Hypochondria and Racial Interiority in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee

If I were seriously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done.

Henry David Thoreau, "Slavery in Massachusetts," 1854

In the novels that have become critical touchstones for understanding cross-racial sympathy in the antebellum era—works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) or Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851)—medical constructions of the mind and its diseases play a profoundly important but still overlooked role. Indeed, antebellum authors such as Stowe, Melville, and Poe repeatedly, and sometimes histrionically, foreground one nervous disorder in particular: hypochondria.¹ They do so in order to imagine the stakes and consequences of imagined sympathy across racial boundaries. For although "hypochondria" survives today as a way to characterize those who believe they are ill when they are not, the antebellum disorder it named was much more expansive and suggestive than this. Physicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century defined hypochondria as a functional disorder of the nervous system that began with a somatic cause, dyspepsia, and had a wide range of psychological symptoms, including melancholy, ennui, imagined illness, and imagined bodily transformations. The protean nature of hypochondria, in which such disparate symptoms as these could be the means of diagnosing the disorder, was the reason for its expansive use in antebellum fiction and, as I will show, made it not only an integral aspect of an interiority defined by race in the nineteenth century but one that emerged as a counter-discourse to the particular forms of sympathy most often represented in the sentimental novel.

Recent work by Christopher Castiglia, Peter Coviello, and Sianne Ngai (in distinct but complementary ways) has recast our understanding of how antebellum theories of affect and emotion, the vocabulary of sympathy, turned what at first glance seems a physical distinction, race, into an expression of interiority and intimacy.² The sentimental novel, and its literary cousin the abolitionist novel, has done more than exemplify this relationship between affect and race; it has taught us how to read representations of interior depth through these emotional terms. Antebellum hypochondria complicates, and potentially reverses, the sentimental process at the center of these novels. Indeed, nineteenth-century medical theories examined how sympathy could be pathological, as likely to reveal a reduced or debilitated interiority as it is to demonstrate the most morally refined emotions possible in social life. This reduced interiority was most often expressed through the peculiar hypochondriacal symptom of imagined bodily transformation, in which patients believed their bodies were turning into mundane household things such as teapots. In this way, hypochondria provided a psychological language for how the very materiality of the body can become the launching point for all kinds of pathological flights of fancy, sentimental or otherwise. In doing so, antebellum hypochondria tracks how medical theories of bodily sympathy structured anti-sentimental theories of race through the suggestive pathological correlation of the slave ("the man that was a thing," to borrow Stowe's phrase) and the hypochondriac (physicians' psychological version of the same).

In order to elucidate the importance of hypochondria to both the construction of racial interiority and the forms of the novel that teach us to read for that interiority, I turn to Sheppard Lee; Written by Himself (1836), by author and physician Robert Montgomery Bird. In Sheppard Lee, Bird makes explicit what is only implied in other fictional treatments of the hypochondriac, namely the role the symptoms of hypochondria played in structuring a racialized sense of self in antebellum America. He does so by continually returning to the legal and psychological line between person and thing. In its provocative twinning of the slave and slave master through the symptoms of hypochondria, Sheppard Lee offers scholars of antebellum literature a theoretical and formal articulation of the politically vexed psychological vocabulary structuring novelistic representations of slavery, insanity, and interiority. Bird's novel also...