Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction 9781503632042

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Writing the Mind

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Writing the Mind Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

H A N N A H WA L S E R

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Stanford University Press Stanford, California

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S ta n f o r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s Stanford, California ©2022 by Hannah Walser. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Walser, Hannah, author. Title: Writing the mind : social cognition in nineteenth-century American fiction / Hannah Walser. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: L C C N 2021045423 (print) | L C C N 2021045424 (ebook) | I S B N  9781503630079 (cloth) | I S B N 9781503632042 (ebook) Subjects: L C S H : American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Philosophy of mind in literature. | Social perception in literature. Classification: L C C P S 377 .W 35 2022 (print) | L C C P S 377 (ebook) | D D C  813/.309353—dc23/eng/20220324 L C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045423 L C ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045424

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Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane Cover art: Moonlight, by Winslow Homer Typeset by Newgen North America in 10/14.4 New Baskerville ITC Pro and Walbaum

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Contents

Introduction: Toward a Literary History of Cognition

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Boundedness

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Epistemic Reality

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Causal Power

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Responsibility

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Coda: The Curtain

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Acknowledgments 189 Notes 195 Bibliography 241 Index 255

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Writing the Mind

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I n t ro d u c t i o n Toward a Literary History of Cognition

Who Reads an American Mind?

This book begins at the intersection of two pieces of conventional wisdom.1 The first holds that novels are especially good at—may even have as their telos—helping us imagine other people’s interior worlds. Academics and general readers alike have doubtless seen the psychological studies claiming to demonstrate that reading fiction (and specifically “literary” fiction, at that) improves our ability to reason about other minds or even to empathize with others’ emotions: we can rationalize a novel-reading habit, such research suggests, by pointing to its positive impact on “social acumen” or “leadership.”2 From the perspective of literary scholars, these claims may seem beneath rebuttal: their corpora are too sloppily selected, their concepts too historically and sociologically crude, and their premises too reliant on neoliberal assumptions about what kinds of experiences and activities have value. Yet, as Dorothy Hale has recently argued, naïvely positivistic attempts to assess the cognitive and interpersonal impact of fiction reading have something substantial in common with the “ethics of alterity” that subtends many critical arguments for the aesthetic and political significance of particular novels or the novel as a whole. Novel theorists have tended to pose sophisticated questions about “how best to honor otherness through

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and as narrative representation,” whereas psychologists have tended to assume that narrative representation automatically and transparently makes the other accessible—but both approaches rest on the assumption that, in Hale’s words, “the novel has a privileged responsibility to the depiction and deployment of otherness.”3 Insofar as representing alterity entails representing other individuals’ thought processes and perceptual experiences, moreover, scholars of literature and cognition, whether trained primarily in literary studies or in the mind sciences, have tended to agree that “Theory of Mind” (henceforth ToM) represents an indispensable component of novel-reading. Also known as “mindreading”—a telling metaphor to which I will return in a moment—ToM labels the capacity to identify mental states in other human beings and, importantly though less famously, in oneself. ToM explains and predicts other people’s behavior by attributing propositional mental states to them: the competent ToM user, canonically assumed to be any neurotypical human above about four years old, understands that other people have mental states different from their own, that those mental states include representations of the world and attitudes about those representations, and that those representations and attitudes have a causal relationship to their bearer’s actions.4 For Lisa Zunshine, ToM is Why We Read Fiction, as it is Why . . . We Care about Literary Characters for Blakey Vermeule: both authors suggest that fictional characters succeed in captivating us because they activate a set of relatively stable cognitive heuristics that we typically use to think about real minds. At its most extreme, this view suggests that, when it comes to ToM, our brains don’t particularly care whether “a passing piece of tantalizing mind stuff ” is attached to a human body or a textual creature: “once hailed” by the appropriate stimulus—something that acts with even a hint of intention—our mind “crank[s] up its reasoning powers” in response.5 The poverty of the stimulus, one might say, applies to other minds at least as much as to syntax, and our brains must consequently be prepared to spin a complex mental model out of very thin materials; fiction simply “capitalizes on and stimulates” this preexisting capacity.6 The second commonplace, less widely held than the first but also subjected to less critical scrutiny, is that many familiar characters from

