Ontological Drift: Medical Discourse and Racial Embodiment in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee

Robert Montgomery Bird was already a well-regarded physician and successful playwright and novelist when he wrote his third novel, Sheppard Lee, in 1836. Recounting a series of mental and bodily states through which the eponymous narrator mysteriously passes, the book presents six stories about six different identities he assumes. The novel impressed Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a review in which he said it was “an original in American Belle Lettres.”¹ While Poe admired the novel, he nevertheless critiqued the way it depicted the narrator’s “metempsychosis,” the traditional term for what Sheppard Lee experiences as his consciousness moves from body to body. Poe suggested that instead of offering six different stories from six distinct subject positions, Bird should have had the focus of his narrative be “a character unchanging—except as changed by the events themselves” (“Bird,” 401). That is, Poe wanted a protagonist who might inhabit different bodies but who would nevertheless retain a solid sense of identity throughout, while Bird’s narrative dramatizes the notion that identity would be nearly lost from one reincarnation to the next.

In one way, Poe is critiquing Bird’s aesthetic choices, speaking artist-to-artist about how best to construct narratives and develop characters, and thus helping to define what the novel can do artistically in the antebellum period. However, in a more substantial way, Poe also registers a difference between himself and Bird in terms of ontology, about the nature of consciousness as well as the mind’s relationship to the body. Poe saw consciousness as something that supersedes and, indeed, resists the vicissitudes of bodily experience, while Bird saw it as fundamentally weak and unstable, determined almost completely by its material embodiment.

Yet, as Poe continued in his review, Bird’s rendering of metempsychosis, particularly in the section where Sheppard Lee inhabits the slave Tom, who eventually leads a slave revolt, becomes an index of Bird’s—and Poe’s—anti-abolitionist, racist sentiments. Poe applauds Bird’s representation of “abolition and the exciting effects of incendiary pamphlets and pictures, among our slaves in the South” (“Bird,” 399). Therefore, while Poe critiques Bird’s aesthetic choices involving metempsychosis, he applauds his racist satire of abolitionism through metempsychosis. In this way, probing Bird’s idea of metempsychosis becomes an effective means for revealing both his definition of ontology and his racial sentiments—how the relationship between the mind and body is often racialized in the antebellum period.

To fully understand Bird’s complicated, nuanced rendering of metempsychosis in Sheppard Lee, it is necessary to situate him within the antebellum medical and scientific culture in which he was trained and in which he participated. The regular medical training he received at the University of Pennsylvania informed the ways he imagined the relationship between the mind and body. However, by exploring the ways Bird’s novel was not simply informed by regular medicine, but also inflected simultaneously by what James H. Cassedy calls “irregular” medical discourse,² I want to suggest how Bird’s representation of metempsychosis does not fit comfortably into either regular or irregular medical discourse. His novel’s representation of the mind-body relationship seems much closer to that in irregular medicine. Yet, by framing Bird’s representation of the complex consciousness of the rebellious slave Tom through Bird’s reflections on chemistry, I argue that Bird’s text revels in an “ontological drift,” that is, an aesthetic shuttling between ontological positions. Bird’s ontological drift roughs out a new relationship between the mind and the body, one that draws on the chemical understanding of material “conditions” to mark out a contingent, rather than essentialized, understanding of consciousness. By doing so, therefore, Bird’s idea of ontological drift not only complicates Poe’s essentialized notions of black subjectivity, but also suggests, more generally, how identity itself was as mobile and flexible as the antebellum culture in which Tom and Sheppard Lee, as well as Bird and Poe, were living.

The discontented dr. bird

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