num_pages: 216
description: Coale explores the profound influence that the mesmerist andspiritualist 'craze' of the 1840s and 1850s had on Hawthorne's artisticvision and fictional techniques. Nathaniel Hawthorne despised both mesmerism and spiritualism, viewingthese pseudosciences as new incarnations of witchcraft, in which the master-slaverelationship overwhelms all others. Nevertheless, even though he regardedthe psychological paradigm behind these pseudosciences as morally repellent,he also, as Samuel Chase Coale convincingly shows, recognized its accuracy.  In creating what he called romances, Hawthorne employed his own mesmerist-likestrategies and thus created texts that participate in the very medium heabhorred. In effect, Coale concludes, Hawthorne's romances constitute aform of mesmeric expression themselves. Coale's examination of the processesof mesmerism- the creation of the trance, the entry into its dreamlikestate, the psychology of idolatry produced by this procedure- clearly revealsthe affinities between mesmerism and Hawthorne's art. 
language: English
title: Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance
titlecomplete: Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance
ratings_count: 2
publisher: University Alabama Press