<div><p>Coale explores the profound influence that the mesmerist and<br>spiritualist 'craze' of the 1840s and 1850s had on Hawthorne's artistic<br>vision and fictional techniques.</p><p>Nathaniel Hawthorne despised both mesmerism and spiritualism, viewing<br>these pseudosciences as new incarnations of witchcraft, in which the master-slave<br>relationship overwhelms all others. Nevertheless, even though he regarded<br>the psychological paradigm behind these pseudosciences as morally repellent,<br>he also, as Samuel Chase Coale convincingly shows, recognized its accuracy.<br></p><p>In creating what he called romances, Hawthorne employed his own mesmerist-like<br>strategies and thus created texts that participate in the very medium he<br>abhorred. In effect, Coale concludes, Hawthorne's romances constitute a<br>form of mesmeric expression themselves. Coale's examination of the processes<br>of mesmerism- the creation of the trance, the entry into its dreamlike<br>state, the psychology of idolatry produced by this procedure- clearly reveals<br>the affinities between mesmerism and Hawthorne's art.</p><br><p><br></p></div>