Frank Norris, market panic, and the mesmeric sublime

American Literature

Volumn 75, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 61-90

  Zimmerman, David A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849276389     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-75-1-61     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Hamlin Garland, The Shadow World (New York: Harper, 1908), 138
2. On the sublime and its manifold expressions, effects, and ideological uses in American literature, see Mary Arsenberg, ed., The American Sublime (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1986)
3. Joanne Feit Diehl, Women Poets and the American Sublime (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990)
4. Rob Wilson, The American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
5. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994)
6. Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995)
7. Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995)
8. and Christophe Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1998)
9. and Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985)
10. For an overview and analysis of American theoretical discussion of the sublime since Weiskel, see Martin Donougho, "Stages of the Sublime in North America," MLN 115 (December 2000): 909-40
11. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976)
12. Frank Norris, "Inside an Organ," The Wave, 2 January 1897, 9; further quotations will be cited parenthetically as "IO."
13. see also "The Novel with a Purpose," Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, 1197-98)
14. John Philip Sousa, quoted in Craig H. Roell, The Piano in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 54
15. Norris, "The Mechanics of Fiction," 1163
16. See Bernard de Fontenelle, A Plurality of Worlds, trans. John Glanvill (London: Nonesuch, 1929), 15,17. I thank Michael Perelman for pointing me to de Fontenelle as the source of Smith's trope
17. See my "The Mesmeric Sources of Frank Norris's The Pit," Frank Norris Studies 26 (autumn 1998): 1-4
18. For dated but still useful surveys of mesmerism's and hypnotism's varied expressions and uses by American writers in the nineteenth century, see Howard Kerr, Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850-1900 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1972)
19. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies in Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), 189-269
20. On the political, racial, and economic work of such expressions, see Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2001), 101-203
21. Cynthia D. Schräger, "Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race," in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1997), 307-29
22. Cynthia D. Schräger, "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W. E. B. Du Bois," American Quarterly 48 (December 1996): 551-86
23. Cynthia D. Schräger, "Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy: Gendering the Transpersonal Subject," American Literature 70 (March 1998): 29-62
24. Christophe Den Tandt, The Urban Sublime, 151-85
25. and Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 63-132
26. and Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 119-40, 170-91
27. See, for example, Barbara Hochman, The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1988), 108
28. and Horwitz, '"To Find The Value of X,'" 162
29. On the explosion of interest in multiple personality around this time, see Nathan G. Hale, introduction to Morton Prince, Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975)
30. On the prevailing symptomatology of hysteria and its association with a resistant femininity, see Carrol Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 197-216
31. See Morton Prince, "Some of the Revelations of Hypnotism: Posthypnotic Suggestion, Automatic Writing, and Double Personality," Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality: Selected Essays, ed. Nathan G. Hale (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 52
32. Frederic W. H. Myers, "The Subliminal Consciousness," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 9, 1893-94 (London: Kegan Paul, 1894), 5
33. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication," in Studies on Hysteria, Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1964), 2:12
34. On the relation between hysteria and hypnotism in early clinical discourse, see Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), 221-56
35. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 53-181
36. Hippolyte Bernheim, Automatisme et Suggestion (Paris: Alcan, 1917), 49
37. Boris Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion (New York: Appleton, 1919), 327; further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as PS
38. On hypnotic suggestion and the origins of crowd psychology, see Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871-1899 (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 116-18, 131, 142-49, 188-203
39. and Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 114-36
40. See Ann Fabian, "Speculation on Distress: The Popular Discourse of the Panics of 1837 and 1857," Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (fall 1989): 127-42
41. John Mills, "On Credit Cycles and the Origin of Panics," Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society, Session 1867-68 (Manchester, Eng: Manchester Statistical Society), 17
42. Edward D. Jones, Economic Crises (London: Macmillan, 1900), 207,181
43. G. T. W. Patrick, "The Psychology of Crazes," Popular Science Monthly, July 1900, 292
44. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960), 35-36
45. and Charles L. Crow, "The Real Vanamee and His Influence on Frank Norris's The Octopus," Western American Literature 9 (March 1987): 131-39
46. B. O. Flower, "The Battle of Privilege against Democratic Government," Arena, April 1908, 485
47. see Alfred O. Crozier, The Magnet: A Romance of the Battles of Modern Giants (New York: Funk, 1908), 44
48. On New Thought economics and success writing in the nineteenth century, see Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 124-76
49. GailThain Parker, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil War to World War I (Hanover, NH.: Univ. Press of New England, 1973)
50. Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers (New York: Doubleday, 1965)
51. Prentice Mulford, Your Forces and How to Use Them, 2 vols. (Wimbledon, Eng: Anglo-American, 1908), 2:151
52. See Frank C. Haddock, Business Power: A Practical Manual in Financial Ability (Meridian, Conn.: Pelton, 1919), 166
53. On attitudes toward spiritualist and psychic mediumship in nineteenth-century America, see Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)
54. and R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977)
55. Frederic W. H. Meyers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Chatte, 1907), 127
56. Frank C. Haddock, The Personal Atmosphere (Meriden, Conn.: Pelton, 1916), 5
57. Elizabeth Towne, Practical Methods for Self-Development (Holy-oke: Towne, 1904), 42
58. Thomson Jay Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893; Chicago: McClurg, 1910), 25
59. R. Osgood Mason, Telepathy and the Subliminal Mind (New York: Henry Holt, 1899), 152
60. Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Library of America, 1991), 68
61. Ernest Hart, Hypnotism, Mesmerism, and the New Witchcraft, 2d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1896), 209-10
62. George Du Maurier, Trilby (London: Collins, 1953), 315
63. On Charcot as an artistfigure and disciplinarian of hysteria's anarchic significations, see Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 91-106
64. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 326-27
65. On the effects of such troubling in late nineteenth-century literature, see Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850-1915 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins kins Univ. Press, 1995)
66. Janet Beizer, Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994)
67. Elin Diamond, "Realism and Hysteria: Toward a Feminist Mimesis," Discourse 13 (fall-winter 1990/1991): 59-92
68. Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), 46-56, 103-66
69. Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 40-67
70. and Nye, American Technological Sublime, 109-42
71. Alfred Binet, "The Role of Suggestion on Phenomena of Double Consciousness," in On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies/ By Alfred Binet, ed. Daniel N. Robinson (Washington, D.C: University Publications of America, 1977), 73
72. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: Appleton, 1895), 26
73. William Hirsch, "Epidemics of Hysteria," Popular Science Monthly, August 1896, 549
74. Pierre Janet, quoted in Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), 213
75. B. W. Richardson, "The Hypnotic Epidemic," Asclepiad 7 (1890): 122
76. Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London: Paul, Trench, 1906), 92
77. For a summary of the American reception and development of early crowd psychology, see van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 224-27
78. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1962), 77 (a reprint of the 1903 translation from the second French edition by Elsie Clews Parson)
79. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 95
80. Jones, Economic Crises, 204-5
81. On Laura's and Jadwin's distinct but equally doomed strategies for achieving a stable sense of self protected from internal and external flux, see Hochman, The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller, 99-125. For Hochman, Laura's self-division represents the split between her identity before and after her marriage
82. See Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire, 169-70
83. For other accounts of the relation between hysteria, self-division, embodiment, and the market, see Brown's analysis of work and mesmerism in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, in Domestic Individualism, 63-95