Index

Tatar, Maria, 6, 40, 49 Tayler, J. J., 86 Teste, Alphonse, 36 Practical Manual of Animal Magnetism, 36 Thom, J. H., 86 Thompson, H. S., 35 Thoms, Peter, 171 thought-transference, 15 Times, 108, 203, 212 Townshend, Chauncey Hare, 39, 73, 131 Facts on Mesmerism, 39, 73, 131 tulipomania, 85 Uglow, Jenny, 86 Unitarianism, 85-88, 91, 95, 96, 103 Veiled Lady, 129, 139

273

Viettinghoff, Dr G. F. Von, 109, 114 Volckmann, Mr, 238-39 Walker, Dr, 109, 110, 111, 114 Walpole, Horace, 200 Castle of Otranto, 200 Webb, R. K., 86 Wernicke, Carl, 81 Wheatstone, Charles, 84 Wilson, Ellen, 114 Winkworth, Catherine, 88 Winter, Alison, 6, 35, 49, 6263, 68, 164 Wilde, Oscar, 230n Wolff, Robert Lee, 6, 59 woman question, 124 world wide web, 62 Zoist, 2, 21, 26, 32, 34-35, 116, 158