The female thermometer eighteenth centur 17

6 THE FEMALE THERMOMETER Yet such are themes, I confess, to which I have myself ineluctably been drawn I have always been attracted by the "irrational" or "gothic" side of eighteenth-century culture: by Mrs Veal, Cagliostro, the Cock Lane Ghost, Mesmer, and Piranesi as much as by Toland, Hume, or Voltaire Those "Nightvisions" and "Antic Shapes," the "wild Natives of the Brain" eulogized by Edward Young in Night Thoughts, have typically engrossed me more than "the self-given solar Ray" of classic Enlightenment rationalism And in the essays that follow I positively revel in the morbid, the excessive, and the strange: in prophetic dreams, doppelgangers, primal scenes, and sexual metamorphoses ("Amy, Who Knew my Disease," "Lovelace's Dream"); in disguises, estrangements, and carnivalesque assaults on decorum ("Matters Not fit to be Mentioned," "The Culture of Travesty," "The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative"); in auras, detached body parts, and inanimate objects coming mysteriously to life ("The Female Thermometer"); in optical illusions, magic lantern shows, and hallucinatory reveries ("Phantasmagoria"); in corpses, tombs, and wandering apparitions ("The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho," "Spectral Politics"); and in monomania,folie a deux, time travel, and visionary "sightings" of the dead Marie Antoinette ("Contagious Folly") But it is not merely a matter of sharing themes, or of using Freud to license my own sometimes peculiar divagations "A scholar's mind," wrote Natalie Clifford Barney in Adventures of the Mind, "is a deep well in which are buried aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments."1 My own ongoing obsession with the eighteenth-century "uncanny" is no doubt the result of a host of submerged emotional impulses—some of them embarrassingly personal But changes in intellectual fashions have also had a lot to with it I am hardly the first recent literary critic or historian to find a phantasmagoric side to eighteenth-century literature and culture—or to sense in the myriad transformations of the epoch something other than the unproblematic, unassailable triumph of Reason's "sufficient light." Ever since the publication of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's magisterial Dialectic of EnlightenmentT over forty years ago, it has been difficult to maintain—without a devastating infusion of Swiftian irony—the onceconventional view of the eighteenth century as an era of unexampled social, political, and philosophical progress The venerable notion of "Enlightenment rationalism" has itself come under pressing ideological attack, as a phalanx of historians and social theorists—from E P Thompson to Michel Foucault—have described ways in which appeals to reason can be used "instrumentally": "to control and dominate rather than to emancipate."2 The result has been the promulgation of an image of the eighteenth century profoundly unlike the one memorialized in Macaulay's History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1849-61) or Sir Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) No more the expansive, unruffled, serenely self-confident "Age of Reason'' commemorated in nineteenth-century