Investigating the Soul

Graduate student Emily Ogden explores the relationship between 19th-century American literature and the practice of mesmerism.

“I think it all started for me with Moby Dick,” says Emily Ogden about her decision to devote her dissertation research to the confluence of popular science and literary culture in 19th-century America. Ogden, a doctoral student in English, had long wanted to study her favorite novel’s treatment of science. She was most fascinated by Herman Melville’s depiction of Captain Ahab’s magnetic power over his crew and of the book’s descriptions of mesmerism, the practice of healing people by putting them into trances. Developed by German physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 18th century, mesmerism comprised a controversial system of therapeutics, and was a forerunner of modern hypnotism. The practice went in and out of vogue during the 19th century — as medicine and as entertainment. Ogden noticed that when it was popular in the United States, it became a feature of many American novels written during those periods.

“I’m trying to figure out why that happened, and how that allows us to relate the novel to science and culture,” Ogden says.

By studying Moby Dick and others novels by writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Edward Bellamy, Ogden is examining how literature and the popular appetite for mesmerism reflected emerging ideas about empiricism and scientific objectivity.

Mesmerism was based on Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism” — that humans were governed by an invisible fluid that acted in accordance with the laws of magnetism. Drawing on her studies of mesmerist texts, Ogden believes that, although they were contested by many other physicians and scientists of the era, 19th-century mesmerists were trying to develop a social science based on budding scientific ideas about human physiology. “Through their theories of animal magnetism,” Ogden says, “the mesmerists were trying to empirically understand the workings of the soul and the mind — areas which were not previously thought of as subjects for this type of research.”

Ogden explains that the mesmerists had a particular connection with novelists like Hawthorne and Melville, who also saw themselves as trying to understand the soul. “The question they’re all asking is how far can objectivity and empirical research go into the soul and how far should they go?” Ogden says. “A conclusion I’m coming to is that episodes of mesmerism in these 19th century novels are a way to handle the issue of this relationship between science and the soul.”  

Ogden feels there is also valuable insight to be gained from studying how these texts reflect the dynamics between mesmerism’s popular success and its precarious standing in the scientific community. She finds many of them to be surprisingly acute and thoughtful explorations of what empiricism and objective certainty meant in an environment that offered little institutional control over disciplinary practices. “As my research progresses,” Ogden says, “I hope to answer the larger question of how we can understand objectivity – something that is so important to our scientific practices and our historical practices — by examining this moment in which the mesmerists, who now look obsolete, were asking those same questions.”