1. Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck and Tom , 61-66. [BACK]

2. Wecter reports on Hannibal mesmerists, spiritualists, and animal magnetists in Sam Clemens of Hannibal , 90, 196-97. See The Washoe Giant in San Francisco , 119-21, 125-36, for Twain's newspaper pieces on spiritualists. For a review of Twain's interest, see Howard Kerr, "'Sperits Couldn't a Done Better': Mark Twain and Spiritualism," in Mediums and Spirit Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature 1850-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 155-89. Also Alan Gribben, "'When Other Amusements Fail': Mark Twain and the Occult," in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920 , ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 171-89. Absolutely crucial for understanding Twain's attention to mediumship is Susan Gillman's Dark Twins , chap. 5, especially because it shows the connections in his thinking between science and the occult, psychic research and spiritualism. [BACK]

3. On the use of conceptions of femininity and domesticity to counteract suspicions of fraud and imposture in mediumship, see, especially, Alex Owen, "The Other Voice: Women, Children, and Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism," in Language, Gender, and Childhood , ed. Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 34-73. [BACK]

4. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), provides a compelling account of mesmeric theorizing. On American versions of mesmerism see Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Mesmer drew on eighteenth-century theories of electricity in formulating his idea of animal magnetism; see Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 186-87. [BACK]

5. On the amazingly versatile explanatory power of electricity, see Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), especially chap. 3, "Locating the Body in Electrical Space and Time." And on the tendency to attribute clairvoyance and thought transference to the powers of electricity, see R. Lawrence Moore, "Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings," American Quarterly 29 (1972): 491-92. [BACK]

6. The secondary literature on nineteenth-century mental physiology is extensive. But see, for example, Kurt Danziger, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century

British Psycho-Physiology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology," in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought , ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), 119-44. Also Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), especially his chapter "Victorian Psychophysiology," and most especially 35-45. Helpful, too, is Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), particularly her discussion of the psychophysiologist Henry Maudsley and his insistence on the physical basis of mental phenomena, mental illness, and hysteria (106-38). [BACK]

7. "Mental Telegraphy," in The American Claimant and Other Stories and Sketches by Mark Twain (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897), 374-96. [BACK]

8. The letters on this between Twain and De Quille, and De Quille's comment on the "force," appear in Lawrence I. Berkove, "'Nobody Writes to Anybody Except to Ask a Favor': New Correspondence between Mark Twain and Dan De Quille," Mark Twain Journal 26, no. 1 (spring 1988): 5, 7-8. For Twain's reference to odyle, see Notebooks , II, 172-75. For information about and a contemporary critique of odyle—a supposedly newly discovered natural force described by Karl, Baron von Reichenbach—see Thomas Laycock, "Odyle, Mesmerism, Electro-Biology, &c.,'' The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review 8 (1851): 378-431. [BACK]

9. See George M. Beard, The Study of Trance, Muscle-Reading and Allied Nervous Phenomena in Europe and America, with a Letter on the Moral Character of Trance Subjects and a Defence of Dr. Charcot (New York: privately printed, 1882), and Beard's "Physiology of Mind-Reading," Popular Science Monthly 10 (1877): 459-73. Beard is concerned to debunk the claim that Brown could communicate by a wire, and to assert that other instances of Brown's mindreading—done by placing his hands on a subject's head—were cases of "muscle-reading," accomplished by feeling involuntary and reflexive expressions of thought in the face. Also see Ricky Jay, "A Few Words about Death and Show Biz: Washington Irving Bishop, J. Randall Brown, and the Origins of Modern Mind Reading," in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (New York: Villard, 1986), 155-99; see 177 for an account of Brown's telegraphic demonstration. [BACK]

