Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, The

College Literature, Oct 1996 by Lowenthal, Cynthia

Terry Castle. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. $35.00 hc. $16.95 sc. 278 pp.

Castle writes that "the crucial essay" in this volume is not to be found in its table of contents. The essay that "haunts" her collection is Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny," a 1919 "meditation on the problem of the enlightenment" (3). Freud's central insight there-"that it is precisely the historic internalization of rationalist protocols that produced the uncanny" (l5-drives Castle's analyses, and thus she predicates her work on the following assumption: "the more we seek enlightenment, the more alienating our world becomes; the more we seek to free ourselves, Houdini-like, from the coils of superstitions, mystery, and magic, the more tightly, paradoxically, the uncanny hold us in its grip" (15).

And the subjects of her essays prove that very point. She admits that her essays "revel in the morbid, the excessive, and the strange," in prophetic dreams, disguises, detached body parts, optical illusions, and corpses-all elements once assumed to lie outside the acceptable bounds of "The Age of Reason." But as her work shows, the uncanny actually originates during the Enlightenment, at a particular moment in history; the eighteenth century, as her title suggests, "invents" the uncanny: "the very psychic and cultural transformation that led to the subsequent glorification of the period as an age of reason or enlightenment-the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch-also produced, like a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse" (8).

This premise leads her to examine a host of eighteenth-century literature and phenomena in essays collected under the rubric of "the uncanny" but published separately over the last fifteen years in ELH, PMLA, Journal of Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Most of the essays individually remain fresh and fascinating; some, as one might expect, have stood the test of time less well than others. But all maintain the extraordinarily high standards one has come to expect from Castle's already impressive body of work.

One of the most fascinating essays in the collection is the second, "The Female Thermometer"or, the history of the weatherglass. In a rich and historically grounded analysis, Castle focuses on the barometer as "the perfect emblem of the emotionally volatile human subject that began to emerge, definitively, in the late eighteenth century" (42). In the third through the seventh chapters, Castle takes on a range of subjects. "Amy, Who Know My Disease" (1979) is an examination of the perverse mother/daughter relationships that Defoe's sets up in Roxanna; "Matters not Fit to be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband" (1982) argues that Fielding was both powerfully attracted to and repelled by the figure of the spectacularly successful cross-dressing woman, Mary Hamilton-a female transvestite tried and convicted for marrying another woman while in disguise. "Lovelace's Dream" (1984) examines Lovelace's scheme to allow Clarissa to escape only as a means of capturing, and torturing, her again. Castle concludes that "it is [Clarissa's] very flight from Lovelace that makes possible her final entrapment by Richardson. For he is now free to do with her what he has "plotted" all along-that is, transform her into his exemplary Christian heroine" (64). Two essays, "The Culture of Travesty: Sexuality and Masquerade in Eighteenth-Century England" and "The Carnivalization of EighteenthCentury English Narrative" are written in the same vein and spirit as Castle's awardwinning Masquerade and Civilization. All of these essays display both the benefits and the drawbacks of Castle's decision to collect essays published over the last fifteen years linked thematically by the uncanny: each essay is compelling in its own right, but none displays a particularly intimate connection to the uncanny, and some are more current than others.

In the last four chapters, concerned with ghosts of every variety, Castle's claims about the uncanny are more forceful and more intimately connected to her overall thesis. Each essay works from precisely the same premise: enlightenment science and technologies produced ghosts that moved inward-to inhabit the psyches of postenlightenment minds. In "The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho," Castle argues that the supernatural is rerouted into the realm of the everyday through memory where one dwells with the spirits of the dead; thus to be a Radcliffian hero or heroine is to be haunted, even to become ghostly oneself (12324). In "Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Castle examines the "ghost-shows" of eighteenth century Europe, public entertainments that produced "specters" through the use of magic lanterns as attempts at scientific demystification of the supernatural. The experiments produced the opposite effect: "The mind became a phantom-zone-given over, at least potentially, to spectral presence and haunting obsessions" (144). "Spectral Politics: Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination" traces the processes by which reverie came to be seen as a dangerous activity and the imagination was figured as a capricious tyrant; in the end, "the act of thinking had to be regulated" (175). The final essay, "Contagious Folly: An Adventure and Its Skeptics," is one of the most interesting-even though it has little to do with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Castle examines the problem of the shared or collective hallucination, the folie a deux in this case, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain's shared experience with the "ghosts of Versailles." Castle uses this example to illustrate the impasse into which skepticism leads: "it becomes impossible to distinguish so-called normal collective convictions from pathological ones" (214); the political result was that folly was transformed into ideology.