TWILIGHT STATES: SLEEPWALKING, LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SENSATIONAL SELFHOOD IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE by Rebecca Wigginton B. A. in English, University of Kentucky, 2005 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Rebecca Wigginton It was defended on September 29, 2014 and approved by Philip E. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, English Jonathan Arac, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, English Marah Gubar, PhD, Associate Professor, English John Twyning, PhD, Associate Professor, English Christopher Drew Armstrong, PhD, History of Art & Architecture Dissertation Advisor: Philip E. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, English ii Copyright © by Rebecca Wigginton 2014 iii TWILIGHT STATES: SLEEPWALKING, LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SENSATIONAL SELFHOOD IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Rebecca Wigginton, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 Twilight States: Sleepwalking, Liminal Consciousness, and Sensational Selfhood in Victorian Literature and Culture argues that sleepwalking was everywhere in nineteenth-century culture, both as a topic for scientific, legal, and public debate, but also as a potent symbol in the Victorian imagination that informed literature and art. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century interest in the somnambulist was provoked by what the figure represented and revealed to the Victorians: namely, themselves. The sleepwalker represented the hidden potential within the self for either greatness or deviance, or, more mundanely, simply a fuller existence than consciousness has an awareness of. Sleepwalking writ large the multi-layered self at a time when the self—by psychiatry and society at large—was being accepted as increasingly multivalent. The sleepwalker was a visible and often sensational embodiment of the multilayered consciousness that became the accepted model of the mind over the course of the nineteenth century, visibly demonstrating what doctors and philosophers suggested that the mind could do. By connecting literary representations of sleepwalkers in the works of Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, and Sheridan Le Fanu to both nineteenth-century medical discourses of somnambulism and popular press’s accounts and illustrations of altered states, we see that the discourses surrounding the figure of the somnambulist indicate that it was a cultural receptacle for fears associated with the changing scientific and political landscape, but also a locus for hopes about human potential and innate goodness: an ambivalence possible because of the sleepwalker’s liminality. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE……………………………………………………………………………………….iiiv 1.0 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..1 1.1 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SLEEPWALKER…………………………….1 1.2 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY…………10 1.3 VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY………………………………………………......13 1.4 INDIVIDUAL CHAPTERS…………………………………………………......21 2.0 “GUILTY FORMS OF INNOCENCE”: SLEEPWALKING AND CRIMINALITY IN THE WORKS OF WILKIE COLLINS…………………………………………........24 2.1 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….....24 2.2 VICTORIAN CRIME……………………………………………………………28 2.3 THE SLEEPWALKING DEFENSE…………………………………………….35 2.4 SLEEPWALKING AND SENSATIONALISM………………………………...45 2.5 WILKIE COLLINS: THE CRITICAL CONTEXT……………………………..54 2.6 COLLINS SLEEPWALKER #1: “WHO KILLED ZEBEDEE?” (1881)……….56 2.7 COLLINS SLEEPWALKER #2: NO NAME (1862)…………………………….62 2.8 COLLINS SLEEPWALKER #3: THE MOONSTONE (1868)………………….75 2.9 COLLINS SLEEPWALKER #4: THE LEGACY OF CAIN (1888)……………..90 2.10 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….97 3.0 SOMNAMBULISM, MYSTICISM, AND MATERIALISM IN THOMAS HARDY’S TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES…………………………………………………………98 v 3.1 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………98 3.2 TRANCE STATES AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY MYSTICISM………..101 3.3 SOMNAMBULISM AND THE SELF…………………………………………119 3.4 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………139 4.0 “HE WAS EITHER DEAD OR ASLEEP, I COULD NOT SAY WHICH”: VAMPIRISM, SOMNAMBULISM, AND HYPNOTISM IN DRACULA AND CARMILLA……………………………………………………………………………..143 4.1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………...143 4.2 THE SCIENCE OF SLEEPWALKING AND THE AUTOMATIC SELF……144 4.3 READING CARMILLA AS ANTECEDENT…………………………………..151 4.4 DRACULA’S LUCY WESTENRA: SLEEPWALKER OR STREETWALKER? …………………………………………………………………………………..157 4.5 THE TROUBLED SLUMBERS OF JONATHAN HARKER………………...163 4.6 “AGAIN THE OPERATION; AGAIN THE NARCOTIC”: REPETITION AS CURE FOR THE OVERLY MOBILE BODY………………………………...169 4.7 MINA HARKER’S UNVIEWABLE HYPNOTIZED BODY…………………178 4.8 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………183 5.0 CONCLUSION: THE AFTERLIFE OF VICTORIAN SOMNAMBULISM…………185 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………................191 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………...........