2 - Wilde, hypnotic aesthetes and the 1890s

Summary

The psychical researchers who were stretching the boundaries of the mind through their investigations of telepathy were also intrigued by another phenomenon that indicated the porousness of the mental apparatus: hypnosis. At the fin de siècle, hopeful cultural fantasies of the possibilities of telepathic contact were balanced by an anxious sense that someone or something might get inside one's mind and control one's actions. Although hypnosis has a long history, the fin de siècle is a peculiarly suggestible time, brimming with anxieties about the complete extinction of will brought about by the stage mesmerist, the medical practitioner, and the Society for Psychical Research experiment. Psychical researchers such as Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers studied hypnosis for what the phenomenon could tell them about the vicissitudes of conscious and subconscious thought, but hypnosis also had an audience outside the medical and scientific arenas. By the 1890s the hypnotically threatening figure was a staple of popular literature; Rider Haggard's She (1888), Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897) take over the minds as well as the bodies of their entranced victims. George Du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby, the sensational story of a Bohemian artist's model who becomes an operatic star and sexual slave through the mesmerizing influence of the demonic Jewish musician Svengali, was one of the most popular novels of the decade in Britain and America.