Hypnaesthesis argues for understanding somnambulism, nightmare, and insomnia as aesthetic categories in the gothic and dark romantic traditions of antebellum American literature that provide critical insights into the experiential costs of the exhortations to normative vigilance prevalent in the American Enlightenment. During this period unceasing vigilance became the watchword for liberty as the Lockean conception of the self, understood as dependent on waking consciousness, fused with Protestant and Enlightenment ideas about salvation, productivity, and freedom to form the philosophical and political core of American identity. By exploring the nocturnal territory of thought through aesthetic experience in the works of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, I show how American literature provides alternative paths for post-enlightenment thinking, introducing sleep as a fundamental problem for reimagining subjectivity and collectivity. Beginning with the category of somnambulism in Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), I show how an emergent medico-literary understanding of the nervous self in the eighteenth century provided an opening for identifying a novel form of sharedness in the pre-subjective affect that I call somnipathy, adapting the nineteenth-century definition of this term from Noah Webster’s 1848 American Dictionary of the English Language: “sleep from sympathy, or by the process of mesmerism.” The interconnected sense of life arising from somnipathy established the foundation, in my account, for the aesthetic category of nightmare developed in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) by Robert Macnish, who later created an hypnotic formula for inducing the feeling of horror specific to nightmare in fiction. Under the influence of Macnish’s short stories for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Poe pushed nightmare experience to its natural limit with his ontological portrait of insomnia in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), somnipathically conveying the crushing sense of isolation and despair arising from a society that systematically denies the necessity of sleep. I conclude with an analysis of Melville’s theorization of the sleep drive as a political problem in Moby-Dick (1851) and “Bartleby” (1853), revealing how a critical interpretation of insomnia and nightmare phenomena may give rise to the perception of the necessity of sleep as a common right belonging to each (political) animal.

Creator

• Hengstebeck, Eric

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-qrce-0x37

Subject

• American literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15381
• etdadmin_upload_779884

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright