The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (review)

Reviews Terry Castle. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 278pp. $25.50 (paper). ISBN 0-19-508098-X. "In the essays that follow I positively revel in the morbid, the excessive, and the strange," Terry Castle announces in her introduction to The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Some of us remember the days when the eighteenth century was still presented almost exclusively as the age of reason, a period in which the supernatural and the irrational were recognized only as occasional aberrations from the commonsensical norm; and the undergraduate at least had the vague sense that Addison, Steele, Pope, Johnson and Co. lived the life of Houyhnhnms, with only an occasional gesture in the direction of nasty doings by Yahoos. The result was empty classrooms. Since the literary critics, the feminists, and the social and cultural historians have turned the spotlight on the Yahoos and the patriarchs, and on the steaming underbelly of that civilized society, courses on the eighteenth century have filled again, and graduate students are flocking into a period which can offer delights comparable with novels by Stephen King or Anne Rice—and that even before the arrival of the Gothic novel. Terry Castle is well equipped to explore the dark Other of the age of enlightenment , as her book on masquerade demonstrated. Her knowledge of the back alleys and "no trespassing" byways of the culture is minute and particular; and she can not only produce out-of-the-way facts and figures, publications and performances , but she can brilliantly and convincingly articulate their significance for the culture. "The Female Thermometer" is the first essay after the introductory chapter , and although it is far from representing the argument of the book (the collection's title is to this extent a misnomer) it presents persuasively an ongoing image of the interaction between the technology and psychology of an EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 3, April 1997 344 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 age. Things and even abstract qualities become valuable as we learn to measure them, and the measurements enter discourse according to the subtlety and complexity of their calibrations. Castle examines the history of the thermometer and the barometer, and the metaphoric thinking by which the instrument that measures comes to stand for the qualities measured, and in some cases even to determine them. A thermometer that neutrally registers atmospheric heat is thus fancifully called on to measure degrees of religious fervour and erotic excitement, as in Hogarth's engraving of "Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism"—and the metaphor is variously applied to other states of mind and states of body. Presently, by a familiar transference, the instrument that measures is viewed as the cause and determinant of the condition measured: like Miss Havisham (to take a later instance of the same interaction between machine and psychology) when she believes that by stopping the clocks she can stop time. As Castle parades the shifting metaphorical applications of the thermometer , it appears as both the female condition of erotic excitement that is being measured, and the male member best qualified to raise and cure the condition . She dances her thermometer as learnedly and suggestively as ever Walter Shandy danced his white bear, and far more convincingly too. The same interaction between technology and psyche is the theme of the essay on "Phantasmagoria and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," on the development of the magic lantern and its illusions by the showman Etienne-Gaspard Robertson and his followers. Again, the historical account of the development of technology provides the basis for an examination of a cultural shift whereby the facility for producing spectral apparitions externally becomes the means to question the state of belief about apparitions in the mind. The focus on the changing status of the apparition, spectres, and ghosts is in fact the connecting principle in the essays. Freud's essay on the uncanny is the presence that haunts the collection. The overall thesis of the book is that it was the eighteenth century that invented the uncanny, even if the term itself is Freud's. "The assumption (tacitly Freudian...