ALH Online Review, Series XVI 1 Emily Ogden, Credulity: a Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press

ALH Online Review, Series XVI 1

Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 272 pp.

Reviewed by Shawn Rosenheim, Williams College

In 1794, Benjamin Franklin was named co-chair of a French commission charged with the task of evaluating the nature of animal magnetism, which had recently taken Paris by storm. After extensive experimentation (including the sophisticated use of double-blind tests), the commission ultimately issued a “masterly report” that, in the words of a delighted John Adams, “shews very clearly that this Magnetism can never be useful, for the best of all possible reason, viz.—because it does not exist” (qtd. in 25). For Emily Ogden, the author of Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, this is the first of many ironies permeating mesmerism, which first arrived in the US in 1837—40 years after the Franklin Commission had pronounced it dead.

As the first monograph devoted to the subject in 30 years, Credulity continues the work of such scholars as Ann Taves, Ann Braude, and Alison Winters, who see mesmerism (and its offshoot, spiritualism) as a limited form of female empowerment. Without wholly denying these claims, Ogden argues that mesmerism in its many forms (including animal magnetism, somnambulism, and “spirit travel”) is better understood as a form of rationalizing modernity, a technology of enchantment intended for use on ostensibly unsophisticated subjects: nervous patients in France, enslaved Africans in Guadeloupe, factory girls in New England. “Delusion was what mesmerists understood themselves to be practicing, and they said so explicitly: they manipulated and enhanced the credulity of their clairvoyants in order to know, to discipline, to entertain, and to cure” (16).

Certainly, Charles Poyen, the founder of American mesmerism, saw it that way. Although Poyen studied “animal magnetism” as a medical student in Paris, he had already been introduced to it at home, in Guadeloupe, where his fellow planters would sometimes mesmerize slaves, inducing a somnambulistic clairvoyance in which subjects were able to report on “everything that happened on the plantation” (qtd. in 89). Lecturing primarily in New England factory towns, Poyen presented mesmerism as a tool to mold young female mill-workers to rigid factory schedules, promising to make exhausted workers “bright as a penny” during their time at the loom. Mesmeric factories never caught on, but Poyen’s public demonstrations of mental control over a subordinate female—here, a factory worker named Cynthia Gleason—did much to establish the essentially theatrical and highly gendered conventions for future practitioners of the art.

Still, firm distinctions between rational master and dominated subject proved hard to maintain. Mesmerism turns on the creation of what Ogden calls a “reciprocal credulity,”

in which mesmerist and subject unconsciously collaborate in telling a story that serves their respective needs. That seems to have been the case with the newspaperman William Leete Stone, who sought out the clairvoyant Lurena Brackett intending to expose her performance as a fraud. During an induction, we are told, the blind Brackett could walk down the street describing her surroundings “as confidently as a sighted person . . . even when she was blindfolded as an extra precaution against fraud, she seemed to see the room around her” (109). While mesmerized, Stone took Brackett on a clairvoyant “flight” to New York City, where she described her surroundings with such accuracy that Stone became a full-time convert to this new kind of mental power, glossing over the incoherent elements in Brackett’s descriptions, discovering instead, like many another mesmerist, that “the pretense of belief had a tendency to become real” (20).

Ogden’s archival research is exhaustive, and she writes with a punchy, unfussy energy that often makes Credulity a pleasure to read. At times, though, her case studies bog down in excessively detailed genealogies of the spread of mesmerism in the US. Much richer are those sections of the book devoted to the deep connections between mesmerism and fiction. Fiction readers, Ogden observes, “can look suspiciously like credulous people— they are passionately moved by characters who do not exist.” What saves them from becoming “that dread thing, a dupe” is that, unlike the clairvoyant, the reader willingly suspends her or his belief. Or as Ogden fine-tunes the point, “The reader is not a believer, just not a disbeliever” (127).

