5 - Daniel Deronda and the omnipotence of thought

Summary

This book has tried to understand why nineteenth-century writers moralized about the practice of thinking about another person, and above all it has sought to understand under what conditions nineteenth-century writers found it possible, or even desirable, to believe that thinking about another person could affect him or her, for good or for ill. I have proposed that studying the way nineteenth-century texts approach what we can call mental action at a distance, or, following Freud, “the omnipotence of thoughts,” can provide new insight into the history of ideas about mental causation, practical ethics, and the sociability of the mind. I have also stressed the contemporary consequences, and contemporary value, of this strand of thinking about thinking: when, we might ask, does a belief that our thoughts might substantially affect other people seem seriously delusional, and when might behaving as if we had such powers be in fact an ordinary part of social life?

Throughout this investigation, I have explored how these questions took shape, for a range of nineteenth-century British writers, through specific literary forms and practices. The two preceding chapters focused on nineteenth-century poetry and poetic theory. Chapter 3 focused on the relationship between poetic uses of second-person pronouns, and the anxieties of thinking about a beloved other. I pondered the paradoxes that ensue when poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti write “I think of thee” – or, more provocatively, “I do not think of thee,” proposing that nineteenth-century poets reformulated apostrophe from a poetic form of speaking-to-another into a form of silent thinking-about-another.