Agents of Insensibility: Altered States in Victorian Medicine and Fiction

The image of an etherized London in the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has, of course, become a widely recognized sign of modernism. Eliot etherizes the chattering, confining social world of a London evening, using his metaphor to yoke the medical use of ether and the modernist project of overturning Victorian literary and social conventions. In this sense, the opening of “Prufrock” is a coda for the Victorian period. ¹ But Eliot’s ether metaphor also builds on a Victorian tradition of representing “agents of insensibility”—medical technologies for altering consciousness. Mesmerism, opiates, and anesthetics like these caused an enduring sensation because they seemed to vaporize or alter beyond recognition the ordinary attributes of a self: will, perception, disposition, even consciousness. All of these agents can be understood as by-products of Enlightenment science’s “dare to know” ethos, but the murky knowledge they uncovered carried with it a very unenlightened air of superstition, an air reinforced by the medieval and occult paraphernalia that accompanied so many of the experiments. While mesmerists and physicians experimented with inducing altered states, novelists explored the social and epistemological implications of doing so. ² Victorian writers explored emerging ideas about the incoherent depths of selfhood these experiments seemed to plumb. Both medical and literary writing about altered states is suffused with Victorian anxieties about what might lie in these depths. The behavior of a person in an altered state tends not to be congruent with his or her behavior in waking life. Under the spell of mesmerism, subjects performed feats of memory and strength; opiates seemed to turn ordinary people into visionaries, and sometimes sinners; anesthetics, while they sedated, seemed also to arouse both unexplainable mirth and disquieting displays of sexuality. The Victorian fascination with these transformations was a reversal of the usual modes of identification, in that discomfort and terror tended to outweigh sympathy. That terror, though, was also a recognition that we are all potentially vulnerable to the altered states that transform otherwise upright citizens into creatures of instinct devoid of social graces or moral limits—Jekylls into Hydes.