10. In a letter to Howells, August 16, 1898 ( Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 674), Twain claimed that in an unpublished version of "Simon Wheeler" "written in 1876 or '75," an execution was prevented by testimony transmitted by mental telegraph—systematized in a phrenophonic way through a contraption "like the old mesmerizer-button" which automatically translated thoughts into words. And in "Three Thousand Years among the Microbes" (1905) Twain imagined a "Recorder" into which one dictated thoughts, not words, that were retained in a state so "clear and limpid and superbly radiant in expression that they make all articulated speech—even the most brilliant and the most perfect—seem dull and lifeless and confused by comparison" ( Which Was the Dream , 490). [BACK]

11. See the collection of essays The Correlation and Conservation of Forces , ed. Edward Livingston Youmans (New York: D. Appleton, 1873), which includes essays by physicians, physicists, and physiologists, among them pieces by Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz and Michael Faraday, and William Carpenter's essay "On the Correlation of the Physical and Vital Forces." Yehuda Elkana, The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), provides the larger history of these scientific advances, as does Thomas S. Kuhn, "Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery," in his collection of essays, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 66-104. [BACK]

12. William Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, with Their Application to the Training and Discipline of the Mind and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions , 4th ed. (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 633. For examples of Carpenter's use of telegraphic metaphors to describe the nervous system, see 13, 35-38. [BACK]

13. The Autobiography of Mark Twain , ed. Neider, 163-65. [BACK]

14. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mechanism in Thought and Morals (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871). [BACK]

15. For a discussion of hysteria as a reflexive "physiological and pathological action of the ovaria," see Thomas Laycock, A Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women; Comprising an Inquiry into the Nature, Causes, and Treatment of Spinal and Hysterical Disorders (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840). His investigations of hysteria led Laycock to extend the notion of reflex to other mental events; see "On the Reflex Functions of the Brain," British and Foreign Medical Review 19 (1845): 298-311. [BACK]

16. Elin Diamond addresses this subject in "Realism and Hysteria: Toward a Feminist Mimesis," Discourse 13, no. 1 (fall-winter 1990-91): 59-91. However, inasmuch as Diamond broaches the issue of hysteria and mimetic immediacy, she characterizes hysteria as the figure of the breakdown of realism—the malady in which the symptoms seemingly have no referent. I am arguing, differently, that in the cases I cite, science thought it was able, after all, to root hysteria in the body—and hysteria therefore stood as the ideal model for realism, rather than the metaphor for its failure. Hysteria in these years raised the question of whether its symptoms were physiologically rooted; researchers had not come to the answer, yet, that they were not. Helpful on this point is Joan Copjec, "Flavit et Dissipati Sunt," October 18 (1981): 21-40, which discusses Jean-Martin Charcot's initial disposition to treat hysterical symptoms as indexical, physiological signs—as an instance of his more general "indexical neurology." See, too, Charcot's Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Delivered at la Salpêtrière (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1879), where, taking into account the criticisms made of the ''ovarists" (220) and their diagnosis of hysteria, and acknowledging that hysterics may be "guilty of trickery" in their symptoms (205), he nonetheless insists on ailments of the ovaries as causes (if not the cause) of hysterical symptoms, promotes "compression" of the ovaries for relief of symptoms (222-33), and pur-

sues other physiological causes of hysteria. On Charcot's stress on the brain and ovaries (rather than the uterus) in his etiology, on his attention to male hysteria, and on the linkage he made between hysteria and hypnosis, see Martha Noel Evans, Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 28-29, 42. [BACK]

17. Quoted in Gillman, Dark Twins , 139. [BACK]

18. As far back as 1869, for example, Twain claimed that when he wanted to write a newspaper article he would simply "sit down & let it write itself " (letter to Mrs. Jervis Langdon, February 13, 1869, in Love Letters , 67). He similarly claimed in his autobiography that he completed Tom Sawyer only because "the book went on and finished itself" ( Mark Twain in Eruption , 197). In 1893 he remarked to his wife that writing Tom Sawyer, Detective delighted him because "the story tells itself" (letter to Livy Clemens, November 10, 1893, Love Letters , 277). In his tale of how he wrote Pudd'nhead Wilson —in "Those Extraordinary Twins''—he explains that his writing "goes along telling itself" until "it spreads itself into a book" (119). Of Joan of Arc , he said, the novel seemed to write itself, "I merely have to hold the pen" (Twain to Rogers, September 2-3, 1894, in Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers 1893-1909 , ed. Lewis Leary [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], 72-73); later, in the autobiography, he remembered that Joan knew what she had to say without intervention from "Mark Twain" and "said it, without doubt or hesitation" ( Mark Twain in Eruption , 199). [BACK]