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nineteenth-century American fiction seem to have no insides. Bartleby and Ahab, Arthur Gordon Pym and Dupin, even Hester Prynne and Miles Coverdale, generations of readers have agreed, repel psychological understanding. In the spatialized metaphors that often structure theories of character, these figures are less “round” or “deep” than we expect, offering little traction for the attribution of complex inner lives; or perhaps they are “deep,” as the mid-twentieth-century Americanist critic Richard Chase suggested, but simultaneously “narrow and predictable,” like the bed of a stream that never deviates from its path.7 Chase’s peers in the 1950s and 1960s agreed that something about nineteenth-century American novels seemed to inhibit our usual inclination to see fictional characters as represented persons. Despite Americans’ constant “praise of the ‘individual,’” Lionel Trilling observed, “we have contrived that our literature should have no individuals in it”; perhaps “character” did not even exist “in nineteenthcentury American fiction,” Richard Poirier suggested, at least not “in the unfractured form it usually takes in English fiction of the same period.”8 In the intervening half-century, Americanists have rightly learned to be wary of claims like Poirier’s—broad contrasts that reify national difference by implying that US literature expresses a unique and historically consistent national character. Subsequent generations of scholars have exploded the extraordinarily limited canon of the midcentury critics, identifying in the process a literary tradition much less susceptible to totalizing narratives.9 Perhaps precisely because these mid-century observations about the crudeness or emptiness of American literary characters never quite rose to the level of contestable claims, however, they have never quite been exorcised, either. Jane Tompkins, working to recuperate popular and sentimental fictions of the nineteenth century—in other words, writing with a critical agenda diametrically opposed to that of Trilling, Chase, and Poirier— nonetheless notes in passing that “the already-constituted social world that must exist in order for people to be individuals in a social sense” is missing from James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, meaning that his characters cannot function as “in-depth psychological portraits.”10 Sharon Cameron’s The Corporeal Self, which seemed to an early reviewer to be

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a “deliberately perverse work” in its rejection of “traditional studies of Hawthorne and Melville,” nonetheless explicitly accepts and extends the mid-century critics’ identification of a “non-mimetic version  .  .  . of ‘character’” in American fiction that troubles “the boundaries between persons” that the British tradition takes for granted.11 We will see in a moment that even in the twenty-first century—when methods imported from cultural studies and book history have bolstered Americanist scholars’ focus on local idiosyncrasies rather than national generalizations—the intuition persists. Either of these commonplaces—that nineteenth-century American characters often seem to lack inner lives, and that novels stand or fall by their ability to evoke other minds—can of course be debated on its own terms, but Writing the Mind is concerned with the implicit syllogism that concludes the two premises. If the inhabitants of nineteenthcentury US novels fail to “hail us” as minds do—to offer fodder for our mindreading abilities—then those books, it would seem, cannot really be novels, or at least cannot be good ones. Texts that so persistently “thwart readerly identification” with their characters, as Jordan Stein acknowledges in a recent essay (adding one more entry to the long list of critics who suspect that something is off about American represented minds), often do not seem like novels at all.12 Few people, including me (and also Stein), would accept this conclusion, which seems to require a remarkably narrow definition of the novel. In a sense, one could use the first premise of this unacceptable syllogism to reject the second: Ahab and Arthur Gordon Pym do not seem to have minds we can access, but we want to say that the texts they inhabit are novels, so the novel must not be all about mindreading. Just as there was a grain of truth in the Americanist’s intuition, though— the experience of thwartedness, friction, or resistance that attends attempts to understand nineteenth-century characters’ behavior in psychological terms—I would like to preserve the novel theorist’s sense that interpersonal cognition constitutes a central preoccupation of the genre. In the pages that follow, I will argue that many key texts of nineteenth-century American literature depart from the normative model of the novel identified by Hale, not by ignoring the problem of

