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

TERRY CASTLE. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1995. Pp. [x] + 278. $35.

This book - first in a new series ' 'Ideologies of Desire" from Oxford under the editorship of David Halperin - is chiefly a collection of Ms. Castle's previously published essays, among them her well-known "psychosexual" reflections on Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Clarissa, Fielding's Female Husband, Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries ofUdolpho, and such favorite themes of hers as "Carnivalization" and "Phantasmagoria." The collection opens with two new essays that I will consider here.

Her second chapter, "The Female Thermometer," explains the title of the book: this, in the Connoisseur (1754), is the name Bonnell Thornton gives to an imaginary instrument that calibrates the rise and fall of a woman's sexual passions as a thermometer registers degrees of heat and cold. After reviewing the development of the thermometer from the first crude device of Galileo (1612) through the refinements of Torricelli (1644), Fahrenheit ( 1 7 1 7), and Celsius (1742), Ms. Castle warms to her real subject: the ways in which an imaginative "link between the movements of the weatherglass and the vagaries of human feeling developed quickly" in the eighteenth century - a link, she believes, especially between thermometric calibrations and degrees of sexual desire, as graphically illustrated, for example, in Hogarth's Masquerade Ticket (1727) and his satire on religious enthusiasm, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762).

Except, however, by attributing to Thornton's lame joke a representative significance that few...