Antebellum literary culture was to a remarkable degree preoccupied by questions of credulity, as in the New York Sun’s famous moon hoax and, later, in “The Unparalleled Adventures of Hans Pfaall,” Poe’s riff on that deception. Writing fiction designed to blur the lines between fiction and reality, Poe was part and parcel of a world in which Stone could shift from exposing mesmerism to endorsing it literally overnight. Such a culture not only actively tested the reader’s credulity, it milked such testing for all the pleasure and anxiety it could. In addition to its fine-grained readings of Poe (including a virtuosic reading of “The Angel of the Odd”), Credulity offers nuanced accounts of the mesmeric dynamics at work in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and The House of Seven Gables, and a genuinely surprising and illuminating reading of Ahab’s quasi-mesmeric gestural language in Moby-Dick.

Yet while Ogden says much that is valuable about the nature and uses of credulity, we never really learn what she thinks mesmerism is. Is it only a game? Does anything distinguish it from other forms of social theater? Ogden doesn’t say, nor does she acknowledge that lacuna as a problem. Such reticence leads to moments where Ogden herself seems credulous, as when she suggests that while mesmerism did not restore Brackett’s vision, perhaps it gave her such confidence that she could move as if sighted:

What if it was a confidence game that freed its players rather than enthralling them? Magnetism made both Brackett and her interlocutors credulous about her abilities, and “sight” was then the name they gave to the confident activity Brackett manifested under those conditions. . . . Stone’s credulity was under another description, simply his openness to her self-redefinition. (124) Caught between discounting the experiences of her female clairvoyants or endorsing the reality of enchantment, Ogden fudges the question. But her pragmatic attempts to account for Brackett’s abilities (perhaps she read by feeling the “slight embossing left on the reverse side of a paper by ordinary printing”) often themselves end up sounding like flights of fancy (140).

Ogden’s generally unitary model of the self often makes it hard for her to think through the messiness of mesmeric relations. For her, the relation between mesmerist and clairvoyant is essentially a zero-sum game, in which the mesmerist coerces his patient, or the patient entangles the mesmerist in a fiction: “Either there must be a malleable part of the self over which the controlling self has power, or else there must be impressible and credulous people on whom the controlling self exerts his or her will” (231).

Mesmerism is, of course, an older name for what we today call hypnosis—a subject traditionally thought unworthy of scientific inquiry. That situation is changing. The nature of the hypnotic state is now becoming neurologically visible. Thanks to real-time brain-imaging, scientists can often see the difference between an actual memory and a hypnotically implanted one through the patterns of cranial blood flow. As described by the neurologist Amir Raz, hypnosis describes an “attentional network” which temporarily reworks dominant patterns of consciousness. In such a state, some of the subject’s belief in the boundaries of the possible starts to shift, with sometimes dramatic consequences. Raz claims to cure chronic eczema in about quarter of his patients through hypnotic suggestion—and this on a population for whom all standard medical treatments have failed. In order to show that hypnosis is the operative agent, Raz will sometimes instruct patients to cure the eczema on only one side of their body. While spectacular, the results are not magical: since eczema is aggravated by stress, it follows that altering patterns of consciousness could have somatic effects.

Ogden is a talented critic, and by prevailing standards, Credulity is a valuable addition to the literature on nineteenth-century American mesmerism. Its weaknesses are not Ogden’s alone, but reflect the textual parochialism of most cultural studies. Even as a cultural formation, mesmerism cannot be understood without a more robust account of the biology of consciousness and the relations between semantic beliefs and bodily convictions.

Which is to say that a great deal of work remains to be done before we have anything like a satisfying account of credulity. I once asked a recently hypnotized student what the experience had been like. Was he coerced by the hypnotist? Amnesiac? Just playing along? No, he said, none of those. Then what made him start stripping off his clothes in front of hundreds of people and seem to fall in love with a broom? He thought for a moment. “Well,” he said finally, “whatever he said just seemed like a really good idea.” For all its virtues, Credulity does not do much to help us understand the mystery of that bland and ubiquitous phrase.