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other minds or by failing to adequately stimulate our ToM capacities, but by prompting readers to entertain nonpropositional methods of explaining and predicting behavior. By representing minds that are neither transparent to themselves nor legible to others and characters that behave in a way inconsistent with explanations based on beliefs, intentions, or reasons, the texts in this study probe the limits of typical ToM and offer an ad hoc patchwork of alternative paradigms. In other words, Writing the Mind defines these familiar but problematic nineteenth-century American fictions as points in a space of sociocognitive experimentation. Fictional texts are not simply artifacts in need of explanation, but are themselves repositories of explanatory paradigms. Novels both represent human actions under a certain description and—through formal structures, stylistic decisions, and explicit narratorial commentary— offer guidelines on how to explain, interpret, and predict those actions. The information conveyed, withheld, or hinted at in a novel’s representation of a character’s cognitive processes offers us a kind of negative image of the common-sense psychological knowledge that the reader can be expected to share; it also hints at the idiosyncratic priority and probability that the author assigns to particular mental causes, idiosyncrasies that the reader may over the course of the novel come to share. Fictional narratives, in other words, model ways of answering the question, “why did he/she/they do that?” Every novel is a language game in which some kinds of answers to that question are felicitous and others are not—and the rules of that game may be similar or quite dissimilar to the rules that govern similar exchanges in the reader’s real life. The task of the literary historian of social cognition, this book suggests, is to determine the “when,” the “where,” and the “who” of the many ways of answering “why” questions: to understand why certain heuristics thrive in some times and places but not others, how certain genres accommodate or exclude certain kinds of psychological models, and what kinds of interdependencies relate the social and political location of a text’s author and characters to the theories of mind that the text puts forward. Writing the Mind represents an attempt to make sense of these interdependencies in one relatively

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circumscribed literary tradition; it also represents a wager that the best way to understand those interdependencies is to attend closely to the formal features of the fictions that investigate them. Mindwriting

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As pivotal as ToM has been in cognitive and (especially) developmental psychology, any overview of the concept is complicated by the fact that its scope and mechanisms remain contested. Before diving more deeply into the nineteenth-century US context, then, it will be helpful to look more closely at ToM—not to offer a comprehensive explanation of ToM as psychologists and philosophers understand it, but rather to highlight the aspects of mindreading that literary reading can help us understand. Precisely because these aspects are best suited to humanistic, historical, and hermeneutic modes of explanation, they have been comparatively neglected in the vast body of mindreading research that the cognitive sciences have produced so far—but I will identify a few kindred approaches from both philosophers and empirical investigators along the way. One of the virtues (or vices) that a literary scholar brings to the cognitive table is the habit of putting pressure on metaphors. We might begin by asking, then: to what extent does mindreading live up to its name? Since this psychological term rests on a metaphor that specialized use has rendered nearly invisible, unpacking its implicit comparison between interpreting other minds and decoding texts may help restore the complexity of the phenomenon it describes. The cognitive scientist Cecilia Heyes begins this process in her recent book Cognitive Gadgets by pointing out that, although mindreading is often represented as an innate capacity shaped by natural selection and scripted by our genes, reading, in contrast, is not innate but entirely learned. For Heyes, who argues that our inborn cognitive toolkit is considerably more lightweight than many psychologists assume, the analogy helps demonstrate that social learning can account for some behaviors that might otherwise feel as though they could not possibly be culturally acquired. Reading, after all, has specialized neural circuitry and can be disrupted by genetically inherited developmental disorders—features

