Murison Politics of Anxiety Intro

Cambridge Books Online
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The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Justine S. Murison
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812071
Online ISBN: 9780511812071
Hardback ISBN: 9781107007918
Chapter
Introduction pp. 1-16
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812071.001
Cambridge University Press
:

Introduction
I think anxiety is very interesting, observed Amy, eating sugar,
pensively.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (:o)
Tis book refocuses the study of nineteenth-century American litera-
ture on frogs shorn of their heads, tables that report on the afterlife, and
men who think they are teapots. Tese instances constitute more than
a curiosity cabinet of outr psychology or outright fraud; rather, the
nineteenth-century understanding of the nervous system united them
as possible, even plausible, sources for psychological insights. Many cru-
cial discoveries about the nervous system predate ::c, but not until then
did nerves come to shape the representations and experiences of cultural,
political, and religious tumults in the United States. By the :,cs and
through the rest of the century, writers absorbed, expressed, and popu-
larized the medical language of the nerves. In turn, their narratives of
nervousness swayed debates about the biological and cultural meanings
of freedom and possession, subjects to which all of the writers in this
study return. Free society was understood to be nervous; that is, it was
open, vulnerable, and fraught with the power to derail reform while also
dependent upon an active, participatory body politic, a paradox not lost
on political and social commentators before and after the Civil War.
Why, George Fitzhugh , pro-slavery author of Sociology for the South
(:,) and Cannibals All! Or , Slaves Without Masters (:,;), asks, have
you Bloomers and Womens Rights men, and strong-minded women, and
Mormons, and anti-renters, and vote myself a farm men, Millerites, and
Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians,
and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and indel Isms
at the North? Why is there faith in nothing, speculation about every-
thing? Why is this unsettled, half-demented state of the human mind
co-extensive in time and space, with free society?
:
Although Fitzhughs
defense of slavery may not have survived the war, Te Politics of Anxiety
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Te Politics of Anxiety :
in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows why his diagnosis of
freedom did.
Te parameters of this study are wide: from teapots to mental path-
ology; from galvanic batteries to abolitionism; from phantom limbs
to domestic ideology . Nineteenth-century Americans connected these
subjects some quite far aeld from each other through the popular
understanding of the nervous system. Strictly speaking, for a nineteenth-
century anatomist the nervous system consisted of the brain, the spinal
cord, and the nerves that radiated out from these centers. To under-
stand nineteenth-century psychology, therefore, we must begin with the
body. Te body, as it turns out, was not a stable unit precisely because
the nervous system governed it. As Charles E. Rosenberg explains, in
early nineteenth-century medicine the body was seen, metaphorically,
as a system of dynamic interactions with its environment. Food, drink,
clothes, climate, work: All of these elements, and an innite number of
others, demanded a necessary and continuing physiological adjustment,
and therefore the body was always in a state of becoming and thus
always in jeopardy.
:
Te nervous system made possible this exposure to
the environment. Te senses relayed environmental information along
the nerves and, in turn, the nerves cued muscles to move the body. When
in working order, the nervous system kept the mind in tune with bodily
actions and reactions. Te basic assumption, put best, was of an embodied
mind and a thoughtful body.
To be nervous in the nineteenth century was therefore more than a
passing description of individual personality; rather, nervousness charac-
terized the basic psychological assumption of the century. Because the
nervous system united the body together, from the brain all the way to
the toes, the cultural impact of the nerves proved both physical and meta-
physical. Te somatic emphasis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
psychology responded to the theological need to cordon o the soul from
disease. Doing so, according to Roy Porter , allowed for the diagnosis of
nerves to preclude moral blame, by hinting at a pathology not even
primarily personal, but social, a Zeitgeist disease, a disease of the body, in
other words, as shaped by the social and physical environment rather than
one primarily lodged in a deep conception of the self.
,
Often signaled
by references to susceptibility and susceptible subjects, this experience
of the self was profoundly tumultuous, barely buered from the world
in the way that Charles Taylor has described it.
Because both body and

mind were open to environmental pressures, they proved vulnerable to the
political climate and the social world. Indeed, for the nineteenth century,
Introduction ,
an aect such as anxiety was somatic and cultural or, more accurately,
somatic because cultural. By the :,cs, a popular language of the ner-
vous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body and
for society of major historical changes: from the pace of technology and
urbanization to the rise of Jacksonian democracy ; from the turmoil of
social reform to the fraught relations between classes, races, and genders.
Far from naturalizing what was otherwise cultural or political, the pre-
dominant theory of the nervous system knit the body and mind together
through their interactions with the world.
