Whenever I re-read Poe’s “Mesmeric Revelation,” I am always most fascinated by the response that the piece excited in the minds of nineteenth-century readers. Poe was gifted at working contemporary themes (especially scientific themes) into the fabric of cultural conversation. But this story and Poe’s later tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” are unique in that they elicited controversy over the difference between truth and fiction and between scientific evidence and scientific observation and experimentation.

For those of you that did not get to make it to our meeting on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, I handed out my “cheat sheet” for all you need to know about the place of mesmerism at the time Poe published “Mesmeric Revelation” in The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in August 1844. Since the time that Franz Anton Mesmer published his treatise on “Animal Magnetism” in 1779, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, there was controversy over his theories. In 1784, King Louis XIV established a royal commission on Mesmer’s theory of magnetism, as reported by his followers. The panel consisted of four men from the French academy of medicine and five men from the Royal Academy of Sciences (one of who was the then American ambassador to France Benjamin Franklin). The commission declared that there was no evidence to support the claims made by Mesmer and his followers, but their unfavorable verdict did nothing to stem the growing numbers of men and women who believed in the truth of Mesmeric theory.
Taking into account this history of the skepticism of magnetism, “Mesmeric Revelation” evokes the question of truth and evidence. As public interest in sciences of the mind increased in the nineteenth-century, there was an undercurrent of literature (fictional and non-fictional) that questioned definitions of science, rational inquiry, and scientific space. The question that I find is most apparent in “Mesmeric Revelation” is how scientific trends like mesmerism can objectively explore spaces that are defined by individual experience, not concrete evidence. The text illustrates a dissatisfaction that questions remain unanswered in an era when science is quickly “discovering” and “explaining” all phenomena, seen and unseen. Mr. Vankirk appeals to the narrator of the tale, sharing with him his own inability to accept the answers, “the mere abstractions,” of metaphysical inquiry that philosophers have given the world in an age of scientific reason: “In short, I was not long in perceiving that 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 on the mind” (403). How do we move from the philosophizing upon the unknowns of existence (in this story death) to methodically unmasking its mysteries?
This inquiry is the basis of the story, as the unnamed physician “P” questions his mesmerized patient Mr. Vankirk about his experience in a suspension between mental states, about his observations as a “sleep-waker” (405). As Laura Otis notes in her introduction to the unit of “Sciences of the Mind”: “When literary writers use the same kind of detail [as writers of non-fiction], they sometimes convinced readers their imaginary patients were real. With its scientific references and suspenseful dialogue between mesmerist and subject, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ appears to be an actual case history” (Otis 329).

The language that Poe employed in the many versions of the story was not the only contributing factor to the reading public’s confusion over whether “Mesmeric Revelation” was fictional or case history. When the story first appeared in The Columbian, it was in the August 1844 issue—an issue comprised of eleven poems and ten prose works. Of these prose works, one piece is historical (“Charlemagne and Hildegarde”) and another piece is the fourth installment in a travel serial narrative (“Recollections of China”). There are other characteristics that indicate the status of the prose as fiction or non-fiction; for instance, one piece is has the prefatory tag “a tale” while another has “a sketch.” But the remaining six prose works in the issue are ambiguous in terms of genre. Thus, the first readers of “Mesmeric Revelation” were not able to judge what the story was in context of the works that surrounded it.

To further blur the lines between fact and fiction, the story was reprinted and reintroduced to American and British readers in magazines and journals that were literary, scientific, and religious publications. Some editors prefaced the tale with an acknowledgement of its truth (as in the September 1845 issue of the American Phrenological Journal), others denied that the piece was a recollection of an mesmeric experiment, and many journals (like The New World) chose to reprint the story without any introduction or with a preface that deemed not to judge the veracity of the tale.

Poe remained quiet during most of the debate over “Mesmeric Revelation.” Inquiring editors either received no answer to their letters or received a reply that could be read as either an affirmation or a denial of the “truth” of the story.

Some Notes:
1. Jerrell had asked in class what I thought about the opening sentence of the story (“Whatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted”). I have found that sentences like this one are common in Poe’s fiction dealing with “scientific” topics of his era. As a poet with a natural tendency to question the inner-workings of the human mind, Poe perhaps distrusted the ease by which phrenologists and mesmerists could penetrate the mysteries of the mind. In March 1836, Poe reviewed a book by a Mrs. Miles entitled, Phrenology, and the Moral Influences of Phrenology: Arranged for General Study, and the Purposes of Education in the Southern Literary Journal. Poe uses a very similar phrase to the opening sentence in “Memsmeric Revelation.” He writes, “Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at. It—is no longer to be laughed at by men of common understanding.”

2. An interesting side-note about Poe and the popular sciences of the mind: Poe was even the subject of phrenologists’ interest at one time. In a letter to his friend Frederick William Thomas dated October 1841, Poe remarks, “Speaking of heads--my own has been examined by several phrenologists--all of whom spoke of me in a species of extravaganza which I should be ashamed to repeat” (“E. A. Poe to F. W. Thomas”).

3. I have no idea which version of Poe’s story Otis is using for the text of the story. For a variety of versions of “Mesmeric Revelation” published in journals and magazines (some have long passages that you will not find in printed collections of his work), visit http://eapoe.org/works/info/pt052.htm