| In the latter half of the 19th century, amid anxieties regarding degeneration and "race suicide," scientists studied evolution, heredity, and the newly "discovered" unconscious mind, hoping to improve the health and quality of American children. Modern Spiritualism, mesmerism, and other occult sciences offered discourses and a set of subjects that furthered those projects and helped launch emerging disciplines like psychology, child development, and eugenics. Studying both formal properties and historical contexts, and with an interdisciplinary focus on law, medicine, and popular culture, I read Hawthorne's 1852 The Blithedale Romance and five novels that reprise Blithedale's motifs. I argue that, in restoring the Spiritualist medium to the function of mother, these works authorize incipient State and civil experts to protect the white maternal body---and, hence, a particular construction of the republic---from alien-nation and decay. Reining in these mediums also serves the male authors' respective struggles in a feminine literary market. The texts I study figure female sympathy and generic conventions as "mediums" too easily exploited and in need of rational, though benevolent, masculine discipline. In fiction by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Richard Harding Davis, the matrifocal values that empower Stowe's mothers as agents of reform here render women unsuited for self-rule: embodied in the heroine, sympathy becomes gullibility, self-sacrifice becomes culpability, sensitivity becomes nervous exhaustion or hysteria, and the mimetic properties of the feminine imagination, once associated with intuited truths, become the aliment of illness. In contrast to Spiritualists' claims regarding the veracity and self-sovereignty of mediums, in these works the medium is a dupe or charlatan. Because her testimony cannot be trusted, her body, unencumbered by language or will, constitutes the focus of expert examination, a move that enhances the prestige of professionals particularly in medicine as nativism and white demand for segregation increased at the end of the century. Perceived connections among unstable subjectivities, the ostensibly disease-prone female body, and a shifting social "physiology" likewise promoted a "clinical gaze" in literature where white professionals, usually male, become the arbiters of evidence. |