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that would probably be taken as evidence for its innateness if historical and anthropological evidence did not make clear that literacy is a fairly recent and far from universal human invention.13 Reading also shares with ToM a feature that psychologists who argue for a mindreading “module” are apt to play up: its automaticity and relative imperviousness to conscious control.14 We mindread “effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously,” Simon Baron-Cohen observes, comparing our surprise on seeing the mechanisms of ToM exposed to “the apocryphal man who was shocked to discover he had been speaking in prose all his life.”15 Reading tout court represents a similarly opaque learned ability: a typical literate adult not only need not make an effort to read, but finds it difficult or impossible not to read a word placed in front of them. (None of which prevents a Gertrude Stein or a Harryette Mullen from productively interfering with this involuntary process.) As it happens, recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that this picture collapses two distinct types of social cognition and elides many others. There is good neurological evidence that “explicit mindreading”—directly and often verbally ascribing mental states to other people—operates relatively independently of a much less conscious form of interpreting others’ actions, one that “reads” basic attitudes like attention and desire from bodily movements and postures.16 Even if we define mindreading rather narrowly as the attribution, whether explicit or implicit, of propositional attitudes to other people, this attribution involves multiple cognitive processes—some of them indeed relatively modular and effortless, others requiring conscious verbal reasoning, and many of them embarrassingly faulty.17 Some philosophers, however, have pointed out that explaining and predicting others’ behavior on the basis of propositional attitudes accounts for only a relatively small fraction of our day-to-day social cognition. In practice, we often use “representations of a person’s character traits, their situation, or their social role,” not representations of their beliefs or desires, to understand and anticipate their actions; in social situations with a consistent structure—an interaction between waiter and customer in a restaurant, for instance—we can predict others’ actions perfectly well without knowing or caring about their mental states.18

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(Indeed, attempting to take those mental states into account might actually make our predictions less accurate and our own actions less likely to accomplish our goals.) Nor are predicting and explaining the only things we can do with other people’s minds: we use attributions of mental states to persuade, deceive, assign credit or blame, evaluate testimony, gather information about nonmental objects and events, and even to induce other people to behave in more predictable and explainable ways. The philosopher Kristin Andrews coined the term “pluralistic folk psychology” to contrast her approach with previous work in the philosophy of mind that treated reasoning about propositional attitudes as the paradigmatic case of social cognition.19 Introducing this theoretical paradigm into cognitive literary studies, which has shared the singular focus on ToM characteristic of traditional philosophy of mind, brings (at least) three benefits. The first is an enriched descriptive vocabulary: rather than forcing literary representations of social cognition, and indeed the sociocognitive scenario of reading itself, into the shape of propositional attitudes, pluralistic folk psychology suggests that texts often prompt us to do things with characters’ minds beyond populating them with propositional mental states. Readers might be encouraged, for instance, to taxonomize characters on the basis of personality traits; to notice, absorb, or question the social scripts that produce characters’ behavior; to generalize traits like credibility or intelligence from a represented person to a real individual or group; and, crucially, to take the text’s model of a character’s cognition as an epistemic guide for their understanding and experience of their own thinking. This last possible use of represented minds points to a second benefit: by exposing the plurality of heuristics and models that individuals use to navigate their interpersonal worlds, pluralistic folk psychology highlights the flexible, ad hoc quality of sociocognitive practices— implying in turn that these practices can be modified, supplemented, or abandoned when necessary. If social cognition is not fixed and uniform but malleable and plural, fictional texts may take a more active role in its development: rather than being parasitic on an inherited

