INTRODUCTION

MARTIN WILLIS and CATHERINE WYNNE

Elliotson has written to me to go and see some experiments on Okey at his house at 3 0 '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 '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.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 2 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne 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, III (April 1843), 49. 5 "Prospectus", Zoist, Ill, 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, Ill, 2-3. 8 Elliotson, "Dr Elliotson's Address to the Phrenological Association", Zoist, I13 (October 1843),229.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 3 discovery of the "great resources of 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. \0 Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: The Story ofHypnosis, Basingstoke, 2002, 190. 11 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. Margaret Cardwell, Oxford, 1972, 53-54. 12 Brarn Stoker, Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson, Oxford, 1983, 191.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 4 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne 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 ElliotsonlO'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

\3 Bram Stoker, Famous Impostors, London, 1910, 155. 14 Bram Stoker, The Lair o/the White Worm, London, 1911, 112.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 5 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 modem 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 tum 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. I? Otis, xix.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 6 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne 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 Damton'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 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 ", 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.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 7 consensus on literary and scientific connection? 1 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 l840s, 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 ofAmerican Romance, Tuscaloosa: AL, 2000; Waterfield.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 8 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne 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.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 9 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 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 mid• nineteenth-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

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 11 influence, Budge contends, is markedly reactionary in Bulwer• Lytton'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 electro• magnetism 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

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 12 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne 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 re• emerges with a different slant in Angelic Rodgers' essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rodgers informs us that in an October 1841 letter to his then fiancee, 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.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 13 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 re• emerge 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

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 14 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne 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 selfs 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 non• canonical narratives of the fin de siecle that deal explicitly with the criminality of mesmeric influence. Criminal acts perpetrated by

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access Introduction 15 hypnotic suggestion threw into confusion the medical authority that mesmerism, through its therapeutic use as , had gained by the last two decades of the nineteenth century. On trial at thefin de siecle, 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-siecle 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-siecle 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.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access 16 Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne

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.

Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne - 9789401203012 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 08:46:30AM via free access