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The work aims to explore the theme of mesmerism in Hawthorne’s fiction in the view of philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. My reading links the theme of mesmerism not only to sympathy, blind identification and the event of language but also to allegory between maintaining and dissolving boundaries and differences in The House of the Seven Gables.
Hawthorne's fiction is bound up with sympathy, a key ethical and aesthetic notion in his writing, engaging both the tradition of eighteen-century moral philosophy and Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Mesmerism in the novel belongs to this rhetoric of magnetism. Holgrave’s mesmeric ability is, for instance, referred to as a certain magnetic element in the artist's nature. In the curious psychological condition that overtakes Phoebe when Holgrave reads her his legend, she begins to live only in his thoughts and emotions. The mesmerists become the unseen despot of another. The mesmerist is unseen because the identification between them is blind. His mesmerism also disrupts this sympathy and appears repeatedly in Hawthorn’s writings as a threat to the individuality of the subject. Mesmerism is portrayed in Holgrave's legend as a kind of speech act or performative. The trance state into which she falls when Holgrave reads appears, in other words, to be a kind of literary-effect, an effect of the fictional narrative and its language. Mesmerism is in this scene not only an intersubjective relation, but a relation to language. It is the event of language, of the magic of words. In conclusion, Hawthorne’s romance is an integrative mode seeking to reconcile self and other, past and present, spirit and matter, actual and imaginary through mesmerism.