YOU'VE BEEN TRILBY'ED
The Hypnotic Tales of Rafael Sabatini – Donald K Hartman (editor)
Editor and researcher Donald K Hartman’s latest volume in his ‘Hypnotism in Victorian and Edwardian Era Fiction’ series – The Hypnotic Tales of Rafael Sabatini – arrived in the post recently like some kind of Christmas miracle. (Aka the ‘magic’ of being sent a surprise free book for review.)
Maniac that I am, I’ve been thinking about Trilby since I first conspired to bag Kev as my boyfriend in early 2017. Kev and his former Head Hacking partner, Anthony Jacquin, made a training product called ‘The Trilby Connection’, where Anthony trains a woman hypnotist, and so I wanted to impress my new beau with my knowledge of the reference.
It turned out, of course, that Kev cared only about the implied Svengali reference. In spite of the antisemitism, xenophobia, and classism, etc, it’s easy to see why this master hypnotist transcended George du Maurier’s novel to become a noun in common parlance today.
But what of the titular heroine, Trilby? She’s faintly remembered as a style of hat worn by the actress who portrayed her in the story’s 1895 stage adaptation. But, back in the late 1800s, Trilby was a craze. ‘Trilbyana’ spanned mega-merchandising, including ice cream, spoons, dolls, and deli meats, as well as public discourse on the heroine’s style, beauty, and ‘moral innocence’ (which likely just masked the eroticism associated with hypnosis).
Trilby sparked a backlash, too – particularly among those who believed du Maurier had wrought great evil upon this world in bringing Trilby, and myths of hypnosis, into the public consciousness. It is easy to dismiss Trilby’s fictional fate – dying at the sight of a portrait of her deceased hypnotist, Svengali – as silly melodrama. But let’s not forget that ‘she’ was a composite of real-life women who du Maurier and his mesmeric chum Felix Moscheles meddled with – notably, their ‘friend’ Carry. And ‘death’ for such women was social and/or spiritual, if not physical.
Hartman brings us two stories that ‘clap back’ at du Maurier and Trilby with such concerns in mind. Penned by Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950), an Italian-born British author known for his bestselling romance and adventure novels in the 1920s and 30s, ‘The Avenger’ (March 1909 edition of Gunter’s Magazine) and ‘The Dream’ (August 1912 edition of The Story-Teller) feature a character called Roger Galliphant, a medical man and hypnosis expert, who is sleuthing and solving various hypnotic murders – physical and psychological.
Hartman’s two previous volumes, Death by Suggestion and The Hypno-Ripper, are similarly concerned with Victorian/Edwardian hypno-murders. But Sabatini’s writing is surprisingly thoughtful and robust beyond the mind-crime capers our protagonists are caught up in. For instance, ‘The Avengers’ features content-heavy discussions between Galliphant and the narrator on the “jumble of hypnotic nonsense” that is du Maurier’s book, as well as the mess gangs of gentleman hypnotists have made of women plagued by mesmeric experiments.
To make this point, Galliphant, in avenging a hypnotic serial killer in the first story, is deeply disturbed at mixing ‘fascination’ (eg, gazing at a candle until ‘entranced’, as an example of a fairly innocuous parlour game) with deliberate use of suggestion. To use the power of suggestion in this way is, it is inferred, to play God. People, particularly women, were not able to gain perspective on hypnosis by understanding it as a science, so I found Sabatini’s writing a haunting insight into just how dark and disturbing it may have been to have been ‘corrupted’ by hypnosis as a story; a story incompatible with the ultimate guiding story of the bible – as perhaps was Carry’s struggle after biting the ‘forbidden fruit’.
The second story, ‘The Dream’, sees Galliphant exonerate a man for murdering the hypnotist who’d plotted for him to instead murder a relative for financial gain. A highlight is 20-year-old Adelaide, the would-be-wife of the murder accused, who’s a mesmeric medium and amateur expert in hypnosis who helps to restore her love’s sanity and innocence. We meet her as she’s reading a tome called Researches in the Subliminal and she shares my frustration at “how foolish and wilful people can be in their ignorance” in not availing themselves of the facts of hypnosis! What a refreshingly progressive female character.
In conclusion, I believe we need to revisit perspectives from the past to better understand mesmerism/hypnotism as it was – and as it is now. Hartman’s work makes you appreciate the chaos from which prevailing views and practices emerged, with this latest compilation leaving me longing for women like Adelaide to cut through the current and persistent noise of ‘NLP Master Practitioners’ clogging up internet and IRL training forums. And my favourite exchange (below) reminds us all that, unless you’re exposing yourself to quality, credible yet nuanced and somewhat opposing views on the subject, you are likely just standing still with a time-waster and/or charlatan.
“I will not believe,” I said, “that which I cannot understand.”
“How limited, then,” said Galliphant in his pleasant way, “must be your field of faith. You have not, I take it, made any serious study of hypnotism?”
“No,” I answered frankly. “I know of no studies worth making.”
“Yet,” he contended, “there is no lack of text-books on the rationale of the subject.”
“Nor yet on the subject of psychic research,” I retorted, hitting back at last. “You will find men to write on any subject likely to appeal to the weak-minded. They can thus depend upon a large public.”
“You are of course quite wrong on the score of hypnotism,” he said quietly, sticking to the point, and the finality of his manner staggered me.
“Do you seriously mean,” I asked, “that a man of your mental powers can attach belief to the absurdities credited to hypnotism?”
“No,” he replied, with a smile, “not to the absurdities. I discard those. But there remain many things in hypnotism that are not absurd.”