Te nineteenth-century open body, as I refer to it throughout this
book, culminated a much longer medical history. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, physicians in the Atlantic world innovatively theorized that the rela-
tion between mind and body was not produced by the uid exchange
of the humors but by a network of nerves. In doing so, they conceived
not just a nervous body, to borrow Peter Melville Logan s phrase, but a
nervous self a mind and body in tight, inextricable connection.
,
Work
by seventeenth- through early nineteenth-century investigators such as
Tomas Willis , Robert Whytt , and Charles Bell outlined the anatomy of
the nervous system: Sensory organs transferred information to the brain,
and the brain, in turn, exerted a will over the body.
o
How this happened,
though, was anyones guess. Tus the horizon of medical excitement in
the nineteenth-century was physiological rather than anatomical, focused
on invisible functions rather than visible structures.
;
Early nineteenth-
century physiologists such as Franois-Joseph-Victor Broussais in France,
Johannes Mller in Germany, and Marshall Hall in Britain explored these
mysteries, but nervous physiology would nonetheless remain inexplicable
for decades to come. Te nervous system therefore could not oer cul-
tural or political (let alone medical) stability, for its physiology persist-
ently ba ed scientists, physicians, and patients throughout the century.
Tis instability, though, allowed the nerves to become a exible vocabu-
lary, used widely to express dierent, sometimes even contradictory,
exper iences and opinions.
Te advent of this unstable yet exciting realm of nervous physiology
coincided with the nadir of medical professionalism in the United
States: the Jacksonian era.
Medical contest, from both within the pro-

fession and around its margins, dominated the century. By the :,cs,
prominent regular physicians such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,
nally revised typical therapeutic interventions such as bloodletting and
mercury ingestion, challenging, quite controversially, the dispensation
of poisonous minerals and lack of hygiene in surgery and childbirth.
,
If
Te Politics of Anxiety
debates such as these within the profession unsettled any unied med-
ical voice, what counted as professional further complicated this pic-
ture. Because medicine remained unlicensed until the :;cs, the eld
encompassed lay practitioners and theories that we now disparage as
pseudosciences. Indeed, while physicians certainly had a stake in, as
Dana D. Nelson puts it, generating scientic rationales for the organ-
ization and supervision of the national economy, and the civic, public,
and private arenas, it is equally true that irregular practitioners from
homeopaths and botanical Tomsonians to mesmeric doctors and spir-
itualist mediums diverged widely from regular physicians and were
popular with patients for precisely this reason.
:c
Te nineteenth-century
fads of the water cure and mesmeric healing, for instance, were explicit
responses to the potentially deadly hand of the physician.
Raried medical studies of the nerves, therefore, could not alone
account for the prevalence of nervous terminology in nineteenth-century
American culture. Indeed, odd physiological terms for the nerves which
included sympathy , animal electricity , the nervous uid, and the
odylic principle only became truly ubiquitous through the heady
world of popular science and health reform . Antebellum Americans wit-
nessed the wonders of the nervous system during popular demonstrations
of mesmerism and clairvoyance ; when having their heads read by trav-
eling phrenologists ; by perusing health reform manuals and attending
lectures by men and women such as Sylvester Graham and Mary S. Gove ;
and by visiting sances with modern spiritualists such as the Fox sisters
or Emma Hardinge . Te terms of the nervous system peppered readers
letters to newspapers; essays on everything from the Democratic Party
to the afterlife in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review or
Putnams Monthly ; and theological debates about revivalism and spirit
bodies among all of the major Protestant sects. Perhaps more than any
other inuence, the phrenological print empire of Fowler and Wells
widely circulated books on a variety of health subjects, including phren-
ology , physiology, calisthenics, and electrical psychology. From the family
physician to their favorite periodical, nearly everywhere Americans turned
reinforced the experiences of a nervous self.
Nineteenth-century ction exemplied the cultural stakes of this ner-
vous, susceptible self. Although ction was by no means the exclusive
literary form in which nervous language found expression any glance
at Walt Whitmans invocations of the body electric or Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Sr.s essay on Te Physiology of Versication would belie such
a claim it was nonetheless the primary genre to spark debates about the
Introduction ,
eects of reading on mental health. As the pitched battles of eighteenth-
century anti-novel discourse cooled by the middle of the nineteenth
century, they produced a well-worn theory about good and bad
novels that fused moral issues to health concerns, particularly the health
of susceptible women readers. [A]lthough the true novel is of mod-
ern date, expounds one commentator in :, its rst rude progenitor
was an ospring of iniquity, and the impurities of the original blood
are constantly appearing in the tetters and blotches upon the features of
its legitimate children.
