Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Mills, Bruce. Poe, Fuller and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance. Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 202 pages, ISBN 0-8262-1610-2, $39.95 cloth
Reviewed by
La Sierra University
Bruce Mills’s Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance, offers a unique literary discussion of mesmerism in nineteenth-century U.S. In ways that few scholars have done until this point, Mills brings together the literature of mesmerism written by practitioners, researchers and literary figures during the American Renaissance. He argues that research and writing about mesmeric experiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought about new understandings of the mind, and that this understanding facilitated an important shift in focus among American writers. They moved from a preoccupation with creating a uniquely American literature to creating a literature that more fully explored and understood the workings of the American mind. Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller, whom Mills demonstrates were both familiar with the literature on mesmerism, began to explore how the “transition states” induced by mesmerism could help writers improve their craft, and both writers developed an aesthetic that incorporated this new conception of human psychology. Mills extends this argument to suggest that their explorations rendered more fully-developed conceptions of democracy because of the focus on the workings of the mind instead of the material world. In addition to the work of Poe and Fuller, Mills also examines works by Lydia Maria Child and Walt Whitman in the later chapters of the book.
According to Mills, Poe and Fuller’s writings represent an important transition in American literature, producing work at a time when emphasis had been on the material symbols of place and life in American culture, but was shifting along with broader cultural interests to an exploration of how the individual imagination shapes the notion of Americanness. This change, he argues, was fueled in part by the cultural preoccupation with animal magnetism and related phenomena. He begins his study by tracing the shift from the early belief in a magnetic fluid or other physical force as the means to effect corporeal change to the idea that imagination or other internal influences caused mesmeric effects. Once it became seen as a more internal and psychological phenomenon, mesmerism garnered interest among writers who wanted to create particular effects among their readers. Poe utilized this knowledge to create the concept of the short story, a brief piece of writing fueled by a unifying effect toward which every aspect of the story put its influence. Fuller utilized this knowledge to philosophize about a more democratic configuration of gender and society, in particular one that saw gender identity to be not oppositional but in fluid.
Mills’ examination of Poe’s writing on mesmerism (in chapters two and three) focuses on three works: “Mesmeric Revelation” and “Marginalia,” both classed as short stories; and Poe’s longer prose poem Eureka. Beginning with the shorter works, chapter two argues that Poe’s theory of the short story can be traced to the same kind of thinking that dominated works about mesmerism, especially as regards the creation of an “effect” by the magnetist or writer. The two practitioners work toward similar ends: creating a desired effect or response in a reader or patient. States of mind said to be crucial to the mesmerist and the receptivity of the patient correspond to the goals of the literary artist and reader. Mills suggests, but does not develop the idea that these notions have had a significant impact on the history of the short story since Poe (66). The chapter on Eureka argues that the prose poem articulates Poe’s ideas of how the interior mind works. Often seen as an insignificant satirical work among Poe’s opus, Mills posits that the piece is based on magnetic principles of attraction and repulsion, and that Poe’s sense of the workings of the mind mirrors the scientific understanding of the universal motion of celestial bodies. For support, Mills draws in parallel ideas from mesmeric literature to illustrate Poe’s ideas, a well as those of Emerson. The chapters on Poe begin with great promise, especially in the discussion of Poe’s use of mesmeric principles to help him create an unified effect in his stories. The weakness of this chapter is its narrow focus on two short stories without making explicit the connection of these stories and the literary principles on which they were created to the larger body of Poe’s works. There is at least one other prominent work that features mesmerism, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which goes unmentioned. Mills’ discussion of Eureka promises to offer a very new reading of a much overlooked work, but the chapter becomes more engaged in the comparative pieces discussed and doesn’t spend adequate time on Eureka itself.
Chapters four and five move to the work of Margaret Fuller and a discussion that wanders between her application of mesmeric principles in the literary critic’s work and her ideas about gender. Analysis focuses primarily on the “Wisconsin” chapter from Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Mills says that Fuller’s early criticism and attitudes toward writers and writing seemed to be shaped—in both vocabulary and concept—by her readings on magnetism and somnambulism. She, like Poe, articulates a sense of the writers’ genius as something a bit inexplicable but characterized by a giftedness couched as “electric.” “Wisconsin” imagines the possibilities of transition states (seen both in the individual and the society) for the harmonizing of longstanding social dualisms. Highlighting the possibility of openness and fluidity in transition states, she suggests that by harnessing the electric potential of the transition state. Mills says “Fuller articulates a consistent vision of an apprehensive creative energy,” one that reimagines the work of the writer and in some cases society itself.
Chapter six introduces the work of Lydia Maria Child, an area of expertise for Mills, who has published other work on Child. Beginning with a discussion of the professional relationship between Child and Fuller, he examines the ways that the two writers imagined the usefulness of mesmeric principles to bring about social change in regard to equality of the sexes. Here Mills effectively uses the mesmeric model to argue that the two writers are writing and thinking against the binary notions of gender that scholars have identified as dominant in nineteenth century thought. For these writers, electricity or magnetism could be a socially “harmonizing force.” Mills argues that the concepts and language of mesmerism shaped how these writers came to understand the craft of writing and the act of reading, and how to influence notions of American democracy to embrace more egalitarian attitudes and practices. Child and Fuller found in “femality” (to use Fuller’s term from an early essay), which for Fuller at least was not exclusively found in women, an openness and sensitivity to divine electricity and therefore more likely to serve as agents of social change in a democratic society. The concluding chapter’s brief discussion of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” reiterates the connections between mesmeric and democratic ways of thinking as imagined by Fuller and Child.
The strength of Mills’ book is that he takes mesmerism seriously, examining its intellectual boundaries as understood both by the scientific and literary worlds. Most scholars have examined in the phenomenology of mesmerism and its medical and social impact in the United States, but Mills offers something new to literary studies in his consideration of the intellectual dimensions and implications of mesmerism for literary production. This book proposes a new way to understand developing notions of democracy in the nineteenth century. Occasionally the book suffers from an overdependence on close readings of the mesmeric literature at the expense of writings of those featured in the title of the book, and some of the terminology used is underexplained, in particular the idea of the transition state, which is used frequently throughout the book but for which I could not find a well-developed definition. Still, the book makes an original contribution to literary studies in mesmerism that will be particularly useful for graduate students and faculty studying the American Renaissance.