The Specter of Insanity: Hallucination, Revelation, and Medicine in the Modern British Ghost Story (1869-1925)
Creators: name: Maloney, Erik
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2016

description: In the pages that follow, I argue that some of the most notable practitioners of the modern ghost story engaged the problem of hallucination in their works for reasons that cannot be reduced to the question of literary aesthetics or form. The three authors at the center of this study—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Montague Rhodes James, and Arthur Machen—were, in various ways, deeply invested in the epistemological, theological, and scientific questions raised by ongoing efforts to account for hallucinations and ghosts. While these writers obviously exploited to chilling aesthetic effect the aporias and cultural tensions that had long attended ghostly and hallucinatory visions, their works also evince a keen interest in the intellectual and social stakes that continued to render the explanation of these phenomena controversial, in both religious and scientific spheres of
knowledge-production. To be more precise, the ghost stories of Le Fanu, James, and Machen share a common interest in the social repercussions of medicine’s increasingly bold claims to explanatory authority in matters related to hauntings, hallucinations, and mystical visions. The doctor-patient relationship is the archetypal dynamic through which these authors grapple with the implications of medicine’s ongoing struggle to offer definitive explanations for visionary phenomena that had formerly been the purview of theologians (and that somehow continued to evade its grasp). The standard scenario involves a doctor called to attend a patient who is suffering the negative effects of what is either a hallucination or a ghostly haunting. Often, the physician enters this scene as an egomaniacal pretender to theological or priestly authority who proves far more interested in reinforcing his existing philosophies about the natural (and supernatural) world than in actually alleviating the suffering of those who have been placed under his care. At other junctures, the physician embodies the pernicious, disciplinary dimension of medicine— and the fear that perceived psychopathology will result in social stigma or institutionalization. If they are lucky, the patients of these fictional doctors will be issued a genteel (but useless) prescription of confinement to the home, or perhaps a restorative sojourn to the seaside. Much bleaker outcomes are, however, far more common. This emphasis on the pain, despair, and terror of the patient—usually an upper-class male— points to the therapeutic void that will eventually be occupied by the fields of psychology and psychiatry. While the ghost story is commonly thought of as a genre that opportunistically exploits cultural anxieties to sensationalist ends, this cannot be said of the fiction of Le Fanu, James, and Machen, which—with insight, compassion, and, occasionally, humor—probe the gap between medicine’s pretensions to knowledge and its actual capacity to understand and to treat those suffering from mental illness.