Abstract
Toward the beginning of A Laodicean, as George Somerset follows the lead of the telegraph wire to Paula Power’s castle, Hardy says that this machine “may be said to symbolise cosmopolitan views and the intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind.”1 This kinship forms a favorable contrast with the “stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas” and “deadly mistrust of one’s neighbour” that Hardy identifies with feudalism, represented by the castle itself (ibid.). The historical vision outlined here, with its identification between technological advance and progress—the realization of social harmony, moral virtue, and intellectual sophistication—is a familiar feature of nineteenth-century thought. Modernity, in this view, will bring an end to antagonism, and hostilities of all kinds will seem increasingly atavistic as the social conditions that cultivate them are consigned to the past. The telegraph was often regarded in this way, as a metonym of modernity and progress. An exciting invention, it was representative of technical modernization in general, but more particularly, and as a means of communication, had a still more immediate role in the “interchange of ideas” that was supposed to lead to the “moral kinship of mankind.”
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Notes
Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (1881; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 18. Subsequent references in the text.
Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 10. See also James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 201–30.
H. L. Wayland, “Results of the Increased Facility and Celerity of Inter-Communication,” New Englander, 16 (1858), 800; quoted in Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, 10.
For a reading of this episode similar to the one that follows, see Charles Swann, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 101–03.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Norton, 1967), 264. Subsequent references in the text.
On the genealogy of this term, see Marco Bresadola, “Early Galvanism as Technique and Medical Practice,” Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity, ed. Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi (Bologna: Dipartmento di Filosofia, Università di Bologna, 2001), 157–79. For a recent selection of essays on Galvani’s historical significance, see Marco Bradola and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds., Luigi Galvani International Workshop Proceedings (Bologna: Dipartmento do Filosofia, Centro Internazionale per la Storia della Università e della Scienza, 1999).
Exemplary in this regard was Andrew Crosse (1784–1855), the English amateur scientist who, in 1836, caused widespread consternation by claiming to have precipitated insects by electrifying minerals: see James A. Secord, “Extraordinary Experiment: Electricity and the Creation of Life in Victorian England,” The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-century London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 4–5.
See, for example, Gerrit L. Verschuur, Hidden Attraction: The History and Mystery of Magnetism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 7.
H. A. N. Snelders, “Oersted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism,” Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 228–39.
See, for example, Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), ch. 2.
Roy R. Male Jr., “Hawthorne and the Concept of Sympathy,” PMLA, 68 (1953), 138–49; 140 cited. See also Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Cunningham and Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences; Eric Wilson, “Emerson and Electromagnetism,” ESQ, 42 (1996), 93–124.
On Romantic conceptions of electricity, see Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 153–60.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand” [1850], Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: Norton, 1987), 241.
Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 151. Subsequent references in the text. 15. For background on this, and an analysis similar to the one that follows, see Aaron McClendon, “For Not in Words Can It Be Spoken: John Sullivan Dwight’s Transcendental Music Theory and Herman Melville’s Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 19 (2005), 23–36.
On the provenance of such ideas, see Jamie C. Kassler, “Man—A Musical Instrument: Models of the Brain and Mental Functioning before the Computer,” History of Science, 22 (1984), 59–92.
Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57. 18. Ibid.
On the relationship of these two terms, see Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1990).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music [1876], trans. Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 35. Schopenhauer’s discussion of music famously features in The World and Will and Representation (1818).
On the emergence of this theme in German philosophy, and especially its relation to music, see Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).
Ernst Benz, The Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, trans. Wolfgang Taraba (Allison Park: Pickwick Publications, 1989); James Delbourgo, “Electrical humanitarianism in North America: Dr. T. Gale’s Electricity, or Ethereal Fire, Considered (1802) in Historical Context,” Electric Bodies, ed. Bertucci and Pancaldi, 117–56.
See the author’s “Introduction” to the second edition of the novel: Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, A New Edition with Introduction and Appendix (1886; London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887), ix–xxv. Subsequent references in the text.
Brian Masters, Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 6. See also Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Pierre, famously, was a publishing disaster: see, for example, Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, “Historical Note” to Pierre (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 365–410.
Studies include: R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
For more on the gendering of professional telegraphy, see Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
See Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), ch. 1.
R. Laurence Moore, “Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings,” American Quarterly, 29 (1972), 475–500; 486 cited; Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 69.
John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 94–96.
Alan Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Part III.