::
Providing the novel with a metaphoric family
history, the Christian Parlor Magazine claims that even the purported
best novels, such as those by Sir Walter Scott, never shed the taint of
their illegitimate origins. And it is not just Christian advocates who fret-
ted over the tetters and blotches of ction. Some novels, according to
the National Era , do terrible mischief to readers, rendering their sens-
ibilities irritable, morbid, feeble, approaching to exhaustion, by constant
abuse upon the ridiculous distresses of ranting fools and hysterical pup-
pies of both genders. Tis nexus of health and morality exceeds meta-
phor, for later this writer laments how readers devour every book in the
spasms of a hysterical paroxysm that ends with the nerves vehemently
shaken, the muscles, in an earthquake, the lungs worked to exhaustion,
ushed cheeks, boiled eyes, and a sharp appetite for bread and butter.
To counteract these hysterical, orgasmic symptoms, the article recom-
mends those novelists enlisted in the service of moral, social, and pol-
itical reform.
::
An anti-slavery newspaper that would serialize Harriet
Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin in :,:, the National Era had a stake
in marking some ction as healthy. Yet it nonetheless shares assump-
tions with stauncher anti-novel voices like that in the Christian Parlor
Magazine . Te presumption behind both is that ction, whether moral
or licentious, can inltrate the reader get beneath her very skin to
shake her nerves and upset her physiology.
Because ction potentially threatened the health of readers, formal
choices most especially the balance between romance and realism
carried moral and medical weight in the early nineteenth century. In
the novels and tales that address directly the cultural implications of the
nerves, writers narrative choices reected the exciting yet unstable med-
ical world of the nervous system. Fiction tested, imagined, and extended
these medical developments, a role that physicians such as Holmes and
S. Weir Mitchell , both of whom wrote ction, appreciated. In particu-
lar, ction aorded them a mode to explore those aspects of the ner-
vous system that reached beyond clinical analysis. As Holmes explains
Te Politics of Anxiety o
in his preface to Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (:o:), a novel about
serpentine hysteria, a grave scientic doctrine may be detected lying
beneath some of the delineations of character, and he employs this
doctrine as a part of the machinery of his story without pledging his
absolute belief in it to the extent to which it is asserted or implied.
:,

Holmess description of romance accords neatly with the mid-century
denition Nathaniel Hawthorne promotes in Te House of the Seven
Gables (:,:): the mingling of the marvelous and the mundane. Where
medicine leaves o, romance begins; however, Holmes insists that he
grounds his version of romance in science even as it stretches beyond
known scientic limits. Romance did not function as the opposite of sci-
entic realism but as its critical supplement in the middle decades of the
nineteenth century.
:
Indeed, that Holmes chooses to call Elsie Venner a
romance points to how nineteenth-century medicine inspired and
was inspired by experimental, nonrealist ction, including genres such
as the Hawthornian romance, the gothic tale, the political satire, and
the city mystery novel. Tese ctions were continuous with rather than
rejections of nineteenth-century scientic speculation, and no more so
than in their scrutiny of the susceptibilities and sympathies of social life.
Representing the romance of the nervous system thoughtfully and, at
times, critically, the writers in this study helped construct and explore
(and thus popularize in many cases) a neurological vision of the body
and mind . Tis literary participation in the vagaries of nerves in their
wild, disruptive, and, at times, contradictory biological imperatives
continued throughout the century. After the Civil War, though, many
writers began to pitch their ctional explorations of the nerves in oppo-
sition to the professional aspirations of neurologists as those physicians
(including Mitchell and George Miller Beard ), increasingly supported
by institutions and licensure, dened nervousness as merely pathological
and in need of professional, therapeutic control.
Te literal and metaphoric symptoms ascribed to susceptible read-
ers and nervous citizens in the nineteenth century are also a reminder
that symptomatic reading , the hallmark of critical approaches to litera-
ture in the twentieth century, has a somatic pre-history, which this book
introduces. Tat history is best encapsulated by the transition (typied
by Sigmund Freuds work) from nervousness to anxiety, that is, from
a literal invocation of a physiological symptom to a psychological term
that defers to an unconscious. Tis transition speaks directly to literary
scholarship because anxiety has been the longstanding aective orien-
tation of the symptomatic tradition. Etymologically and medically,
Introduction ;
anxiety reaches back to the classical period and forward to current
colloquial expressions derived from Freudian psychoanalysis. Coming
from the Latin for a feeling of choking or distress, anxiety connotes
the hysterical symptom of a ball rising in the throat, which partially
explains the theory of the wombs wandering during the classical period.
