University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Summer 2010 The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890 Emily Ogden University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Ogden, Emily, "The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 296. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/296 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/296 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890 Abstract Antebellum mesmerism posed a challenge to the prerogatives of self-mastering reason from within the scientific tradition itself. Though mesmerism is now most familiar as the sensational stage-practice and quack cure that drew criticism from Hawthorne and Henry James, its sympathizers considered it a theory of sensory error. Mesmerists claimed that the trance replicated the physiological effects of deception, allowing them to study swindling in laboratory conditions. Concluding that sensory error was ineradicable, they refuted Lockean pedagogy's claims to reform the errant senses. One could at best manage delusion, through the self-doubt that liberalism had enjoined only its marginalized types—credulous women, laborers, racial inferiors—to practice. Mesmerism transvalued these figures, praising their powers of self- suspicion and condemning the ridiculous confidence of eason.r Tracing the American mesmeric tradition from the science's first appearance there as a falsehood, in 1784; through its limited practice in the 1790s; to its extensive popularity from the 1840s to the end of the century, I find in its performances an alternate sensory public capable of including among its knowing subjects hysterics, renegades, and castaways.