The female thermometer eighteenth centur 170

Phantasmagoria 159 popular historical fiction John Inglesant (1881) After his brother is murdered in Italy, the hero suffers a febrile mental derangement: Every new object seemed burnt into [his brain] by the sultry outward heat, and by his own fiery thoughts The livid scorched plains, with the dark foliage, the hot piazzas and the highways, seemed to him thronged with ghastly phantoms, all occupied more or less in some evil or fruitless work A sense of oppression and confusion rested upon him mentally and physically, so that he could see no objects steadily and clearly; but without was a phantasmagoria of terrible bright colours, and within a mental chaos and disorder without a clue.40 This association with delirium, loss of control, the terrifying yet sublime overthrow of ordinary experience, made the phantasmagoria a perfect emblem, obviously, of the nineteenth-century poetic imagination Especially among the later romantic and symbolist writers—Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, the Goncourt brothers, Loti, Lautreamont, Nerval, and later still, Yeats, Pound, Apollinaire, Eliot, and Artaud—the phantasmagoria was a favorite metaphor for the heightened sensitivities and often-tormented awareness of the romantic visionary It conveyed exquisitely the notion of the bouleversement de tous les sens: that state of neurasthenic excitement in which images whirled chaotically before the inward eye, impressing on the seer an overwhelming sense of their vividness and spiritual truth As Yeats put it, "there is always a phantasmagoria" in the mind of the poet.41 The word has persisted in this context in critical writing to this day.42 IV The figure of the inward spectre-show was not, however, as straightforward, conceptually speaking, as its popular exploitation might lead us to assume Indeed, it concealed a profound epistemological confusion The confusion derived from the ambiguous notion of the ghost What did it mean, after all, to "see ghosts"? Were ghosts themselves real or illusory? Inside the mind or outside it? Actual phantasmagoric spectacle, we recall, had enforced on it audience a peculiar kind of split consciousness on exactly this point Promoters like Robertson and Philipstal prefaced their shows with popular rationalist arguments: real spectres did not exist, they said; supposed apparitions were merely "I`effet bizarre de l'imagination" (M, 1:162) Nonetheless, the phantoms they subsequently produced had a strangely objective presence They floated before the eye just like real ghosts And in a crazy way they were real ghosts That is to say, they were not mere effects of imagination: they were indisputably there; one saw them as clearly as any other object of sense The subliminal power of the phantasmagoria lay in the fact that it induced in the spectator a kind of maddening, contradictory perception: one might believe ghosts to be illusions, present ''in the mind's eye" alone, but one experienced them here