As the nervous system became the central anatomical and physiological
basis of the bodys relation to the mind in the eighteenth century, phys-
icians reclassied hysteria as a nervous disorder. Te symptom of chok-
ing became psychosomatic in this process, disguising the linguistic
connection between hysteria and anxiety. In colloquial English by the
early nineteenth century, anxiety did not display the somatic richness
of the classical period or the psychological complexity it would achieve
after Freud, and yet its history contained both.
Because anxiety accrued both somatic and psychological meaning
throughout the centuries, it is well poised to open a conversation both
about the history of aects and the aects of critical methods.
:,
Te
meaning of anxiety in contemporary criticism emerges out of the sur-
prising conuence and compatibility of the work of Freud and Michel
Foucault . Freud famously broke with the somatic culture of nineteenth-
century neurology . In doing so, he reinvigorated anxiety as a psycho-
logical rather than physiological term for the early twentieth century,
obscuring the somatic roots of anxiety in the nervous system. Freud
constructed the modern meaning of anxiety in Tree Essays on the Teory
of Sexuality (:,c,), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (:,:o), and Anxiety
and Instinctual Life (:,,:). In the process of writing these works, Freud
notably reversed his original theory of anxiety. Whereas in the :,:c
essays neurotic anxiety arises out of repression, in Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiety , anxiety produces repression. Positioning the source of anx-
iety outside the self in an external situation of danger, Freud argues
that anxiety perpetuates the lesson of this original trauma by producing
a repressed subject.
:o
In turn, any return of the repressed reveals the
traces of anxiety by way of its failures fully to enact repression.
Te Freudian explanation of repression and anxiety has maintained its
relevance despite Foucaults inuential critique of the repressive hypoth-
esis. As part of Foucaults broader project to delineate the knowledge
power nexus that discourse produces, volume I of Te History of Sexuality
(:,;o) directly confronts the limitations of repression as described in psy-
choanalysis. If anxiety produces repression, and repression is the result of
the prohibitions of the libido, then its process is negative in Freuds argu-
ment. Foucault turns this theory on its head in Te History of Sexuality .
Te Politics of Anxiety
Te repressive hypothesis, according to Foucault, overlooks the discur-
sive explosion surrounding what seem to be linguistic prohibitions.
:;
Yet
implicit in Foucaults recounting of discursive explosions is exactly the
emotional valence Freud too addressed: fear, panic, and anxiety. Trough
nervous disorders and newly categorized sex crimes, Foucault argues,
medicine and law produced social controls that undertook to protect,
separate, and forewarn, signaling perils everywhere, awakening peoples
attention, calling for diagnoses, piling up reports, organizing therapies.
As he puts it, Tese sites radiated discourses aimed at sex, intensifying
peoples awareness of it as a constant danger, and this in turn created a
further incentive to talk about it.
:
To be sure, Foucault does not invoke
anxiety in its full Freudian sense, but he implicates anxious emotions
as both motivation and consequence of power and discourse. Even as dis-
course produces power in this formulation, it also evinces the traces of
anxiety. Foucault thus rea rms anxiety as the aective underside of dis-
course and power. Following the logic of Foucaults Freudianism (a seem-
ingly contradictory phrase), discourse implies anxious repression, which,
in turn, becomes the subject rooted out and symptomatically interpreted.
As an e cient term for the productive nature of all that an individual
or society represses, anxiety evokes power projected, experienced, and
embodied. Anxiety, at its richest, therefore, restores to texts political
meanings that may lurk in their margins and lacunae.
If I am correct that anxiety operates as productive repression,
then its usefulness for literary study lies in its shorthand expression of
the motivating aect of discursive production. Tis longstanding use of
anxiety has been generative of keen inquiries into how discourse con-
structs and subsequently attempts to control categories of identity such
as race, gender, and sexuality. To locate disjunctions between the power
of discourse and resistances to it demands a turn to a language outside
its historical moment, one that can reveal the contradictions endemic to
ideology. Anxiety has usefully described just such a disjunction. Te
role anxiety plays as both discursive source and its result, however, com-
plicates literary historicism by resisting causal relationships: Anxiety
stands metonymically for the motivation behind which analysis cannot
go, and it therefore serves as the transcendent cause of cultural produc-
tion. My study claries these psychological stakes of literary historicism
by placing anxiety and the broader theory of the nervous system it
registers as the historical subject of analysis rather than its structuring
frame. By changing focus in this way, I seek to demonstrate how an atten-
tive history of psychology can reveal the various ways writers responded
Introduction ,
to biological embodiment, dreams of emancipation, and concerns about
determinism in their ction, and how they did so by engaging complexly
with pre-Freudian nervous physiology.
