Fantastic Evidence: Mesmerism, Narrative, and Knowledge in the Heterodox Victorian Novel
Open AccessAbstract of DissertationFantastic Evidence: Mesmerism, Narrative, and Knowledge in the Heterodox Victorian Novel This dissertation explores the effect of mesmerism on the development of the Victorian novel. In literature, mesmerism’s presence creates a moment of fantastic hesitation, where the readers cannot be certain how to correctly interpret the meaning of the events, by destabilizing knowledge categories such as evident and factual, true and false. Thus these narratives are often unable to reach a definitive conclusion, and the readers must determine the text’s meaning for themselves. I argue that this characterizes a unique literary genealogy, the heterodox novel, which responded to the realist novel through its aesthetic project of indeterminacy and relativity, challenging the objectivity of scientific knowledge and the concept of absolute truth. Chapter One focuses on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s metaphysical novel A Strange Story (1862) to demonstrate how mesmerism’s epistemological instability thwarts Bulwer’s intention of establishing a priori over a posteriori knowledge. In Chapter Two I examine four novels by Wilkie Collins, spanning his career from 1852 to 1876. I argue that his heavily plotted novels, diverse narrative structures, and preoccupation with fate and destiny comprise an aesthetic mode of challenging the means of representation of the realist novel. In Chapter Three I focus on Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) as representative of the tension in Gothic novels between the desire to know and confrontation with the unknowable. In my fourth chapter, I trace the development of the detective novel over the second half of the nineteenth century to show how the presence of the heterodox influenced the detective’s ability to successfully solve crimes.
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