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

Summary

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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.

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Extract

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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 denned 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 counterdiscourse 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 th...

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