What may prove most surprising what is, in other words, hiding
in plain sight is how the nineteenth-century emphasis on nerves and
susceptibility is a deeply somatic and symptomatic rendering of the
relation of self to society and culture. Although the chapters of this book
consider local meanings that the nervous system accrued across a var-
iety of registers, the book as a whole inspects how the nervous system
structured nineteenth-century narratives of national history and social
life. Hawthornes Te House of the Seven Gables usefully illuminates the
role nervousness played in the nineteenth-century historical imagin-
ary. In his second novel, Hawthorne traces the Puritan lineage of the
Pyncheons from the seventeenth-century witchcraft trials in which
the familys progenitor Colonel Pyncheon opportunely used witchcraft
accusations to seize land from his poorer neighbor Matthew Maule to
the Pyncheons of the antebellum United States, including the elderly
Hepzibah, her brother Cliord, and their conniving cousin, Judge Jarey
Pyncheon. A series of characters in the novel refract the contradictions
of antebellum nervousness as a physiological relation to others and to the
environment: Te bell and door of the shop continually smite Hepzibahs
nervous system; Cliord grows pettish and nervously restless when
too long denied Phoebes company; a crowd of children ee the house
after their susceptible nerves take alarm; even the old hen in the garden
has a nervous cluck.
Although Hawthorne continually returns to variations of the word
nervous to describe Hepzibah and Cliord, the character of Judge
Pyncheon best exemplies the nineteenth-century teleology of somatic
nervousness. Te narrator tells us that Phoebe, the Pyncheons sweet
country cousin, briey imagines the judge as the founder of the House
of Seven Gables merely updated by a trimming of the colonels beard, the
purchase of readymade clothes, and the acquisition of a gold-headed cane.
Te narrator demurs from this dressing of the colonel in antebellum con-
sumerism only to oer a physiological (rather than sartorial) dierence
between the colonel and the judge as more accurate: Te long lapse of
intervening years, in a climate so unlike that which had fostered the ances-
tral Englishman, must inevitably have wrought important changes in the
physical system of his descendant, changes that include muscle volume,
weight, complexion, and, [i]f we mistake not, moreover, a certain quality
of nervousness [that] had become more or less manifest, even in so solid
Te Politics of Anxiety :c
a specimen of Puritan descent, as the gentleman now under discussion.
:,

Te narrator dwells on Jarey Pyncheons nervousness, speculating that
as one of its eects, it bestowed on his countenance a quicker mobil-
ity than the old Englishmans had possessed, and keener vivacity, but at
the expense of a sturdier something, on which these acute endowments
seemed to act like dissolving acids, a process that, as it diminishes the
necessity for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us by
rening away our grosser attributes of body.
:c
By describing the mod-
ern, nervous nature of Jarey Pyncheon as simultaneously spiritualizing
our grosser attributes of body while sacricing a sturdier something
of the Puritan past, Hawthorne emphasizes the environmental and social
conditions of the two men. Shaped by his historical situation, the judges
nervousness corresponds to a denitional paradox that had developed by
mid-century. According to An American Dictionary of the English Language
from :,, nervousness had variant, even opposing denitions: the rst,
[s]trength; force; vigor; and another, colloquial one, weakness or agi-
tation of the nerves.
::
Hawthorne seizes on this potential paradox. While
an increase in the nerve force animates and spiritualizes matter, it indi-
cates nonetheless a loss and weakness of the modern body. Even if one is
a gentleman of sturdy nerves as Hawthorne describes the judge later in
the chapter, this characterization always suggests both self-control and
the lurking capacity of the nerves to undermine that control.
::

For antebellum Americans, as for Hawthorne, this newly nervous body
signied not just an unsteady, contradictory modernity; it was uniquely
national. Te historical trajectory Hawthorne sketches, in which the
United States becomes a nation of nerves, depended upon the eighteenth-
century claim that the colonies and the new nation represented a healthy
alternative to the degeneracy of Europe. Benjamin Rush (physician, abol-
itionist, and signer of the Declaration of Independence) was the most
prominent advocate of this theory. In a particularly revealing speech to
the American Philosophical Society on February , :;; on the eve
of the Revolutionary War Rush voices what would become one of the
most enduring tropes in Western psychology. After dispensing with the
diseases endemic to Native Americans (fever and dysentery), Rush turns
to the more complex and provoking nervous illnesses racking the health
of Europeans, represented in his argument by the British. Yet when Rush
shifts to these disorders he does not leave Native Americans behind. As
he describes the vulnerability of the civilized mind to the nervous dis-
orders of hypochondria and hysteria , he asserts, [i]n like manner the
author of nature hath furnished the body with powers to preserve itself
Introduction ::
from its natural enemies; but when it is attacked by those civil foes which
are bred by the peculiar customs of civilization, it resembles a company of
Indians, armed with bows and arrows, against the complicated and deadly
machinery of re arms.
