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CHAPTER NINE Substance and Shadow Brian O’Doherty, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. (1992) For we know in part. —Corinthians 13:9 “We are both substance and shadow, and it is the shadow that moves the substance” (7), the narrating voice asserts in the opening section of The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. This phrase also applies to O’Doherty’s novel as a whole. Its substance is the reconstruction of the historical case of the treatment of Marie-Therese von Paradies (1759–1824) by Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) in Vienna in 1777.1 Shadow is cast by the multiplicity of possible interpretations of the actual events and the consequent uncertainties in readers’ minds. But it is precisely these ambivalences that make the novel so intriguing as they imaginatively capture the equivocations innate to psychosomatic disorders: are they substantive manifestations of a somatic disease or shadows of a psychological disturbance? Marie-Therese was the daughter of Joseph von Paradies, private secretary to the Austro-Hungarian empress Maria-Theresa, after whom she was named. Born with perfect sight, she went blind overnight at age three on 9 December 1762, and remained so despite all the efforts of the medical faculty at the empress’s behest on behalf of her godchild. She had been made to undergo a series of painful, gruesome, and disfiguring treatments, including leeches, bleeding, electric shocks, and a tight plaster cast on her head, all to no avail. But her blindness had not prevented her remarkable development in many respects. She had a pleasing personality, showed artistic ability, studied music under the great Viennese teacher, Leopold Kozeluch, and entertained the royal family. In recognition of her talent and as compensation for her disability, the empress awarded her a pension. 149 She was skilled at lace making too, and had altogether adapted very well to living with her blindness. Yet her parents still sought a cure, and therefore brought her to Mesmer on 20 January 1777, when she was eighteen years old, as a last resort. This is where the novel starts. For Mesmer the arrival of a prominent patient in a pitiful condition and with an affliction so obdurate that it had defied Vienna’s best doctors was the ideal opportunity to prove the efficacy of his theories and methods by effecting a spectacular cure. The Viennese medical world was at that time at best indifferent, or more frequently, antagonistic to Mesmer, although he had completed regular training, graduating in Vienna in 1766 with a dissertation on the influence of the planets on the human body, a topic unexceptional in the eighteenth century. Mesmer argued for a material cause of the planets’ influence through what he called “universal fluid,” in which all things are immersed as in a cosmic ocean; he maintained that this fluid determined not only gravitation but also magnetism, electricity, light, and heat. He had a tendency to grandiose speculation and was also suspected of association with secret societies. But after his marriage in 1768 to a wealthy widow of noble descent, Anna-Maria von Bosch, he settled to a largely conventional practice. Entertaining at their elegant home, the Mesmers took an active part in the city’s high society and were informed patrons of the arts, especially music. Mesmer played the clavichord and the cello and was among the earliest champions of the glass harmonica, an older instrument then newly improved by Benjamin Franklin. He knew Mozart’s father and hosted the first performance of the young Mozart’s opera Bastien and Bastienne in the autumn of 1768. The major turning-point in Mesmer’s career occurred through his treatment of Franziska Oesterlin (known as “Franzl”), a relative of Mesmer’s wife in her twenties. She suffered from a medley of ills: convulsions , spasms of vomiting, inflammation of the intestines, inability to urinate , toothache and earache, despondency, hallucinations, cataleptic trances, fainting spells, temporary blindness, feelings of suffocation, and attacks of paralysis. Franzl’s diffuse symptoms foreshadow those of Anna O and of Emmy von N . . . in Breuer’s and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. Mesmer recognized them as telltale signs of the syndrome then called hysteria. During 1773–74 he treated her successfully with magnets; she regained her health, married Mesmer’s stepson, and led a normal life. However, when Mesmer sought to have his magnetic cure for nervous illnesses formally acknowledged by the medical faculty, his claims were rejected. From this time on Mesmer had a dubious reputation. His cure...

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