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A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840

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A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840 Soul Sleepers: A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Friedman, Kristen Anne Keerma. 2014. Soul Sleepers: A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274567 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Soul Sleepers: A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840 A dissertation presented by Kristen Anne Keerma Friedman to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2014 © 2014 Kristen Anne Keerma Friedman All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Joyce Chaplin Kristen Anne Keerma Friedman Soul Sleepers: A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840 Abstract The strange behavior of somnambulists in the United States between 1740 and 1840 attracted the attention of different emerging professional groups, each of which sought the authority to explain what the condition revealed about the role of volition in governing the human mind, and by extension, the body. Clergy, physicians, and lawyers fought with one another for interpretive rights over the embodied knowledge that somnambulists produced while in their paroxysms. Theologians hoped to use the trance state to appropriate knowledge about the afterlife from the entranced people who claimed their souls had journeyed there. Physicians wished to use somnambulists as instruments to prove theories of mind, including the basis of phrenology. They attempted to fit somnambulism into a diagnostic category with limited success. Lawyers attempted to use the embodied knowledge gathered from somnambulistic acts to create rules managing intent and culpability. Somnambulists themselves asserted authority over containing their own conditions by resisting professional attempts to use their bodies as portals to their unconscious mind. The group most successful at resistance was that of female somnambulists, each of who showed evidence of possessing a dual consciousness. The women whose cases are covered in this dissertation represent the broad failure of any profession to gain ultimate authority over explaining the problematic behavior posed by somnambulists. This dissertation also traces the history of how somnambulists came to be associated with criminality through their primary association with the “night season,” a cultural iii framework that colonial Americans imposed on their environment to regulate disorderly conduct, especially on the part of women, young men, blacks, and Native Americans. In the United States, somnambulism was seen as a natural phenomenon. In contrast to European artificial somnambulism (a byproduct of animal magnetism), somnambulism in the United States revealed attitudes about what standards an interpreter of nature ought to hold. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………… vi INTRODUCTION: Negotiating Somnambulism ……………………………………………………... 1 CHAPTER ONE: Abroad in the Night Season …………………………………………………….. 20 CHAPTER 2: Entranced: The Afterlife of Soul Sleepers ………………………………………. 39 CHAPTER 3: Rachel Baker, The Oracular Corpse …………………………………………… 89 CHAPTER 4: ‘All appears as a dream, which has escaped my recollection’: Mary Reynolds, Memory, and Double Consciousness ………………………….. 139 CHAPTER 5: ‘My Thoughts Were Wildering’: The Somnambulism Defense ………………… 191 CHAPTER 6: Jane C. Rider, A Civil, Well-Bred Somnambulist ………………………………. 239 CONCLUSION: The Sleep-Waker’s Death ………………………………………………………. 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………… 297 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I began this project in 2007 when I wrote a Master’s degree at McGill University on the history of humane societies and suspended animation. The concept of the ambiguously dead body fascinated me and I entered my Ph.D. program hoping to further explore the many unanswered questions remaining after the completion of my M.A. thesis. As I began to research each area of suspended animation that intrigued the humane societies, I became fascinated by somnambulism. It was a liminal physical state that also positioned the soul on the boundary between life and death. I wanted to know more about how early Americans thought about the voyages of the soul, the meaning of mind, and the strange powers somnambulists exercised before astonished crowds. These are the questions that motivated the writing of this dissertation. I owe a great debt to my undergraduate mentors at McGill University who introduced me to the history of science and medicine and gifted me with years of fascinating conversations as well as lessons both in and out of the classroom. Nicholas Dew, Andrea Tone, Michael Bristol, Thomas Schlich, Chris Lyons, and David Hensley in particular, for their kindness, wisdom, and friendship. This dissertation could not have happened without the guidance and support of my committee. I want to extend my utmost gratitude to Joyce Chaplin, for challenging me to achieve the highest standard of scholarship, Jill Lepore for her historical imagination and unrivaled writer’s advice, and Charles E. Rosenberg for talking me through the many meanings of the history of medicine. I also wish to offer a special thanks to Anne Harrington, John Durant, Janet Browne, Alex Csiszar, Sarah Richardson, Vincent Brown, David Armitage, James Kloppenberg, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan vi Gaskell, and Mario Biagioli for support and invaluable advice over the years. Liana DeMarco, Jesse Halvorsen, Laura Johnson, and Matthew Corcoran, I would have been lost without your critical structural support and our many delightful conversations. This dissertation has improved and grown from the suggestions and feedback provided by the members of the Early American Working Group and the History of Medicine Working Group. Thanks to all my colleagues who contributed their knowledge to this project and encouraged me with their interest. To the many bright and motivated students I have taught over the years: I have learned as much from you about writing and history as I have taught – which is to say: a great deal. I have relied on the resources of many libraries and archives. A tremendous thanks goes to the knowledgeable and interested researchers at Houghton Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Philadelphia, and The New York Public Library. I want to recognize, in particular, my unbelievably wonderful friends. Your unrelenting support, friendship, and love have kept me going through the daily grind and the most difficult moments. Listing you all would be a dissertation unto itself. In particular, I want to thank my friends and fellow historians for their close readings and honest feedback: Nicholas Crawford, Leena Akhtar, Cara Kiernan Fallon, Lisa Haushofer, Jeremy Zallen, Jennifer T. Gordon, Oriana Walker, Gloria Whiting, Latif Nasser, Emily Harrison, John Dixon, Greg Afinogenov, Jennifer Ostwinkle, Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau, and Deanne VanTol, you have all gone above and beyond the call of collegial duty. Aaron Wright and Christina Beorn Mobley, we started this journey together eleven years ago on our first day of class as freshmen, and I cannot wait to see the places you will go. vii To my parents Michael and Helen, my sister Katie and my honorary brother John: thanks for putting up with a decade of constantly expanding education. Thank you for making sure I always felt like home was nearby and being there for every step of this long journey. My second family Randee, Richard, and Barry Friedman: you have given me a home in the sun, constant support, and positivity. I love you all and I am lucky to call you all my family. To James Delbourgo, my long time mentor and dear friend, you are my family too. Everything strange and beautiful about history, I learned from you. Thank you for always being there. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my husband Andrew S. Friedman. Without his infinite patience, profound intelligence, his unrelenting stream of jokes, and the immensity of his love, I would not be who I am today. Andy, this one’s for you. ~ Kristen Keerma Friedman Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 2014. viii INTRODUCTION: NEGOTIATING SOMNAMBULISM From approximately 1740 to 1840 in the United States, somnambulists – commonly known as sleepwalkers – presented a constellation of vexing behaviors that demanded interpretation.1 A collection of case studies on somnambulists during this period reveals a set of negotiations between various sources of authority vying for the right to explain somnambulism. Ministers, doctors, gentlemen philosophers, and lawyers with competing visions on the relationship between body and mind each sought to wrest interpretive control from one another, as well as from their somnambulistic subjects in order to assert comprehensive knowledge over a strange human manifestation of American nature. Drawing on the scholarship that examines the human body as an “instrument of knowledge” in early America, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of who had the right to impose classification
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