Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse by DeLong Anne;

Author:DeLong, Anne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1658994
Publisher: Lexington Books

Robinson’s Galvanic Maniacs

Like the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, figures with flashing eyes and floating hair appear frequently in Robinson’s poetry as traumatized victims of personal loss: the abandoned orphan (“All Alone” and “The Alien Boy”), the racialized Other (“The Lascar” and “The Savage of Aveyron”), and the madman (“The Maniac”). These galvanic muses inspire their subjects (and creators) to greater heights of empathy, as the artists connect creatively with the traumatizing experiences of their creations. Like Mary Shelley’s monster and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Robinson’s maniacs are traumatized creatures whom rage and sorrow have rendered marginalized and abandoned. Although they may achieve temporary, conditional voices, like the Frankenstein monster, their voices are silenced by traumatic rejection and loss. These experiences of loss and abandonment find expression in the violence of rage or the sorrow of despair. Like Coleridge’s and Mary Shelley’s mesmeric muses, Robinson’s galvanized maniacs are mesmerized by traumatic experience, rather than by specific human agents. The removal of the human mesmerist, as in the case of the Ancient Mariner, underscores the agency of the subject as mesmerist—the muse whose trauma galvanizes the sympathetic poet.

A traumatic experience, like Mesmer’s “magnetic crisis,” shocks Robinson’s maniacs into madness. In this case the crisis produces, rather than cures, the disease. A second “magnetic crisis” occurs, however, in the moment of Robinson’s inspiration: a galvanic connection with her muse’s trauma that enables the poet to diagnose the muse’s affliction. In the cases of the mesmeric maniacs discussed below, this diagnosis identifies loss, isolation, and abandonment as the sources of the trauma.

Like Mary Shelley’s creature, Robinson’s outcasts are traumatized by an abandonment that evokes the artist’s sympathy. The speaker of “All Alone” (1800) has her attention arrested by an orphaned little boy, whose flashing eyes and floating hair announce him as mesmeric: “Thy wavy locks but thinly hide / The tears that dim thy blue-eye’s ray.”21 Mesmerized by the loss of his mother, the boy mesmerizes the poet/speaker, who is compelled to ask for and hear his story. Drawn into sympathy with the orphan and channeling her voice through his, Robinson creates a conversational poem between the poet and her muse. While her confession that she has been following him in an attempt to absorb his pain reveals his mesmerizing power, it fails to assuage the boy’s loneliness, an incompleteness that lends poignancy to the poem’s longing mood.

The abandoned orphan of “The Alien Boy” (1800) also experiences a galvanic, traumatic loss. A hermit’s son, young Henry is exiled with his beloved father to a precarious perch on a rocky cliff, from which his “speaking eye / Alternately the stormy scene survey[s] / And his low hovel’s safety.”22 Henry watches in horror as his heroic father Saint Hubert drowns in an attempt to rescue a shipwrecked mariner: “All alone / Young HENRY stood aghast: his Eye wide fix’d; / While his dark locks, uplifted by the storm /Uncover’d met its fury.” As he is mesmerized by the trauma of his loss, young Henry’s flashing eyes

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