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capacity for mindreading, fiction can represent social worlds and sociocognitive strategies that differ from those to which a reader is accustomed in day-to-day life—nudging them, for instance, to attribute more actions to consistent personality traits and fewer to social roles (or vice versa) by modeling such explanations as effective and appealing. And because prose fictions in particular are (and have been for at least a couple of centuries) mass-produced and widely circulated, the cumulative effect of such influences can produce something we might recognize as cultural change. Fiction, like pedagogy or parent-child interaction or religious ritual, can be a tool of what Tadeusz Zawidzki terms mindshaping, “making populations more cooperative, homogeneous, and predictable.” “One of the most effective ways of counteracting potential cognitive heterogeneity,” Zawidzki explains, “is through public language.”20 In the process, fiction and other forms of public language may end up making discrete populations more different from each other by nurturing culturally specific models of cognition and norms of social explanation and interpretation. Cultural variability is the last and, I argue, the most important item in Heyes’s survey of similarities between mindreading and reading; the third key benefit of the pluralistic folk psychology framework is a more robust understanding of this variability. Because psychological research has an overwhelming bias toward what have been labeled WEIRD societies—“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”21—many empirical studies of mindreading take for granted that the concepts and heuristics structuring those societies’ theories of mind apply always and everywhere. Even when Heyes herself points to evidence that children in different countries acquire cognitive concepts in very different developmental sequences and on different timelines, she assumes that the conceptual ontology of ToM is not only consistent but also, in some basic sense, correct.22 In this respect, Heyes tiptoes toward but ultimately stops short of a more radical conclusion. Does mindreading reflect some basic set of ontological givens, albeit with local variations, or does the composition of the mind actually change over historical time and cultural space?

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Considerable evidence hints that the latter assumption may be more fruitful than the former—but because the evidence is dispersed across disciplines, it has proven difficult for even systematic thinkers about social cognition to integrate.23 Psychological anthropologists like Tanya Luhrmann have documented considerable cross-cultural diversity among theories of mind, where “culture” is a fractal term: at a 2011 conference titled “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” contributors highlighted cognitive models specific to communities defined by linguistic and/or geographical markers (for instance, speakers of Ewe in West Africa), ethnic background (for instance, Indigenous-heritage families in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States), and even profession (for instance, “entertainment magicians”).24 Linguists and linguistic anthropologists like Eve Danziger have found that even seeming sociocognitive truisms—for instance, that a lie is only a lie if the speaker intends to mislead—fail to obtain in cultures that do not habitually track intention in everyday conversation—such as, for instance, the Mopan Maya.25 And psychologists like Jill de Villiers have shown through carefully constructed experiments with children that “mental verbs plus sentential complements”—verbs of thought or communication that take a propositional statement as their complement—are integral to the process of learning that other people may have false beliefs.26 In other words, we need sentences like “She thinks the box is full of candy” not simply in order to express the reality of others’ world-divergent mental states, but to grasp the existence of those mental states in the first place. Each form of evidence described above was collected in accordance with different disciplinary norms and theoretical presuppositions. Yet all of these examples find, significantly, that linguistic constructions— both everyday and extraordinary—form the raw material of our sociocognitive models. Luhrmann in particular recognizes discourse and figurative language as a key means by which local theories of mind adapt, consolidate, and interface with one another: by talking as if minds have certain features, we can not only come to perceive those features in others, but can induce our own phenomenal consciousness to take that form.27 Luhrmann has studied such phenomena in relatively small adult speech communities—psychiatrists at a hospital,

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evangelical Christians at church—where new members learn particular cognitive models and practices through tacit instruction and conversation; De Villiers and colleagues have shown that, at least among English and German speakers, children develop an understanding of other minds as having specific properties—for instance, sentence-like things called “thoughts” or “beliefs” that can either accord with or depart from perceptual reality—in part by picking up on linguistic cues. As someone who grew up in a fairly secular, English-speaking, EuroAmerican community, I am primed to understand the former pedagogical scenario as a case of explicitly magical or metaphoric thinking and the latter as gently guided empirical inference: after all, someone like me may be tempted to say, thoughts really are propositions or something quite like them, whereas they really don’t come from divine intervention. Yet putting these cases in dialogue with one another— the adult learning, for instance, to understand and experience some of their thoughts as coming from God (as Luhrmann’s evangelical informants do); the child learning to understand thoughts as sentences that can be the object of different propositional attitudes—not only reveals similar mechanisms behind the two; it also opens up the possibility of a grander theoretical and methodological perspective. Read in light of an “anthropological theory of mind”—really, the multifarious but patterned theories of mind that anthropological research has discovered—the American child hearing a sentence like “He thought he found his ring, but . . . it was really a bottle cap” is not simply processing a statement of fact, but being trained in an ontology of mind and a method of explaining behavior that are characteristic of their community. 28 Studies like De Villiers’s indicate that something as small-scale and, in ordinary conversation, infrequently noticed as syntax makes a significant difference to the way we understand other minds. The way we talk—and, I am arguing, write—about other minds creates the features that our community understands them to have. When English or American novels represent the mind as an intangible container for propositional mental states that play a causal role in generating behavior, they are not simply reflecting the “Euro-American modern secular theory of mind,”29 they are producing it—and if they stop ascribing those features to minds and start ascribing others, as most of