……218 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “They reached the cloister-garth…,” Hubert von Herkomer………………………...142 vii PREFACE I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Philip E. Smith, for his generous direction and encouragement throughout the project: your thoughtful guidance made this possible. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Jonathan Arac, Marah Gubar, John Twyning, and Drew Armstrong, for their time, advice, and crucial support. Alexandra Valint kindly and generously read my earliest, messiest material, and sent me anything—including R.L. Stine novels—that was even remotely related to my work. Nancy Glazener and my colleagues in our summer publication practicum gave me invaluable advice on chapter two despite its overwhelming length. Sarah Bagley, Kerry Mockler, and Meredith Collins discussed ideas, listened to my summaries of countless sleepwalking stories, and provided support and comradery. Tait was always there, always patient, and always convinced of the worth of this endeavor: thank you for reading every word. This is for Magdalen, who made the last bit so full of joy. viii 1.0 INTRODUCTION Complete sleep is a temporary metaphysical death, though not an organic one…Sleep, which shuns the light, embraces darkness, and they lie down together under the sceptre of midnight. Robert Macnish, 1830 Somnambulism and the conditions allied to it have always attracted peculiar interest, probably because most men have felt that common sleep is yet a wondrous and solemn thing, and full of mysterious possibilities for each of us. David Yellowlees, 1878 This affection [sleepwalking] is surely worthy of more attention and study than it has received…how much anxiety is causes, how much peril it involves, and how often parents and schoolmasters seek counsel as to the best moral and medical treatment to adopt! One-third of our existence is passed in sleep, and it would be strange if this unconscious life, in which the will, but not necessarily action, is suspended, were not one of serious importance both medically and legally. Daniel Hack Tuke, 1884 1.1 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SLEEPWALKER A strange and sensational story circulated in the early 19th century, the tale of a naval ship menaced by the figure of “a woman dressed in white, with eyes of flaming fire.” Four days out from England members of the crew began to report sightings, first mentioned by a sailor who insisted that this “ghost” had stood over his hammock and stared down at him. Other men soon corroborated this story, terrified of the apparition, and in response one of the officers begins to spend nights beneath the crews’ hammocks, hoping his presence would diminish the accounts. And yet, “the horrors and fears of the people rather daily increased than diminished,” until “one 1 very dark night” the officer sees “a stately figure in white stalking along the decks!” Assuming this is the ghost, the officer follows it across the deck, through the gallery, and out at the head- doors, but it then immediately vanished. The following day the crew realizes that a sailor named Jack Sutton is missing. Upon inquiry, the officer learns “that Jack Sutton used to tell [his messmates] a number of comical jokes about his walking in his sleep.” The mystery stands solved: the flaming eyed, spectral, stately “woman in white” is a flesh and blood—and male— sailor, “who had walked overboard in his dream.” The anecdote is closed with mention of the first man who reported seeing the ghost, and it is revealed on inquiry that he was “a most flagitious villain” and a murderer, convinced that his female victim haunted him; “the appearance of the sleep-walker confirmed in his mind the ghost of the murdered fair one.” In conclusion, the story insists, “conscience is a busy monitor, and ever active to its own pain and disturbance.”1 This story is taken from Chapter Seven of physician Edward Binns’s The Anatomy of Sleep; or, the Art of Procuring Sound and Refreshing Slumber at Will (1842), which contains accounts of 25 separate sleepwalkers, some encountered in Binns’s own experience, but many culled from a variety of texts from the 17th through 19th centuries. Binns attributes the story of Jack Sutton to “a naval gentleman,” but gives no other personal, historical, or chronological details. Like many “cases” found in Victorian psychiatric texts, tales of sleepwalkers often circulated between multiple authors, and were sometimes drawn from newspaper accounts or even literary sources: William Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth was praised as an exemplary depiction, “a masterly description…no modern neurologist would repudiate” (Regnard 270).2 I begin with