:,
In this tortured analogy, Rush claims that the
body comes naturally prepared to combat physical disease but is inad-
equately equipped to ght nervous disorder. Moreover, by calling nervous
diseases civil foes, Rush invests the metaphor with a political inection.
As civil foes, nervous illnesses attack from internal sources; the body
breeds them. In this passage, Rush stages a metaphor that necessarily
elides white colonists by calling to mind an era of colonial warfare long
distant by :;;: a time when Europeans made their rst inroads into the
Americas and indigenous peoples primarily fought them with bows and
arrows. Yet this elision speaks directly to the political environment in the
years preceding the American Revolution. Te overriding eect of Rushs
metaphor brings clashes between Native Americans and Europeans into a
gurative relationship with the minds of civilized Londoners. Because
the absent center of Rushs argument is the white colonist, the inchoate
nationalism implied in the mirrored relationship between the anachro-
nistically armed gure of the Indian and the civilized, but diseased,
English is that both are on the verge of extinction.
To preserve this image of the newly formed nation as a healthy alter-
native to Europe, Rush elsewhere addresses both the new pathologies he
believes that the revolution unleashed, including the awkwardly named
Revolutiana and Anarchia, and their potential cure in representative
democracy.
:
According to Rush, representative democracy serves like
chimnies [ sic ] in a house, to conduct from the individual and public mind,
all the discontent, vexation, and resentment, which have been generated
in the passions.
:,
By the antebellum period, most physicians were less
sanguine than Rush was about the ability of American political institu-
tions to forge civic health by drawing passions out of the individual and
public mind. Te market revolution and the ascendancy of Jacksonian
democracy during the ::cs and :,cs together fueled the perception that
the United States uniquely produced nervous citizens.
:o
Te drive toward
institutionalization, which increased signicantly the number of insane
asylums in the rst half of the nineteenth century, failed to quell (and
indeed probably increased) the sense that nervousness pervaded society.
:;

By :,c, physician William Sweetser would explain that [t]he eld of
advancement [ ] is alike free to all, our democratical institutions invit-
ing each citizen, however subordinate may be his station, to join in the
pursuit of whatever distinctions our forms of society can bestow. Hence,
Te Politics of Anxiety ::
as might be expected, the demon of unrest, the luckless ospring of ambi-
tion, haunts us all, agitating our breasts with discontent, and racking
us with the constant and wearing anxiety of what we call bettering our
condition.
:
Isaac Ray , a Maine physician and onetime president of the
Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the
Insane, sums up the consequences of these excitements on the nations
citizens: Tose much-enduring men and women who encountered the
privations of the colonial times have been succeeded by a race incapable
of their toil and exposure, whom the winds of heaven cannot visit too
roughly without leaving behind the seeds of dissolution.
:,
In a strange
pronouncement during the Civil War, Ray echoes Hawthornes teleology
of American nervousness, in which Puritan strength gives way to disso-
lute and nervous nineteenth-century citizens. By the time George Miller
Beard coined neurasthenia and S. Weir Mitchell developed the rest cure
in the :cs, nerves not only explained modern selfhood but also shaped
an image of weak and vulnerable citizens populating the United States.
Te Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature shows
how nervousness came to structure cultural expectations, historical nar-
ratives, and political rhetoric in unexpected ways. Form and history oper-
ate conjointly in my study. I read for formal elements across an archive
spanning literature, medicine, politics, and popular culture, dwelling in
particular on the formal aspirations and eects of texts as I put them in
dynamic conversation with each other. Te chapters that follow proceed
chronologically. Tey track the debates about and increasing relevance of
medical professionalism between :,c and :c. Rather than a teleological
history of declension or triumph, though, I examine both the pressures
from within regular medicine and the dreams of alternative interfaces of
medicine and culture that do not get rea rmed in the professional envir-
onment at the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines a
major cultural debate about embodiment and agency and revises familiar
rubrics of nineteenth-century studies including sympathy, domesticity,
and romance in light of pre-Freudian investments in the nervous system.
In turn, the chapters introduce new terms and theories, such as electrical
psychology , that were common enough for antebellum Americans but
have slipped into the historical netherworld since. What emerges from
these foci is the role of embodiment in constructing social, historical,
and, most of all, ctional narratives, and how, when based on assump-
tions about the nervous system, these embodiments exceeded biological
determinism. A paradox, to be sure, but one that allowed writers such as
Harriet Beecher Stowe or Edgar Allan Poe to probe how the open body
Introduction :,
described in nervous physiology challenged and revised widely held but
unevenly examined political and cultural assumptions.