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the fictions I discuss in this book do, they loosen the grip of that theory and open up space (however limited and context-specific) for others. The diversity of cognitive models that this process of mindwriting creates, together with the imbrication of minds and artifacts (verbal or otherwise) that it implies, suggests that in addition to the cognitive sciences, we need something like a history of cognition—not simply an intellectual history of theories of the mind, but a history of minds as they have been made up in different times and places.30 Neither mainstream cognitive science nor cognitive literary studies has taken this possibility on board; if either discipline did, they might realize how profoundly they need each other. It is not simply that literary texts, as historical documents, can illuminate models of mind that are no longer extant—both in their explicit statements about how minds work and in their formal and linguistic choices. (We cannot subject a nineteenth-century American reader to functional magnetic resonance imaging, but we may be able to reconstruct that reader’s assumptions about how the mind works by noticing what about characters’ cognition seems worth mentioning and what goes unsaid.) Nor is it simply that literary fictions can construct social systems designed to challenge and reshape interpersonal cognition in particular: storyworlds in which other minds are accessible only through unfamiliar types of evidence (or not at all), narratives in which characters’ actions defy causal explanation on the basis of mental states. This book argues that fictional texts can in fact do both of these things, but only because of a more fundamental capacity: they, like any other use of language to describe and manipulate the interpersonal world, participate in producing the mental entities and processes they represent. The success or failure of the readings in this book will show what cognitive science and the philosophy of mind can bring to the study of prose fiction, especially when their categories are treated as historically and culturally bounded. But I hope that this overview of the field has shown that literary studies, as a discipline grounded in a body of texts that use language in highly patterned and unusual ways, and as a methodology that specializes in the context-sensitive unpeeling of linguistic possibility, has everything to bring to the study of social cognition.31

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Histories of Science, Histories of Minds

The preceding section might inspire two related objections. First, one might reasonably wonder whether the history of scholarly and medical theories of mind—the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the protosciences of mind like phrenology and physiognomy that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—is really so different from what I called the history of minds or the history of cognition. If social cognition is one’s concern, why not start with the explicit theories of the concepts most relevant to it—affection, perhaps, or will, or common sense—that writers of the period would have recognized? And (objection number two) isn’t it presentist not to do so? A construct like “propositional attitude” did not really exist for most of the nineteenth century, even if propositional attitudes themselves did—and if philosophy carves up cognition in significantly different ways now than it did in the time of Charles Brockden Brown or even Henry James, neuroscience and psychology are more distant still from their nineteenthcentury ancestors. The history of cognition, as I sketched its premises in the previous section, does not progress: scientists know more about how brains work now than they did in 1800, but the theories of mind that ordinary people use to navigate their interpersonal worlds are not somehow more true or more effective than they were in 1800, in part because their efficacy is linked not to their correspondence with neural processes but to their correspondence with culturally specific and evolving ontologies of mind. If that assertion is true, however, using contemporary—and, sometimes, overtly anachronistic—concepts to understand nineteenth-century representations of social cognition seems to grant the present moment an unearned epistemic authority. Explaining my selective use of contemporary concepts should help provide a window onto this book’s relationship to the nineteenthcentury mind sciences and to the literary historical scholarship that has abundantly addressed them—so it makes sense to begin with the second objection. In a glib mood, I might respond that I am, inevitably, using the terms appropriate to my own place and time in the historical and cultural space of cognitive models: because this book aims to be useful to scholars across several twenty-first-century disciplines,

