States of Insensibility: The Uncommon Sense of Perceptual Disorders in Antebellum Literature and Medicine
Open Access
- Author:
- Vallee, Eric James
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 26, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Christopher Dean Castiglia, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher Dean Castiglia, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Carla Mulford Conklin, Committee Member
Hester Maureen Blum, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Outside Member - Keywords:
- American Literature
African American Literature
Disability Studies
Literature and Science
History of Medicine
Insensibility
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Martin Delany
Oliver Wendell Holmes - Abstract:
- States of Insensibility examines treatments of sensory disorders from the late 1840s to the early 1860s by writers working both in medicine and fiction. Classified within several pathologies including dissociation, insensibility, and fascination, sensory disorders constituted the delusional failure to register experience recognized by others as real. Because these pathologies were understood as both epistemic and moral failures, treatment methods and representational strategies held particular significance for mid-nineteenth century approaches to embodiment and empiricism. Pathologies of the senses presented a critical challenge to the social work of sensibility, undercutting its egalitarian aims and calling attention to forms of subjugation according to race, gender, class, and disability. Originating in eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophy, sensibility signified both a physiological principle and moral philosophy that channeled individual sensitivities to the external environment toward non-hierarchical social attachments. As it was leveraged in medical discourse of mental health and social reform during the mid-nineteenth century, however, sensibility was both proscriptive and prescriptive, inscribing boundaries for social participation not only through sympathetic attachment but according to perceptive capacity. Whose subjective experience counted as real depended upon the social and cultural politics of the time, particularly as they were indexed by normative hierarchies of embodiment. The inscription of insensibility thus represented a more fundamental disavowal of the experience of subjugated populations, not only denying their participation within communal fellow-feeling, but disclaiming the factuality of their experience. While sensibility regulated social participation according to the perceived sensory capacities of different individuals, my argument is that sensory disorders did not function solely as negations of individual experience, but were treated by authors and medical practitioners including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin R. Delany, and Oliver Wendell Holmes as productive sources of what I term “uncommon sense.” As I define it, “uncommon sense” signifies both a variety of sensory capacities that exceed or disrupt the normative function of sensibility as well as endeavors by authors and physicians to treat sensory disorders as alternative foundations for resituating approaches to the socially constructed environment. In focusing on mid-nineteenth century treatments of sensory disorders, States of Insensibility builds upon recent work recovering the complexity of antebellum materialist approaches to embodied cognition, a distributive model of agency circulated throughout the material connections among individuals and their historically situated environments. Insensibility offered a framework for negotiating how and why the experience of those excluded from the bonds of sensibility mattered. Hawthorne’s critical engagement with the proprietary gender politics of associationism, Delany’s telegraphic mode of racial sensibility, and Holmes’s relational approach to adaptation and disability each sought to resituate the material conditions understood as disqualifying populations from political participation as sources for gathering together alternative representational practices and communal configurations.