Altered States of Consciousness: Gender, Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse, and Gothic Literature

Abstract

Gothic literature often depicts altered states, including sleep, dreams, nightmares, somnambulism, hypnotism, and mesmerism. This project considers the mind-body question in Gothic literature through a medical humanities lens informed by medical knowledge contemporary to the selected long nineteenth-century literary works. In particular, these works represent altered states of consciousness in the form of sexual difference and the ill (often feminized) body through the Gothic trope of the vampire. My discussion includes writers with significant access to medical knowledge, including John Keats, John Polidori, and Bram Stoker. I also examine texts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and James Malcolm Rymer, allowing me to consider more popular perspectives on medicine while still focusing on nineteenth-century vampire texts. John Brown’s The Elements of Medicine is threaded throughout my dissertation because of its significance to nineteenth-century notions of health and illness.