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its analysis should be grounded in theoretical paradigms those readers will recognize, even when that means giving entities like “beliefs” and “intentions” a different, more prominent role than they had in most nineteenth-century treatises on the mind. More seriously, the aim of this book is not to explain one period’s cognitive models in terms of another’s—not to redescribe the features of nineteenth-century minds in twenty-first-century terms—but to situate its key literary texts in a continuous tradition of thinking about social cognition that took place outside of the sciences altogether. Much as Joan Richardson has traced an understanding of the aesthetic as “the homeostatic function of the life of the mind” from Emerson through pragmatism to contemporary neuroscience, or as Joshua Gang finds in modernism and in behaviorist psychology alike a skepticism about the epistemic validity of introspection, I argue that nineteenth-century American fictions were tackling with literary tools (character, syntax, narrative structure) a set of problems in social cognition that future scholars would approach with the disciplinary tools of psychology, anthropology, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science.32 By modeling what happens to social cognition when propositional mental states lack epistemic utility and causal efficacy, my central texts map the relationships between suprapersonal realities—legal categories; political hierarchies; power differentials based on race, gender, and wealth; population density or dispersion— and the heuristics for explaining and predicting behavior that are activated in small-scale interpersonal interactions. Rather than symptomatically reflecting, or even skeptically troping on, a historically specific theory of mind, my texts actively theorize the interdependencies between the sociopolitical dynamics that literary scholars often frame as explanatory and the linguistic representations that we frame as in need of explanation. In other words, these texts evince in their narrative form and syntax a critical awareness of cognition as culturally and historically situated—making them more like theoretical interlocutors for the sciences of mind than like objects to be decoded through the sciences of mind, whether historical or contemporary. Still, one might expect eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical interlocutors to be the most productive ones:

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why not Benjamin Rush or Silas Weir Mitchell rather than Elizabeth Anscombe or Alison Gopnik? The answer is simple: the major figures in psychiatry, neuroscience, and physiological psychology in the nineteenth century did not address—at least not with any consistency or theoretical explicitness—processes of typical social cognition. This predicament is not unique: they also rarely addressed the typical cognitive mechanisms of memory, attention, language production, and a host of other functions that form the backbone of any contemporary psychology textbook. Before the advent of research psychology in the late nineteenth century, the sciences (or parasciences) of mind had such a profoundly different relationship to nonpathological cognition applied to ordinary tasks and situations that it is, if anything, slightly ahistorical to treat the nineteenth-century physiology of the nervous system as a systematic investigation of the mind. By addressing this disciplinary transformation, I hope not only to explain why contemporary psychology has more in common with nineteenth-century literature than with nineteenth-century protopsychology, but also to identify this book’s points of alignment with and departure from the materialist focus of recent literary historical work on the mind sciences. For Americanists interested in the impact of the nineteenth-century sciences of mind on literary character and form, theories of the nervous system’s structure and functioning have provided a valuable point of intersection between materialisms old and new. On the one hand, works like Samuel Otter’s now-classic Melville’s Anatomies or Ellen Samuels’s more recent Fantasies of Identification productively frame nineteenth-century scientific attempts to physically localize mental faculties, from Samuel George Morton’s craniological classifications to the Fowler brothers’ phrenology, as the medical arm of biopolitical regimes of racial, ethnic, and class difference. By promoting a vision of interiority as materially legible, these protoforensic technologies not only nurtured state attempts to classify and control populations in the name of hierarchies of race, gender, and ability, but also modeled minds themselves as aggregates of physically manipulable, biologically determined parts. Such readings emphasize the alignment of scientific (or, sometimes, parascientific) methodologies with state

