​Modify My Disbelief: Mesmerism and Blind Sight​

Emily Ogden’s paper considers the role fiction plays in testing the limits of human capacity. Ogden tells the story of Loraina Brackett, a blind woman who could see while in the mesmeric trance. During the first decade of US... [ view full abstract ]

Emily Ogden’s paper considers the role fiction plays in testing the limits of human capacity. Ogden tells the story of Loraina Brackett, a blind woman who could see while in the mesmeric trance. During the first decade of US mesmeric practice, the 1830s, Brackett was celebrated for her ability to move sure-footedly, admire pictures, and even travel (in spirit) to distant places while mesmerized. Listening to fictional accounts made these experiences possible: her visitors told her stories of what she could do, and as she listened, she became capable in the ways they described. The paper asks two questions: first, can we understand some or all of the capacities Brackett developed not as supernatural sight, but as an expansion of the capacities of a blind person? And second, did fictional story-telling, with its especially non-onerous claims on our credulity, permit Brackett and her interlocutors to entertain this possible expansion of blind life? Ogden’s texts are contemporary records of mesmeric performance and Brackett’s papers.