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The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890

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The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890 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. Rather than thinking of American publics as being formed through agreement on the procedures of reason, then, my project proposes that we see them as forming around the procedures of sensation that mesmerism discloses. Through readings of The Coquette (1797), Edgar Huntly (1799), Moby-Dick (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1853), and other works of fiction, I argue that this tradition constitutes a resource for the novel in holding open the gates of the public sphere to a pluralistic range of knowledge- producers. Forming oxymoronic crosses between good liberals and strange, errant, but insightful mesmeric knowers, American fiction creates stereoscopic images of impossible subjects. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Nancy Bentley Second Advisor Amy Kaplan Keywords mesmerism, mesmerism in literature, nineteenth-century American literature, eighteenth-century American literature, history of the American novel Subject Categories American Studies | Literature in English, North America This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/296 THE SCIENCE OF ERROR: MESMERISM AND AMERICAN FICTION, 1784-1890 Emily Ogden A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Co-Supervisors of Dissertation Nancy Bentley, Professor of English __________________________________________ Amy Kaplan, Edward W. Kane Professor of English _____________________________ Graduate Group Chairperson David Kazanjian, Associate Professor of English _______________________________ Dissertation Committee Nancy Bentley, Professor of English Amy Kaplan, Edward W. Kane Professor of English David Kazanjian, Associate Professor of English The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890 2010 Emily Ogden Acknowledgements It is impossible to thank my advisors Amy Kaplan and Nancy Bentley enough for their generosity, their judiciousness, and their intellectual fire-power. Even before this project began, they both had already done an incalculable amount to shape it. Amy started the long process of helping me to remake my writing in my first year at Penn, and seemed to be able to tell, even when I could not, what counted as progress. Her clear- sighted questions have extricated me from many a blind alley. Nancy has the knack of opening up whole new areas of inquiry with a few well-chosen words or book recommendations. She has fundamentally shaped my thinking—so much so that I still sometimes experience a shock of recognition when I come across an old syllabus or scrap of paper from one of her classes: so that was where I learned to ask those questions. My abiding gratitude goes to David Kazanjian for his critical acumen and his gracious support. He, too, has steered the ship clear of hidden shoals more than once. Marks of my own limitations remain; but I suspect that wherever I will manage to erase those in the future, the amendment will be due to having finally managed to follow out to its conclusions a suggestion from one of these three. That educations do have long half-lives I know from having been one of Lisa New's fortunate students. What she taught me ten years ago is still teaching me today. Jo Park and Suvir Kaul patiently worked to form me into a scholar in my first years at Penn. And Margreta de Grazia has presided over my graduate career from the first campus visit iv to the final days; glasses of wine at her house have punctuated the Philadelphia period as much as chapter deadlines have done. I owe considerable debts to the many librarians on whose expertise I have depended, including staff at the Bakken Museum and Library, the American Philosophical Society Library, the Library Company, the University of Pennsylvania Rare Books Room, the Wangensteen Library at the University of Minnesota, and the editors of the Franklin Papers at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library. A one-month residency granted by the American Philosophical Society still bears fruit, and liberal funding from the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation has made my graduate work possible. My parents Mark Ogden and Iris Muchmore have, from a much earlier date, cheerfully supported a long and strange education; my sister, Linnea Ogden, has always been there to listen to the news of its latest episodes. Mearah Quinn-Brauner and Erica McAlpine have been my comrades in arms. And John Parker, my ideal reader and interlocutor, is the person to whom these sentences, wherever they are good ones, are really addressed. v ABSTRACT THE SCIENCE OF ERROR: MESMERISM AND AMERICAN FICTION, 1784-1890 Emily Ogden Supervisors: Amy Kaplan and Nancy Bentley 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 reason. 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. Rather than thinking of American publics as being formed through agreement on the procedures of reason, then, my project proposes that we see them as forming around the procedures of sensation that vi mesmerism discloses. Through readings of The Coquette (1797), Edgar Huntly (1799), Moby-Dick (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1853), and other works of fiction, I argue that this tradition constitutes a resource for the novel in holding open the gates of the public sphere to a pluralistic range of knowledge-producers. Forming oxymoronic crosses between good liberals and strange, errant, but insightful mesmeric knowers, American fiction creates stereoscopic images of impossible subjects. vii The Science of Error: Mesmerism and American Fiction, 1784-1890 Table of Contents Preface: The History of Error viii Chapter One: Mesmer's Demon Fiction, Falsehood, and the Mechanical Imagination 1 Chapter Two: In Praise of the Credulous Reader Charles Brockden Brown's Demonstration Science 37 Chapter Three: Knowledge-Plots Blithedale and the Rivalries of the Parlor 95 Chapter Four: Labor's Clairvoyance Moby-Dick as Mesmeric Stage 140 Epilogue: Starting Her Up American Modernity and the Mesmeric Subject 173 Works Cited 181 viii Preface The History of Error In the final weeks of the year 1784, the London publishing house of J. Johnson came out with a translation of a French treatise that had debunked a highly popular medical treatment. The English edition only lagged four months
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