OH, HOW DO I LOVE THEE?
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain – Alison Winter
Oh, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…
Because that’s all I can really do with this stonker of a book by Alison Winter, an American academic specialising in the history of science.
Mesmerized is Winter’s doctoral dissertation. Published in 1998, it charts mesmerism’s course from Europe to Britain, and examines how the phenomenon influenced Victorian society, culture and concepts of consciousness, as well as the relationship between science and pseudoscience.
I can’t recall where I came across this book; I suspect it was a reference in a popular book. Aside from some Peter Ackroyd tomes during a Dickens phase in my late 20s, I’d never read such a hefty, detailed, questioning and illuminating account of history – it was certainly the first such academic book I’d read.
I first read it back in mid 2019 while mulling my post-it-note Trilby project. But it inspired so much more: a thirst to return to original, obscure sources and revisit what is mostly a history, and story, told through male voices via a questioning female/feminist voice.
And, ultimately, it helped inspire this blog – my thirst for the hypnotically weird and wonderful became A Thing.
Rereading this book for this post was so worthwhile; I’d missed so much the first time around and have learned so much, thanks to the path Winter’s work set me upon, since.
Here are three of my favourite mesmeric morsels from Winter’s book for your delectation:
The key thing that’s stayed with me is that concepts of mind evolve, always subject to the conditions, technologies and metaphors of the day. Winter discusses this in terms of Victorian concepts vs what we find plausible now (P11) – if you’re trying to understand where modern hypnosis comes from, it’s useful not to chalk the past up simply to credulity, superstition, quacks and bad science, as so often is the case. A nuance I particularly appreciated was that subjects were either completely unconscious or a fraud (or the experimenter a fraud). There is an account of a servant girl who recalls being laughed at by her fellow servants during the last experiment. The experimenter does not dwell on this (Winter theorises this is because of the risk of being labelled a fraud himself), but the point is: the concept of thinking while unconscious did not yet exist “as a formally acknowledged state of mind” (p65).
Winter includes first-hand mesmeric experiences from upper-class women and men. But they were not the subjects that fuelled the mesmeric phenomenon. The flawed, invasive, injurious and inhumane nature of tests to trial and establish the mesmeric state permeates this book. To establish the unconscious/fraud binary, snuff was shot up noses and needles shoved beneath fingernails. Winter brings to life, as best she can, the working-class and rural-poor subjects – the preferred of which was the impoverished, ignorant Irish servant girl, Irish people largely being regarded as subhuman at the time. While accounts of the O’Key Sisters finding power and voice are rousing, much of what subjects said or did is a mystery. I love Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (a post for another day) and was frustrated that a scientific witness to a particularly chatty female subject recorded it all as “nonsense”. Shockingly, Winter was “unable to find a single description of mesmerism by a working-class experimental subject” (P80).
Except it’s not shocking, is it? On second reading, I contemplated many of the questionable practices, practitioners and philosophies in terms of contemporary hypnosis – still a very white-male-led field. I also pondered the continued mysteries as to how suggestion actually works for what we’d now call ‘participants’, but is still a subordinate, feminised role in terms of a lasting meme. Winter references a popular family serial publication, the New Monthly Magazine, which in 1845 started a fictional series on The Island of Mesmeria, capitalising on the frenzy for mesmerism, and chronicling the mesmeric explorations of Madame La Reveuse courtesy of mesmerist Signor Phantasio. Winter closes her book with an extract from Mesmeria which, for me, perfectly captures the male ownership of mesmerism (and, later, hypnotism) and the mysteries of mind that remain.
Signor Phantasio: What discoveries I have made! I shall be honoured like Columbus!
Madame La Reveuse: I think I am the discoverer.
Signor: Of what?
Madame: I know not. I have no recollection.
I raved about this book so much, Kev had a flick through a few weeks ago. He found a hidden gem I hadn’t noticed: an author inscription thanking ‘John’ for the years of encouragement and inspiration.
Since I first encountered Winter’s book, I’d read a few academic books about mesmerism and hypnosis, but found them stilted and only fleetingly engaging. I was lamenting why they weren’t as well written as Winter’s work. Kev suggested I contact Winter – perhaps that I even consider doing a PhD of my own someday, maybe picking up where Winter concludes Mesmerized in the late 1850s...
Sadly, Winter died of a brain tumour in 2016, aged 50. I thank her for the inspiration, though, and I hope more hypno-seekers are encouraged to read her work.
