Terry Castle

(Reviewers’ Comments)

“Filled with incisive observations that make us both re-examine the broad preconceptions we hold about the 18th century and reassess some of its specific cultural artifacts.” –New York Times

“Lively new study of 18th-century culture….Intriguing book.” –International Herald Tribune

“An attractive and important book….There is no essay in this book that isn’t a pleasure to read, and none that isn’t at the same time supported.by extensive and wide-ranging documentation.” –Times Literary Supplement

“Terry Castle is well equipped to explore the dark Other of the age of enlightenment, as her book on masquerade demonstrated. Her knowledge of the back alleys and “no trespassing” byways of the culture is minute and particular; and she can not only produce out-of-the-way facts and figures, publications and performances, but she can brilliantly and convincingly articulate their significance for the culture.” –Eighteenth-Century Fiction

“A delight to read”–Ronald Paulson, Modern Philology

“Engagingly written, rigorously researched, and intellectually provocative analyses”–College Literature

“All eras have their popular stereotypes, and in the case of the 18th century, we think immediately of the Enlightenment with its devotion to scientific rationalism, its belief in pragmatism and progress. But in much the same way that historians like Peter Gay and Steven Marcus have debunked Victorian stereotypes of repression and stuffy propriety, so other historians and critics have worked to strip the 18th century of its self-confident and simplistic image as the Age of Reason. The latest among these efforts is Terry Castle’s lively new study of 18th-century culture, “The Female Thermometer.”

“Ms. Castle, a professor of English at Stanford University, focuses in this volume on 18th-century manifestations of what she calls “the uncanny,” that is irrational, gothic, excessive and downright bizarre developments she says arose as a kind of reaction to the reigning mood of scientific rationalism. Her examples include both novelistic depictions of doppelgangers and ghosts and the real-life proliferation of such phenomena as masquerades, magic lantern shows and optical illusions.

“The term ‘uncanny’ comes, of course, from Freud, who defined it as a feeling of ‘dread and creeping horror’ felt in the presence of ‘certain persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations,’ a feeling that occurred, he said, when ‘infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.’

“What Ms. Castle tries to do in this book is extrapolate Freud’s argument about the individual psyche and apply it to society as a whole. Indeed she suggests that the 18th century’s compulsive quest for systematic knowledge had a curious side effect: in trying to repress and rationalize the mysterious, she says, the reigning cult of reason inadvertently gave birth to ‘a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement and intellectual impasse.’

“‘The distinctively 18th-century impulse,’ she writes, ‘to systematize and regulate, to bureaucratize the world of knowledge by identifying what Locke called the “horizon . . . which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things,’ was itself responsible, in other words, for that estranging of the real– and impinging uncanniness — which is so integral a part of modernity.’

“In fact, as Ms. Castle points out in her introduction, all the essays in her book basically tell the same Freudian story: ‘The more we seek enlightenment, the more alienating our world becomes; the more we seek to free ourselves, Houdini-like, from the coils of superstition, mystery and magic, the more tightly, paradoxically, the uncanny holds us in its grip….’

“Certainly the most resonant artifact that Ms. Castle examines is the ‘female thermometer’ that lends this volume its title. The phrase derives from satiric 18th-century portrayals of a special thermometer designed to measure fluctuations in a woman’s moods. In other words, an Enlightenment instrument originally conceived as a scientific means of calibrating the external world was remade into a symbol of humanity’s unstable inner weather, a technological innovation meant to quantify the invisible had been reinvented as a metaphor for the inscrutability of human passions.

“Ms. Castle writes that ambiguity and confusion turn out to be recurrent subtexts in 18th-century literature and life. She argues that the public masquerades, which became popular in London during the first decades of the century, represented ‘a dreamlike zone where identities became fluid and cherished distinctions — between self and other, subject and object, real and unreal — temporarily blurred.’ She adds that the period’s many famous ’shape-shifters,’ like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and the real-life transvestite Charlotte Charke, similarly violated rigid social lines of class and gender.

“In novels, boundaries between life and death, fantasy and reality also began to blur. In Defoe’s Roxana, the heroine and her maid become uncanny mirrors of one another. In Richardson’s Clarissa, the villain has a daytime reverie — involving a strange act of metamorphosis — that changes from a self-fulfilling prophecy into an uncanny reversal. And in Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, characters become haunted by the spectral images of their loves, even as the author tries to explain away supernatural-seeming events.

“In fact, as Ms. Castle sees it, the 18th century’s attempts to banish irrational phenomena like ghosts simply resulted in driving them inward into the human psyche, where they could be rationalized as hallucinations or projections of a troubled mind. This displacement of ghosts, Ms. Castle suggests, would have far-reaching intellectual consequences: among them, a formative influence on ‘the most prestigious theory of thought regulation to emerge in the 19th century: namely, Freudian psychoanalysis,’ the same theory, it turns out, that Ms. Castle has used with such dexterity in her intriguing book. –Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“Terry Castle’s The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny….moves smoothly between the 18th and 20th centuries, making issues of the Enlightenment immediate and important… The book reads like a chart of the new 18th century, a discipline interested in the historicity of categories such as gender, the body, and sexuality. With a compelling mixture of Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and feminist theory, Castle is our best historian of desire, and, as such, she is one of those responsible for the renovation of this business, making it new and exciting.”—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

“Castle’s work on sexuality and gender has helped make feminist and queer intellectual projects acceptable.”–Signs

“This book has remarkable range. In twelve well-documented, often riveting essays, Terry Castle probes the strange underbelly of what we have come to call the Enlightenment….. Again, it is difficult to suggest how good Castle’s collection of essays is. This book will be read with pleasure by anyone in 18th- or 19th-century literature and the history of culture or psychology.”–Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies