Harrington tells the story, then, of how he escaped the nervous body and its socially constructed responses to become objective. Thus, his cure—the process he follows, the regimen he adopts, the mode of getting from inside to outside the nervous body and its confinement—promises to have instructive merit. That cure is as central to the logic of Harrington as De Quincey’s cure is to his Confessions. But the claims in Harrington are far greater, for it is not only Harrington’s escape that is being narrated but the transformation of an entire society from one ruled by the nervous body of a mobbish past to an enlightened utopia ruled by objectivity. Because of the precision with which the tale defines the nervous body, Harrington’s escape has a heroic quality to it, as it is a virtually impossible act. His nervous shudder is “involuntary” (TN, 9:182). His condition is “beyond the power” of his “most strenuous voluntary exertion, to control” (TN, 9:8). Montenero himself claims the condition is “difficult, scarcely possible, completely to conquer,” and he fears throughout the tale that it “might recur” (TN, 9:81). Thus, the method that Edgeworth devises to extract Harrington from this tenacious body merits serious attention. On that method the narrator’s voice depends, as does the community of enlightened readers it presupposes.

Given what is at stake and the represented difficulty of attaining it, the cure is decidedly anticlimactic. After proposing to Berenice, Harrington receives an ultimatum from Montenero. He has discovered an unnamed “obstacle” to the union (TN, 9:142), and he insists that Harrington’s only hope is to demonstrate a thorough ability to control himself and his emotions, without knowing the nature of the obstacle. Should he prove incapable “of this necessary self-control” (TN, 9:143), he will never see Berenice again. That night, says Harrington, “I felt the nervous oppression, the dreadful weight upon my chest” (TN, 9:145), and he is visited by the figure of Simon the Jew, who has the voice of Montenero. “My early prepossessions and antipathies, my mother’s presentiments, and prophecies of evil from the connexion with the Monteneros, the prejudices which had so long, so universally prevailed against the Jews, occurred to me. I know all this was unreasonable, but still the thoughts obtruded themselves” (TN, 9:145, emphasis original). To gain control over precisely such hysterical thoughts, Harrington finally adopts a tried and true course the next morning: “to take strong bodily exercise, and totally to change the course of my daily occupations” (TN, 9:145). Through horse riding and an all-male fishing expedition to the country, he explains, “my ideas were forced into new channels” (TN, 9:147), and the old ideas are suspended. “I thus disciplined my imagination at the time when I seemed only to be disciplining an Arabian horse” (TN 9:146). In this manner, “I…medicined my mind” (TN, 9:146, emphasis original). Though he faces subsequent trials and several dangerous moments of isolation at which his hysterical thoughts recur, this incident is the turning point; by practicing a sustained antidote of bodily exercise and outward-directed activity, he grows increasingly like Montenero and less like his younger, impressionable self. Rather than an actual cure of the nervous body, this narrative redefines it. Edgeworth’s illustration of the consequences of representations for the nervous body are extreme, as we have seen. And so this cure poses a new problem. Harrington’s hysteria is initially defined as a permanent inscription on the body, one that constitutes him in the same way that Mrs. Harrington’s excess sensibility has come to constitute her. Thus, although he describes a condition that is beyond self-control, that condition ultimately proves not to be so. He masters his nervous shudder through a simple exercise of self-will and without any of the dramatics described by De Quincey. In consequence, the initial attitude toward his hysteria and its permanence is called into question. Harrington believed his twitch to be “involuntary,” but it never really was; his disorder was not, in fact, permanent.

Because of this redefinition, the problem represented by the tale is not ultimately Harrington’s nervous shudder, which is always containable. Instead, the problem lies in the popular assumptions about nerves, the ones that led Harrington and everyone around him to assume that his shudder was “involuntary” when in fact it was within his power of self-control. In retrospect, those initial assumptions are recontained as unwarranted fears, for Harrington’s body proves far more resilient that anyone believes possible. Many popular prejudices are relegated to the unenlightened past by Harrington. The most prominent is the myth of the nervous body that, once written on, is never free of its nervous inscription. Edgeworth cures the nervous body by situating the theory of nervous inscription as one of the leading examples of crowd delusion.

This redefinition of the nervous body as itself a popular delusion is the centerpiece in the tale’s hidden plot. Many apparent coincidences in the narrative turn out to have been manipulated by Lord Mowbray. He reveals, in a deathbed confession, that he has staged his most elaborate performance, and in it he has positioned Harrington as the Other. In this drama, Mowbray manufactures an extensive sequence of events designed to convince Montenero and Berenice that her young suitor still suffers from his childhood affliction. Among other stage devices, he encourages in Harrington an appearance of excess sensibility in a visit with the Monteneros to the Tower of London, and he arranges to have Fowler dress up as Simon the Jew to induce an apparent nervous fit during the visit to the synagogue. Harrington’s fits have been reactions to the sight not of actual Jews but of actors made up to appear like his image of Simon and thrown in his way at strategic points.^[37] In his most convincing scene, Mowbray arranges for Montenero and Berenice to overhear a staged conversation in which Harrington’s childhood apothecary confides his knowledge of the boy’s ineradicable insanity and mentions the family’s efforts to hide it from the public. Harrington’s disorder thus constitutes the hidden obstacle to marriage raised by Montenero. It is, of course, one of two such “obstacles”; the other is Mr. Harrington’s empty objection to his son’s marrying a Jew. The resolution of these obstacles is frequently mentioned as an avoidance of the conflict rather than an engagement with it. Berenice is unmasked at the last moment as a Christian, and so the marriage can proceed.^[38] The other obstacle is removed in identical fashion. As Montenero concludes, the marriage can go forward because Harrington does not have a hidden “Jewish insanity”; instead, he has only had an “apparent insanity” (TN 9:202). Harrington’s cure is therefore never itself at issue, for he is never really sick. His disorder is misconstrued by a public that is overly willing to believe in the anachronistic fiction of the nervous body.

Although this solution to the problem of Harrington’s cure solves one obstacle to his emergence into the space of objectivity, it creates a new problem. By recontaining the nervous body, Edgeworth compromises the opposite position of critical objectivity. The two positions exist in the tale as interdependent binary opposites, so that one is either a “nervous” embodiment of socially constructed subjectivity or objective and outside the reach of social constructs. This idea of the nervous subject is essential to the idea of an exterior position, because the nervous body, through its definition, brings into being the space of objectivity that it delimits as its non-nervous opposite. For example, Simon’s bag operates throughout the tale as a metaphor for the imprisonment of the socially constructed body. Harrington’s confinement in the bag is figured as both bodily antipathies and uncontrolled sympathies, and it is structured in a binary relation-ship with a position of nonconfinement, a stance outside the now delimited sphere of socially constituted perceptions. Harrington’s confinement in the bag brings into being a space outside the bag, a space of objectivity in which the subject is free from the constitutive force of representations and thus free of the crowd. Without Harrington’s clearly defined hysteria, Montenero’s objectivity is vulnerable to collapse, which is exactly what the narrator describes.

Montenero’s character as the ideal critic is based on his ability to differentiate the real from the represented, the historical fact from the rhetorical effect. His astuteness is indispensable in the criticism of art. But Montenero is also the central example in the tale of the “fear” that Harrington’s hysteria “might recur.” His astuteness fails when he confronts the enigma of Harrington’s body, and this is a failure of singular magnitude, for on this one critical evaluation rests the future of his only child.

The enigma of Harrington’s insanity—the confusion over whether it is real or staged—needs to be seen as the object of an interpretive competition between the dramatist Mowbray and the art critic Montenero, who are engaged in a fight for control over the text of Harrington’s body. In the contest, the critic discovers only after the fact that “he had been strangely imposed upon” by “Mowbray’s artifices” (TN, 9:201), as a result of which he is taken in, finally succumbing to the dramatic power of the performance. Though he is represented as the one character who stands outside the crowd, in misreading Harrington’s body he yields to the crowd’s fear of hysteria, and so his stance of objectivity is undermined at the end.^[39] Indeed, his imminent departure for America with Berenice, to escape Harrington, is itself a perfect example of crowd psychology in action: an hysterical act performed by one who mistakes his own capitulation t0 popular fear for reason. By failing to see through the artifice of Mowbray’s performance and being moved instead to confuse its dramatic power with factual truth, Montenero is finally defined as one of the crowd at Mowbray’s final play, the staging of Harrington’s insanity. The ideal critic is repositioned in that schoolboy gallery or at a seat in the theatre along with the rest of the audience.