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Thesis ID: CBB001562371

“The Body Electric”: American Literature and the Culture of Electromagnetism, 1750--1855 (2001)

Vanderbilt University
Tichi, Cecelia
Publication date: 2001
Language: English

Publication Date: 2001
Edition Details: Advisor: Tichi, Cecelia
Physical Details: 264 pp.

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Science and literature Electromagnetism 18th century 19th century Franklin, Benjamin Emerson, Ralph Waldo Hawthorne, Nathaniel

{italic}The Body Electric{/italic} examines the way canonical and popular representations of electricity served as vehicles for cultural anxieties in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. As new theories of electricity and electromagnetism, both orthodox and unorthodox, entered the public arena during this time period, authors exploited this terminology as metaphor within their texts, themselves becoming theorists of (to use Benjamin Franklin's term) "American electricity." This project reveals how the culture of electromagnetism transmitted through popular periodicals, novels, advertisements, and lecture series divulges national preoccupations, including the relationship between gender and knowledge, between divine wisdom and secular authority, between the body politic and the bodies of its citizens, and between art and science. Reading works by Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne alongside those of their lesser-known contemporaries reveals the tensions that arose as electricity was increasingly associated with and used to articulate an explicitly American national identity. The literary and scientific authors examined in this study were joint participants in an on-going debate about the social meanings of elite and popular electrical theories within an American context, a debate that began over a century before Thomas Edison's successful experiments made electricity a household word. As {italic}The Body Electric{/italic} argues, the burgeoning science of electricity allowed Franklin to stage scientific, theological and political revolutions that permitted later authors and electricians to enact similar rhetorical insurrections. The generation of electrical theorists (i.e., those theorizing about electromagnetic forces, their relationship to and impact upon the human body, whether using literary or experimental devices) following Franklin included canonical authors such as Brown, Emerson, Fuller and Hawthorne as well as the authors, physicians, and showmen whose essays, domestic medical guides and advertised services popularized electrical theory and its medical application. Taken together, the works produced by these seemingly disparate figures demonstrate that, in the early years of the new republic, electricity carried contradictory, often vexed, meanings for the average American citizen, including the promise of liberation and mystical understanding, and the threat of anarchy, dehumanizing technological advancement, and self- destruction.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 62 (2002): 2425. UMI order no. 3019455.

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