Te rst two chapters demonstrate the impact of nervous physiology on
Jacksonian-era politics, particularly questions sparked by abolitionism and
democracy . Chapter : , A bond-slave to the mind: sympathy and hypo-
chondria in Robert Montgomery Birds Sheppard Lee , introduces readers
to sympathy as a physiological process of the nervous system that unites
the organs of the body. Te medical conception of sympathy oered an
anti-sentimental subject as the pinnacle of health. To understand better
anti-sentimental sympathy, I trace the ctional instantiation of a popu-
lar nervous pathology: hypochondria. Hypochondria was the ironic but
consistent characterization of southern and West Indian slave owners as
suering a disease that, at its most extreme, led people to believe their
bodies were transforming into objects such as teapots. Hypochondriacs
persistently confused their bodies with the world around them, includ-
ing personal possessions and pets, making them analogically related both
to slaves and sentimental readers. In his novel Sheppard Lee; Written by
Himself (:,o), physician and writer Robert Montgomery Bird draws on
hypochondria to lampoon sentimental modes of reading and critique the
language of sympathy deployed during the abolitionist mail campaign
of :,, . To cure such political and ctional sentimentality, Sheppard Lee
suggests, one must keep bodily sympathies and economic speculation
rmly within bounds.
Birds novel is wholly within the Lockean liberal tradition, in which
ownership of the self determines ones relation to society and property.
Edgar Allan Poes skepticism of this tradition colors his use of nervous
physiology for satire. Chapter : , Frogs, dogs, and mobs: reex and dem-
ocracy in Edgar Allan Poes satires, introduces how bodily reexes from
the involuntary movement of limbs to central functions such as respir-
ation became integral to the medical conception of the nervous self in
the :,cs and :cs. I focus rst on the lowliest of animals (the frog) to
consider how studies of amphibian reex functions by British physiolo-
gist Marshall Hall uncovered a seeming paradox about the human body:
sensation without consciousness. Tese reexive, unconscious sensations
accord with Poes eeriest imaginings, from a nervous ape in Te Murders
in the Rue Morgue (::) to a dead man mesmerized and speaking from
beyond the grave in Te Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (:,). Poe,
though, saw more: how reexes challenged the psychological assumptions
of democratic ideals and economic self-possession. Trough interpret-
ations of his political satires, including Some Words with a Mummy
Te Politics of Anxiety :
(:,) and Mellonta Tauta (:,), Chapter : argues that Poe invokes
reexive physiology to satirize the idealizations of self-government and
progress popular with both Young America and the Democratic Party .
Poes barbed commentary and satiric form lay bare the violence lurking
beneath descriptions of progress so popular in the antebellum United
States. Using the reex to critique popular celebrations of progress, Poe
revises the vision of self-emancipation that Bird concludes comically, if
a bit too neatly, in Sheppard Lee .
Tough sympathy and reex were medical concepts familiar to Bird
and Poe respectively, nervous physiology achieved widespread popularity
through practical mesmerism, the public, experimental demonstrations
of trance. By collapsing spirit into matter and exhibiting it with womens
bodies, mesmerists provoked heated attacks from those who sought to pro-
tect domestic ideology. Chapter , , Invasions of privacy: clairvoyance and
utopian failure in antebellum romance, argues that mesmerism was the
cultural site for antebellum Americans apprehension that nervous physi-
ology could not accord with either the passivity assumed of middle-class
womens bodies or the hermetically sealed domain of domesticity that was
the privileged site of those bodies. Nathaniel Hawthornes Veiled Lady in
Te Blithedale Romance (:,:) and George Lippards magnetized women in
Te Quaker City; or, Te Monks of Monk Hall (:,) and Te Memoirs of a
Preacher (:,) occupy an ideological gray area: neither the sexually active
or fully embodied other to the domestic woman nor merely passive
subjects symbolizing the ideals of domestic womanhood. Rather, clair-
voyant and trance subjects were instead working bodies, making visible
the gendered labor of antebellum society, just as Hawthornes Priscilla,
for instance, begins the novel as seamstress and clairvoyant and ends it
as Hollingsworths wife and aective crutch. Mesmerism and domesti-
city were doubly bound to each other: Mesmerists provide a language for
the utopian experiments of the :cs, and both mesmerism and utopian-
ism presented antebellum Americans with spectacles that contravened
middle-class domestic boundaries. It is no surprise, then, that Hawthorne
and Lippard present these two isms together in their romances. In strik-
ingly distinct ways, these writers inspect the radical reconstructions of
domesticity at work in the :cs through versions of romance that are
explicitly in conversation with the mesmeric culture of the decade.
