Mysteries of Mesmerism

Abstract Nathaniel Hawthorne despised and feared mesmerism, the process in which a practitioner hypnotized his subject and put her into a trance. He found it morally and philosophically regnant, since in his view the mesmerist could violate an individual consciousness and soul and gain power over his victim. At the same time, he recognized that the process was probably physiologically and psychologically sound. It worked. The master could manipulate his slave. Hawthorne used this mysterious force to describe the way the artist works upon a readerߣs consciousness. His own fictional technique emulated that process. The kind of fiction he called “romance,” in his view, was essentially a mesmeric text that hovered between our recognizable daily and social world and the more phantasmagoric realm of our dreams. Despising the force, he yet recognized its true power and was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by it.