The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the UncannyThe work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the New York Times "always engaging...consistently fascinating," has helped to revolutionize eighteenth-century studies. The Female Thermometer brings together Castle's essays on the phantasmagoric side of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer," an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores what she calls the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination--the ways in which the rationalist imperatives of the age paradoxically worked to produce what Freud would later call the uncanny. In essays on doubling and fantasy in the novels of Defoe and Richardson, sexual impersonators and the dream-like world of the eighteenth-century masquerade, magic-lantern shows, automata, and other surreal inventions of Enlightenment science, and the hallucinatory obsessions of Gothic fiction, Castle offers a haunting portrait of a remarkable epoch. Her collection explores the links between material culture, gender, and the rise of modern forms and formulas of subjectivity, effectively rewriting the cultural history of modern Europe from a materialist and feminist perspective. |
Contents
1 Introduction | 3 |
2 The Female Thermometer | 21 |
A Psychosexual Pattern in Defoes Roxana | 44 |
4 Lovelaces Dream | 56 |
Fieldings The Female Husband | 67 |
Sexuality and Masquerade in EighteenthCentury England | 82 |
7 The Carnivalization of EighteenthCentury English Narrative | 101 |
8 The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho | 120 |
9 Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie | 140 |
Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination | 168 |
An Adventure and Its Skeptics | 190 |
Notes | 215 |
| 253 | |
| 269 | |
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Adventure Amy's apparitions appears barometer become carnival carnivalesque century character Charlotte Charke Clarissa costume culture dead death Defoe's described disguise early eighteenth-century English Emily emotional episode erotic essay fantastic Female Husband Female Thermometer fiction Fielding Fielding's Figure folie à deux Freud ghosts Gothic hallucination haunted Henry Fielding heroine homosexual human illusions imagination John lady later Lesbian literary London Lovelace Lovelace's dream Lovelacean magic lantern male Marie Antoinette Mary Hamilton masquer masquerade masquerade scene mental mercury metaphor mind Moberly and Jourdain modern moral Mysteries of Udolpho narrative nature nineteenth-century novel obsession Oxford paradoxical Petit Trianon phantasmagoria phantoms plot popular psychic psychological Radcliffe Radcliffe's reader reverie Richardson romantic Roxana Samuel Richardson satiric seems sense sexual Sigmund Freud skeptics spectral spectres spirits story suggests supernatural symbolic theme thermometer thought tion Tom Jones trans transformation transvestism Trianon uncanny University Press vision weatherglass woman women writing wrote York