19. Letter to Emily G. Hutchings, November 14, 1902, in Mark Twain the Letter Writer , ed. Cyril Clemens (Boston: Meador, 1932), 25. [BACK]

20. In relation to this, see Jan Goldstein, "The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France," Representations 34 (spring 1991): 134-65. Goldstein argues that nineteenth-century male writers, notably Flaubert, appropriated the concept of feminine hysteria, partly because the analogy between literary creation and biological procreation fostered a connection between hysteria and "the labors of male writing" (143). This resulted in a vacillation in such writers as Flaubert between embracing "feminine" passivity and giving rein to "the compensatory desire to exaggerate action beyond measure" (145). A similar vacillation and ambivalence, I argue, occurs in Mark Twain. [BACK]

21. G.J. Barker-Benfield, "The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth-Century View of Sexuality," Feminist Studies 1 (1972): 46. Cynthia Eagle Russett and Charles E. Rosenberg also discuss conceptions of the body and psyche as a closed system of nervous energy or vital (or electrical) force depleted by discharge and strengthened by husbanding. See Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially chap. 4, "The Machinery of the Body." And Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4-7, and idem, "Sexuality, Class, and Role," American Quarterly 25 (May 1973): 151. Also, John L. Greenway recounts common conceptions of human physiol-

ogy (men's especially) as an electrical battery storing nervous energy, in "'Nervous Disease' and Electric Medicine," in Pseudo-Science and Society in Nineteenth-Century America , ed. Arthur Wrobel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 46-73. [BACK]

22. Quite pertinent to Twain's self-sufficient electric system is the model of the bachelor machine that Michel Carrouges, in Les machines célibataires (Paris: Le Chêne, 1954), finds so common in the late nineteenth century—a solely masculine, often electric and masturbatory metaphor for the psychic economy and for artistic creation and mechanical reproduction. For further remarks on this "bachelor-machine logic" of male writers near the end of the nineteenth century, see Alice Jardine, "Of Bodies and Technologies," in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number One , ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 151-58. [BACK]

23. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist , in The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells , ed. Walter J. Meserve (New York: New York University Press, 1960), 209-41. [BACK]

24. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance , 270. [BACK]

25. See, for example, Clyde L. Grimm, " The American Claimant: Reclamation of a Farce," American Quarterly 19 (1967): 86-103. Also Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism , 69, and DeVoto, Mark Twain's America , 288. [BACK]

26. Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 5; on Bell and Watson, see Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), especially 240-50. [BACK]

27. Mark Seltzer, in Bodies and Machines , argues that late-nineteenth-century technologies of representation (typewriters, telephones, telegraphs, typesetting machines, etc.) derailed a preexisting model of continuity from the spiritual and invisible mind, through the writing hand, to visible and physical inscription on paper by interposing their material systems of registration (9-10). I argue, differently, that for Mark Twain this distinction between bodies and machines was not so clearly drawn: the body and its expression looked analogous to telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, and so on, when Twain reduced them to a physical and mechanical plane (a move not incompatible with Seltzer's broader argument about the turn-of-the-century oppositions and correlations of bodies and machines). This mechanical model, moreover, could promise for Twain a continuity in certain forms of expression precisely because of its materiality—though, as we now see, that materiality could then turn around into an impediment to representation. [BACK]

28. Quite relevant to this idea of Huck as an impeding medium is the history of perception that Jonathan Crary outlines in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). Crary argues that conceptions of vision in the nineteenth century deposed the disembodied eye and its transparent seeing by locating vision "within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body" (70). Discoveries of blind spots, afterimages, and less than instantaneous or reliable relays of impulses down nerve pathways showed the physiological

process of vision to be defective, prey to illusion, a basis for "subjective vision." Twain obviously was attuned to the same kind of science of perception, though he alternately took the corporeality of perception and expression as a promise of reliability and as an obstacle. Crary underplays the extent to which locating perception on the same material plane as the beheld object could be conceived as underwriting reliable perception and representation, and circumventing the distortions of interpretation and convention. [BACK]

29. Ann D. Wood, "The 'Scribbling Women' and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote," American Quarterly 23 (1971): 7-9. Also see Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press), 1984, especially chap. 5, which reports on identity-denying tendencies of these women—publishing anonymously, adopting pseudonyms, and so on. [BACK]

30. Judith R. Walkowitz, "Science and the Séance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre in Late Victorian London," Representations 22 (spring 1988): 8-9; R. Lawrence Moore, "The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America," American Quarterly 27 (1975): 201-7; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1980), 82-83. [BACK]

31. Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 56. Jay Martin has also suggested that Twain and his male peers learned from women writers, including lessons about the representation and workings of the unconscious gained from women who wrote and acted as mediums; see Martin, "Ghostly Rentals, Ghostly Purchases: Haunted Imaginations in James, Twain, and Bellamy," in The Haunted Dusk , ed. Kerr et al., 124. [BACK]

32. Mary Poovey argues, with reference to English writers, that "literary men" such as Dickens conceived of their work in terms of the dominant representations of the domestic sphere and domestic labor as a means of attaining an aura of moral authority and nonalienated production; see Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 125. [BACK]

33. Mark Twain's Autobiography , ed. Paine, I, xv. [BACK]

34. It appears, of course, that Twain, typically, was not consistently so sure of the "truth" of his autobiography; Howells observes that despite Twain's aim to tell only the truth, Twain announced one day that he had begun to lie, and "as to veracity [the autobiography] was a failure" ( Literary Friends and Acquaintance , 316). But his excitement about this "truest of all books" ( Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 782) and about the comparative truth of his autobiography was remarkably persistent (see the quotation in Gribben, Mark Twain's Library , II, 540, from "Mark Twain, the Greatest American Humorist, Returning Home, Talks at Length," New York World , October 14, 1900). [BACK]

35. Ann Douglas notes that, because nineteenth-century Americans identified mourning as a private matter, opposed to the public world of mask, convention, and market, they saw it as one of their rare moments for sincere

and heartfelt emotion; see Douglas, "Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1880," American Quarterly 26 (1974): 496. Also see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women , particularly chap. 5, "Mourning the Dead: A Study in Sentimental Ritual." [BACK]

36. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). The authors discuss trance writing and its relation to male impersonation most fully in reference to Charlotte Brontë, whose career they take as a paradigm for many nineteenth-century women writers (see 311-17). [BACK]

37. Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987), 9, 74, 145; Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), 11; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy , particularly chap. 5, "King Romance"; and Michael Davitt Bell, "The Sin of Art: William Dean Howells," in The Problem of American Realism , 17-38. [BACK]

38. Mark Seltzer, in Bodies and Machines , argues similarly that the American male naturalists based creation on a seminal, abstract "force," which women could convert, in accord with the model of thermodynamics, but which nonetheless cancelled the power of female reproduction and made possible "an autonomous (and male) technique of creation" (31-35). [BACK]

39. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography , I, 476. [BACK]

40. Howells makes this remark about Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs , in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 26. [BACK]

41. Howells to Twain, February 14, 1904, Mark Twain-Howells Letters , II, 780. [BACK]

42. Doesticks is quoted in Kerr, Mediums and Spirit Rappers , 35. [BACK]