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Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, by Alison Winter; pp. xiv + 464. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, $30.00, 23.95.
Alison Winter's Mesmerized is a tour de force which not only establishes the ubiquitous status of Victorian mesmerism but also convincingly demonstrates its pivotal role in midVictorian struggles over professional, intellectual, and cultural authority. This lavishly illustrated and exhaustively researched study builds on previous work on Victorian socalled "fringe" or "pseudo-" science but pushes much further in arguing for the centrality of mesmerism to Victorian culture. In so doing, Winter forces a reevaluation of precisely what constituted "center" and "margin" during a period in which many Victorian intellectuals and public figures experimented with mesmerism, and the boundaries of scientific and medical orthodoxy were not yet clearly established. Indeed, it is Winter's contention that the contest over the meaning and practice of mesmerism was itself part of a broader cultural negotiation of questions of intellectual and scientific legitimacy.
Important as this is, however, the book goes further. Winter is interested in the ramifications of mesmeric practice for competing Victorian versions of mind, as well as the different ways in which mesmerism became a kind of metaphor for human interaction. She uses her analyses of the Victorians' understanding of their mental powers as exemplified by the mesmeric process to explore both emerging models of the human psyche and the uses to which such models might be put. This brings the issue of power relations consistently to the fore, and the book elaborates in careful and colorful detail the ways in which the mesmeric notion of influence was worked out through trajectories of class, gender, and race. These themes are woven through Winter's exploration of the social (and, by extension, political), scientific, medical, and spiritual dimensions of mesmeric theory and practice, and the result is a wonderfully rich revisionist account of "where the boundaries of possibility lay in Victorian society" (11).
Mesmerism was named after the eighteenth-century Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who pioneered a form...