Embodied Belief--Poe's "Mesmeric Revelation"

To some extent, all of our readings for today deal with the permeable boundary between body and mind, and they seem more specifically to negotiate how human “embodiedness” impacts what is seen as the more immaterial aspects of humanity. How does the body influence a person’s immaterial soul, volition, convictions, identity, or “ego” (as at least two of our writers for today put it)? These immaterial parts of the mind/body dichotomy not only determine for these writers what it means to be human as opposed to another species, but also what it means to be a particular human—an individual with an identity that distinguishes a person from all others.

For this blog, I want to take a look how the body is involved in a particular function of the mind in Poe’s “Mesmeric Revelation”: the mental act of belief. Where does this story suggest doubt—and its counterpart, conviction—reside? Poe’s mesmerism patient, Mr. Vankirk, speaks to the story’s narrator about recent changes regarding his doubts about the existence of the human soul. Vankirk says that all along he has felt “a vague, half-sentiment” of his soul’s existence, but that this feeling never amounted to a full, which is to say intellectual, “conviction” (403). Conviction for Mr. Vankirk is a faculty of the mind, but he nevertheless finds himself feeling something related to the existence of a soul, and that feeling seems to originate in his body as a “sentiment.” The patient reports his “symptoms” in terms that put feeling and belief in opposition to one another, stating that lately “there has been a certain deepening of feeling, until it has come so nearly to resemble the acquiescence of reason, that I find it difficult to distinguish between the two” (403, emphasis added). Vankirk then self-diagnoses, attributing this permeability between his body and mind to “mesmeric influences” (403).

While Vankirk maintains a mind-body dualism when he speaks of conviction as a faculty belonging to the mind, the feeling he has experienced, like the effect of mesmerism on bodily pain, seems to impact his belief in a way that is more… well, convincing… than previous mental efforts to arrive at that same conviction. Indeed, he has been unable to resolve his doubts through conventional methods of reasoning, and concludes that such efforts are misguided: “if man is to be intellectually convinced of his own immortality, he will never be so convinced by the mere abstractions which have been so long the fashion of the moralists of England, of France and of Germany. Abstractions may amuse and exercise, but take no hold upon the mind” (403).

I would argue that it is the mesmerism in which he is involved that has prepared Mr. Vankirk to come to this conclusion. If the body’s pain responds better to mental therapy than to medicine or other bodily forms of treatment, then why might the reverse not also be true: that belief, traditionally thought of as under the jurisdiction of reason, is more influenced by the body than by the abstract reasoning of the philosophers and theologians.

So, in addition to exploring the permeability between the mind and body regarding a person’s identity, could this story also be commenting on traditional methods of religious indoctrination through catechism, philosophical argumentation, and apologetics? Is Poe’s story sympathetic towards the more (American) Pentecostal methods of conversion—enacted in countless revivals throughout nineteenth-century America—that favored a more intuitive and emotional brand of faith, often embodied in ecstatic physical gestures? Or perhaps Poe is exploring more broadly what it means to have, instead of an intellectual conviction, a spiritual experience—the varieties of which another of our authors, William James, would explore in his research and writings of the latter part of the century.

A final thought to ponder. Given the various philosophical views in the nineteenth century on the source of an individual’s identity, what is gained—and what is lost—when belief is detached from the realm of the mind and becomes embodied? If belief (and other functions of the mind like volition and even identity) is imagined not as under the jurisdiction of the intellect only, but as also belonging in some sense to the realm of the body, what happens to identity when an individual body is mutable—as they certainly are in the other stories we read for today—not just growing and dying, but subject to injury, mutilation, and deformity?

--Beth