Abstract
Shortly before joining Ahab’s crew, in Moby Dick, Ishmael makes a curious offer: “take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”1 Like Coverdale, Clifford Pyncheon, and many of the other fictional and nonfictional figures considered in the previous chapter, he believes the body to be both less estimable and less essential to him than the “soul.” But in Mardi (1849), published just three years prior to Moby Dick, another of Melville’s characters, Babbalanja, offers a contrary view: “Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.”2 To illustrate this principle, he recalls the tale of the philosopher Grando, who, like Ishmael, has viewed his body with “sovereign contempt”:
seizing a cudgel, he laid across his shoulders with right good will. But one of his backhanded thwacks injured his spinal cord; the philosopher dropped; but presently came to. “Adzooks! I’ll bend or break you! Up, up, and I’ll run you home for this.” But wonderful to tell, his legs refused to budge; all sensation had left them. But a huge wasp happening to sting his foot, not him, for he felt it not, the leg incontinently sprang into the air, and of itself, cut all manner of capers. “Be still! Down with you!” But the leg refused. “My arms are still loyal,” thought Grando; and with them he at last managed to confine his refractory member.
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Notes
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; New York: Norton, 2002), 45.
Herman Melville, Mardi (1849; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 505. Subsequent references in the text.
The most comprehensive discussion of this, and Melville’s other scientific interests is Richard Dean Smith’s Melville’s Science: “Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland, 1993).
Marshall Hall, Memoirs on the Nervous System (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1837), 4; emphasis in original. The extent to which Hall can be credited with this discovery is controversial; for discussion, see Franklin Fearing, Reflex Action: A Study in the History of Physiological Psychology (1930; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); Roger Smith, “The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy,” History of Science, 11 (1973), 75–123; John D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 5; Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 114–24; Ruth Leys, From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall Hall and His Opponents (New York: Garland, 1990); George Canguilhem, “The Concept of Reflex,” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from George Canguilhem, ed. François Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 179–202.
For an extended account of this analogy, see Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
Cf. Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victoria Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Emblematic of this shift is Diderot’s remark in Rameau’s Nephew (c.1761): “Formerly Mademoiselle Used to Have the Vapours, Nowadays It Is Nerves”: Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 88.
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15.
Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves, 251; Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind, Electricity and Medicine: A History of Their Interaction (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1984), 87, 109–10; Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 239.
Timothy Lenoir, “Models and Instruments in the Development of Electrophysiology, 1845–1912,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Life Sciences, 17 (1986), 1–54; 3 cited.
Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Reden, II (Leipzig: Veit, 1887), 50–51; quoted and trans., Otis, Networking, 49.
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. and ed. H. G. Darling (London: John J. Griffin and Co., 1851), 32. Only Dods’s portions of this volume are considered in this chapter.
Frederick Hollick, Neuropathy: Or, the Principles of the Art of Healing the Sick. Being an Explanation of the Action of Galvanism, Electricity, and Magnetism in the Case of Disease (Philadelphia: [No publisher credited], 1847), 54, 52.
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973), ch. 3.
For an interesting sidelight on this issue, see Elizabeth Green Musselman, “The Governor and the Telegraph: Mental Management in British Natural Philosophy,” Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 67–92.
William F. Channing, “On the Municipal Telegraph,” American Journal of Science and Art, 63 (May 1852), 58–59; quoted in Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 12.
The phrase “therapeutic perspective” derives from John Harley Warner’s The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). See also Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980), 4. Another useful full-length study of Graham and his milieu is Jayne E. Sokolow’s Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origin of Victorian Sexuality in America (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983).
Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, Intended Also for Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Light and Stearns, Crocker and Blewster, 1837), 48. Subsequent references in the text.
Orson Squire Fowler, Love and Parentage: Applied to the Improvement of Offspring (1846; Manchester: John Heywood, 1898), 10.
Orson Squire Fowler, Amativeness; Or, Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality (1849; Manchester: John Heywood, 1897), 18; emphasis removed.
Previous accounts of Beard include Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), ch. 5; F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), ch. 6; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Janet Oppenheim Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, ch. 1; Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), ch. 4–7.
George Miller Beard, American Nervousness; Its Cause and Consequences. A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), 98. Subsequent references in the text.
George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Future, Sequences, Treatment [1869], ed. A. D. Rockwell (London: H. K. Lewis, 1890), 61; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text.
For further discussion of this point, see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 159–63; Barbara Will, “Nervous Systems, 1880–1915,” American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, ed. Tim Armstrong (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 86–100.
George Miller Beard and Alphonso David Rockwell, On the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity, 8th ed. (1871; London: H. K. Lewis, 1891), 190. Subsequent references in the text.
David F. Channell, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 70.
George Miller Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia (Nervous Exhaustion): Its Hygiene, Causes, Symptoms and Treatment, 5th ed. A. D. Rockwell (1884; New York: E. B. Treat and Co., 1900), 76. Subsequent references in the text.
Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neuroses’ ” [1895], On Psychopathology, Vol. 10 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 35–63. Subsequent references in the text. Here, and throughout the remainder of this paragraph, I draw on Philip P. Wiener’s “Beard and Freud on ‘American Nervousness,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), 269–74. See also Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Sigmund Freud, “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” [1908], Civilization, Society and Religion, Vol. 12 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 37. Subsequent references in the text.
The following account draws principally on J. L. Heilbron’s Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and Benjamin Franklin’s own Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London: E. Cave, 1751).
Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 329n19. The relevant passages appear in Franklin’s Experiments and Observations, 14–15, and A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (London: [No Publisher credited], 1725), 22.
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.
Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Orson Squire Fowler, Creative and Sexual Science (1870; New York: Fowler and Wells Co., 1904), 85.
Cf. Ben Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies, 1 (1972), 45–74; esp. 48.
I owe this reference to Harold Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 145.
Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy [1810], trans. Alfred Tulk (London: The Ray Society, 1847), 381. Subsequent references in the text.
The following account is principally indebted to Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. See also Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Burbick, Healing the Republic, ch. 6; Vivian Pollock, The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mark Maslan, Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” [1855–81], Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 29, 52. Except where otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Whitman’s work are to this edition.
For more on this, see Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy”; Harold Aspiz, “Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination,” American Literature, 56 (1984), 379–95.
See, for example, Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York: Dutton, 1997).
For a range of opinion on this issue, see, for example, Joseph Cady, “Not Happy in the Capitol: Homosexuality and the Calamus Poems,” American Studies, 19 (1978), 5–22; Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet; Moon, Disseminating Whitman; Schmidgall, Walt Whitman. Whereas Cady and Erkkila see Whitman as “internalizing” elements of contemporary homophobia, critics such as Moon and Schmidgall see any evidence to this effect as part of a tactical ploy, on Whitman’s part, to advance his “homophile” agenda, as it were, by stealth.
The term is one of several Whitman derived from phrenology, where it designates the capacity for friendship. See Edward Hungerford, “Walt Whitman and His Chart of Bumps,” American Literature, 2 (1931), 350–84; Aspiz, Whitman and the Body Beautiful, 161–62; Michael Lynch, “ ‘Here is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies, 29 (1985), 67–96. Hungerford denies that Whitman’s usage is eroticized; more recent readers, including Aspiz, Lynch, and myself, feel that it is.
Walt Whitman, Notes and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Vol. II, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 889–90.
Ibid., 888; emphasis in original.
Ibid., 889.
Walt Whitman, The Early Poems and the Fiction, ed. Thomas L. Brasher (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 95.
Ibid., 239.
Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 9–11. I owe this reference, and that to Taylor’s novel, to Hugh Stevens’s Sexuality in Henry James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70–73.
Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Philadelphia (1870; London: Sampson Low, 1871), 49. Subsequent references in the text.
Anon., Teleny, or, the Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of Today (1893; London: Icon, 1966), 102.
For commentary on this, see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34–35.
For Whitman’s influence, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 201–17.
Bert Hansen, “American Physicians’ ‘Discovery’ of Homosexuals, 1880–1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society,” Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 104–33; Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. ch. 2.
Xavier Mayne [pseud. Edward Prime-Stevenson], Imre: A Memorandum (Naples: English Book Press, 1906), 114, 133; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. For further discussion of this novel, see Austen, Playing the Game, 20–27.
Imre and Oswald’s self-descriptions echo Karl Heinrich Ulrich’s distinction between “uranians” and “dionians”; for more details, see, for example, Gert Hekma, “ ‘A Female Soul in a Male Body’: Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth-century Sexology,” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone, 1994), 213–39.
This case is made, most notably, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905): Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, Vol. 7 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 37–169; esp. 155–56.
The term “unconscious cerebration” first appears in the fourth edition of Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology (London: John Churchill, 1853), 819. See, for example, Wood, Passion and Pathology, 111n3.
James Braid, Neurypnology; Or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (1843), excerpted as “Hypnotism,” Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 59–61. For further discussion, see, for example, Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ch. 8.
Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 79; Carpenter’s commentary on Braid’s findings is excerpted as “Mesmerism, Scientifically Considered,” Embodied Selves, 62–63.
See Charles Boewe, “Reflex Action in the Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes,” American Literature, 26 (1954), 303–19; Randall Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion,’ ”American Literature, 74 (2002), 715–45.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), Vol. I, 282; quoted by Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion,’ ” 723.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy (1885; Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1886), 221. Subsequent references in the text.
J. E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915), 77–79.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; Boston: Riverside Press, 1961), 433.
Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (1892; London: J. M. Dent, 1937), 42–43.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 26; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896], trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 30.
Morton Prince, The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1885), 8. Subsequent references in the text.
Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study of Abnormal Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 411n1. Subsequent references in the text.
Prince does not specify which “conventional methods” he had used. However, in an earlier article on the therapeutic use of hypnotism, he states that these include “massage, galvanism, ice-bags, [and] staticelectricity”: Morton Prince, “Some of the Revelations of Hypnotism: Post-Hypnotic Suggestion, Automatic Writing and Double Personality” [1890], rep. Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality: Selected Essays, ed. Nathan G. Hale, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 39.
I reflect on Keller’s career at greater length in my “Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of Perception,” Criticism, 48 (2006). For further background, see Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan Macy (London: Allen Lane, 1980). Theoretical and/or interpretative accounts include Jim Swan, “Touching Words: Helen Keller, Plagiarism, Authorship,” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriations in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 57–100; Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ch. 8; Jodi Cressman, “Helen Keller and the Mind’s Eyewitness,” Western Humanities Review, 54 (2000), 108–23.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, with Her Letters (1887–1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education, Including Passages from the Reports of Her Teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, ed. John Albert Macy (1903; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 36.
Mark Twain, Letter to Helen Keller, “St. Patrick’s Day, 1903,” Mark Twain’s Letters, Vol. II, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), 731.
Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908; London: Methuen and Co., 1933), 63–64.
Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), Vol. II, 298; quoted in Lash, Helen and Teacher, 193.
Helen Keller, Out of the Dark (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), 15.
Ibid.
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© 2007 Sam Halliday
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Halliday, S. (2007). Connection and Division. 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_5
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