The best source on early French mesmerism is Robert Darnton’s Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). American developments are the focus for Robert C. Fuller’s Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
Here, and in what follows, I draw on Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970; London: Fontana, 1994); Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud; and Mesmer’s own writings, as collected in Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, trans and comp. George Bloch (Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1980).
See, for example, Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 3–9.
In addition to the texts cited in n39 above, see Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Joseph Alkana, The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), ch. 2–3; Robert S. Levine, “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance,” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207–29.
Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ch. 6; Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters (Hamden: Archon Books, 1978), ch. 2; Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; New York: Norton, 2002), 255. Subsequent references in the text.
Herbert Rothschild Jr., “The Language of Mesmerism in ‘The Quarter Deck’ Scene in Moby Dick,” English Studies, 53 (1972), 235–38.
Herman Melville, Typee (1846; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 70.
Ibid., 196; Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 112.
Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, His Masquerade (1857; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990), 190.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor [1891; pub. 1924], The Complete Shorter Fiction (New York: Everyman, 1997), 449.
This segue between reciprocity and hierarchy all but irrepressibly recalls Hegel’s famed account of the “master-slave relationship.” And indeed, according to Malcolm Bull, this account is informed by mesmeric theory: Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London: Verso, 1999), ch. 6.
Rev. J. B. Dods and Prof. J. S. Grimes, Electrical Psychology: Or the Electrical Philosophy of Mental Impressions, Including a New Philosophy of Sleep and Consciousness, rev. ed. H. G. Darling (London: John J. Griffin and Co., 1851), 149. Subsequent references in the text. The final three chapters of this text are by Grimes, and it is from these that I quote in the remainder of this section.
Anon. [J. F. Ferrier], “What Is Mesmerism?” [1851], Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 58–59. Emphasis in original.
Horace Bushnell, A Discourse on the Slavery Question (1839); William Ellery Channing, Slavery (1835): both rep. Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Lowance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 230, 186.
Ibid., 183.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 116. Subsequent references in the text.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Sophia Peabody, October 18, 1841, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. XV, the Letters, 1813–1843, ed. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 588. A good contextualizing account of this letter can be found in Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists, ch. 2.
Richard H. Millington makes similar points, in relation to Alice Pyncheon’s enslavement by Maule, and Phoebe’s relationship with Holgrave, in Practicing Romance: Narrative Forms and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139–40.
For a full-length study of this and many other aspects of Fuller’s influence on Hawthorne, see Thomas R. Mitchell, Hawthorne’s Fuller Mystery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845], rep. The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin, 1994), 293. Subsequent references in the text.
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological [1966], trans. Carolyn Porter (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 101.
For an alternative perspective on this, and other aspects of Hawthorne’s novel considered in this section, see Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), ch. 3.
To live in “Enjoyment,” as Alexandre Kojève writes, is “to preserve oneself in Nature without fighting against it”: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel [1933–39], trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 46. This seems a concise definition of both the pigs’ “satisfaction,” and of Coverdale’s complaint against it.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1928], trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 217.
Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 131.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 40. Subsequent references in the text. On ideas of art in this novel, see Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 55–61, 414–17; John Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153–59.
For a related reading of Zenobia’s body, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 242–44.
Here, and throughout the remainder of this section, I draw on Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On the history of ideas about the ether, see G. N. Cantor and M. J. S. Hodge, Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories, 1740–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Georges Bataille, “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist” [c.1929], Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Alan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). The surrealists, says Bataille, claim to affirm what is traditionally despised: sexuality, filth, and so on. However, he argues, what they really end up doing is precisely the opposite, for by elevating these terms, they in fact are investing them with “immaterial values” (39). Idealism, then, returns with a vengeance, as is indicated by the prefix sur, suggesting elevation and transcendence. This, I think, is also Hawthorne’s strategy—the signal difference being that, unlike the surrealists, he knows what he is doing.
I am thinking here of Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Pedro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–71.
José B. Monleón, A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 60.
Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation” [1844], Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 723. Subsequent references in the text. For further discussion of this and other “mesmerist” texts by Poe, see Sidney E. Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 1077–94; Doris V. Falk, “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 536–46.
For an even-handed appraisal of the “science” in “Eureka,” see Peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), ch. 2–3.
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© 2007 Sam Halliday
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Halliday, S. (2007). Sympathy and Reciprocity. In: Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605091_4
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