Te nal two chapters argue that the nervous physiology popularized
by mesmerists provided a new neurological vision of the self that reinvig-
orated the spiritual and political engagements of mid-century Protestant
Americans. Chapter , All that is enthusiastic: revival and reform in
Introduction :,
Harriet Beecher Stowes Dred , inspects the relationship between revival-
ism and anti-slavery politics in Stowes second anti-slavery novel, Dred:
A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (:,o), written amid the militancy and
violence sparked by the :, KansasNebraska Act . Whereas in Uncle
Toms Cabin (:,:) Stowe sought to represent slavery (what she called
life among the lowly in the novels subtitle) through a realistic, albeit
sentimental , narrative voice, Dred represents a formal shift modeled on
the nervous pathology of religious enthusiasm. By the early nineteenth
century, physicians categorized such enthusiasm on display at revivals
as a nervous aection marked by symptoms such as crying, laughing,
contorting, groaning, and fainting. Anti-abolitionists borrowed these
characterizations to satirize northern abolitionists , particularly after Nat
Turners Southampton Insurrection and the :,, abolitionist mail cam-
paign . In the wake of both, many abolitionists increasingly claimed to
represent slavery as it is, thereby tying emotional appeals to verisimili-
tude. In doing so, they asserted an inextricable relation between realism
and the success of their political aims. By revisiting what she calls the
poetic possibilities of religious enthusiasm, Stowe explicitly forms Dred
into a romantic narrative that imagines the dialectics of the nervous sys-
tem the movement in and out of nervous states as a prerequisite
for political change. Yet Dred also testies to Stowes ambivalence about
violence. Stowe seeks to embrace the promise of nervous physiology but
remove it from the violence inherent in emancipation that both Bird and
Poe addressed as its potentially unavoidable supplement .
In the rst two decades after the Civil War, the promise of the ner-
vous body as a means for reform deated considerably, changing not just
claims people made about the body but also constricting what had been a
dynamic relation between politics, faith, and medicine. Late nineteenth-
century neurologists sought to delineate a boundary between their sci-
entic work and the nave and common theories of the nerves alive
in mesmerism and spiritualism . Chapter , , Cui bono ?: spiritualism and
empiricism from the Civil War to American Nervousness , uncovers a con-
test between spiritualism (communication with the dead through the
nervous electricity of the body) and neurology over what counted as the
real. Unable to answer the question of the social worth of spiritualism,
spiritualists increasingly argued that the worth of spirit communication
was its science. Tis chapter reads a popular but now obscure spiritualist
novel by journalist Epes Sargent, Peculiar; A Tale of the Great Transition
(:o), as a reection of the changing claims of realism during the decades
of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In both Peculiar and his defenses
Te Politics of Anxiety :o
of spiritualism after the Civil War, Sargent contends that there is empiri-
cal proof of the afterlife, thereby making a case for the real that would
encompass the experiences and observations of those at sances as well
as those on the battleeld. Yet even as spiritualists such as Sargent struc-
tured their ctions of contact beyond death through formal appeals to
empiricism, neurologists, and in particular George Miller Beard , author
of American Nervousness (::), questioned what they saw as nave empiri-
cism. Tey presented instead the nervous self as profoundly social but
best treated by experts trained in neurology. Te chapter ends by explor-
ing Elizabeth Stuart Phelpss challenge to Beards neurology in her wildly
popular novels on the afterlife, the Gates Ajar series .
Te Epilogue of the book, Te condences of anxiety, culminates
this history of nerves and nineteenth-century culture by turning to
William James , a gure whose fascination with these topics can be seen
both as an endpoint for the narrative and a reminder that the contests
over the embodied mind and open body never ended, even after medical
professionals sought to restrict debate to experts. Te conclusion addresses
the investments evoked by the language of nerves in contemporary liter-
ary scholarship through Jamess thoughts on spiritualism . How do the
physiological twists of nineteenth-century nerves speak to assumptions
about psychology and aect in current literary scholarship, as they did to
medical and spiritualist methodology in the nineteenth century? What
is the methodological relation between science, history, and literature?
What role does aect play in shaping methodological choices, and why
has it taken on a new urgency now? Te following chapters provoke such
questions, and the Epilogue, in turn, examines methodology in light of
the local and somatic meanings generated by nineteenth-century nerves.


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Because both body and

Medical contest, from both within the pro-

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