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power—which, in the nineteenth-century United States, meant white supremacist patriarchy.33 Another strand of Americanist criticism, however, sees subversive potential in nineteenth-century fictions’ appropriation and recontextualization of the mind sciences—not in “anatomies,” with that term’s negative connotations of rigidity, but in physiologies. Perhaps best exemplified by Justine Murison’s work on nervous illness and Matthew Rebhorn’s on embodied minds, this critical approach zeroes in on nineteenth-century neuroscientific phenomena—sympathy, reflex action, mesmerism—that seem to dissolve politically salient differences: between body and mind, between one self and another, between voluntary and involuntary action.34 Through the investigation of the nervous system, the narrative goes, “the autonomous, masculine, bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century” was, consciously or not, “engaged in the diligent pursuit . . . of its own deconstruction.”35 Texts that exploit these dissolutions need not thereby align themselves with revolutionary politics: both Murison and Rebhorn, for instance, have written on Robert Montgomery Bird’s proudly racist Sheppard Lee, which plays with the physiological determinants of phenomenal experience to ultimately reactionary ends.36 Still, the conception of nervous tissue (and, at least in Rebhorn’s and Meredith Farmer’s readings of Melville, other organic and inorganic substances) as a kind of “vibrant matter”—animate, agential, affective, and, as matter, stubbornly resistant to ideology—aligns these readings of nineteenth-century physiology with new materialist ontologies.37 Although these two critical lineages focus on different subfields of medicine and pull toward different (though complementary) political conclusions, both emphasize not the epistemology but the materialist ontology of nineteenth-century minds. This makes sense, since the scientists of the period did the same: physicians and other investigators of the mind were fascinated by the physical basis of mental disorders and the capacity of material substances and forces—electricity, “nervous fluid,” “animal magnetism”—to shape the psychic life of individuals or nations. Nineteenth-century science rarely reckoned, however, with the mind as an interpreter of other minds, whether in medical or experimental contexts, in public lectures and performances like

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those staged by mesmerists, or in ordinary life—and, as a result, accounts of nineteenth-century literature’s imbrication with the mind sciences have elided this exceedingly common cognitive function as well. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists did not often publicly reflect upon their own epistemes, scrutinizing the sources of their knowledge of patients’ minds and bodies mainly when they found themselves in the tricky territory of what Isaac Ray termed the “medical jurisprudence of insanity.” Making decisions about the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, especially when the patient’s account of their own experiences conflicted with the accounts of family members, representatives of the state, or other doctors, required clinicians to reckon with the possibility of ambiguous or feigned symptoms, raising the question of what we can know about other minds at least implicitly. The archives of this practical reasoning are an important resource in the history of cognition, and I will return to their significance in a moment—but it is important to note that an individual’s ability to understand other minds was not self-consciously used as an indicator of either disease or health. Social cognition, then, apparently did not strike nineteenth-century clinicians as a kind of reasoning that merited special diagnostic or descriptive attention. A patient’s failure to love his spouse or to provide for his children might serve as evidence of “moral insanity” or a disorder of the will, but would not in itself prompt questions about the patient’s ability to understand the mental states of others. Most of all, the question of how a typical individual makes sense of other minds—what processes and heuristics structure our explanations and predictions of others’ behavior; what clues help us infer another person’s intentions or feelings—was not, in the era of Poe and Melville, a scientific question. Here, too, the mind sciences of two centuries ago diverge from our current disciplinary assumptions. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did psychology emerge as a research discipline distinct from psychiatry, with the goal not of treating mentally ill patients but of understanding the typical mind. Around the same time, as Elizabeth Lunbeck and others have documented, psychiatry itself began to conceptualize mental illness as a quantitative exaggeration of typical cognitive and emotional processes rather than as a qualitatively

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distinct disease entity. Partly out of a desire to expand their profession’s reach and authority, psychiatrists consciously adopted for the first time a program of “producing and compiling knowledge of the everyday,” fiercely differentiating themselves from their materialist predecessors who, in the words of one early twentieth-century practitioner, “sought for exclusive salvation in the urine and faeces.”38 Some theory of the normally functioning mind was of course necessary for any medical understanding of mental pathologies, but the goal of quantifying and, in a sense, standardizing typical sensory and cognitive processes had come into view only with the advent of psychophysics in the 1860s, which accelerated the integration of physiological laboratory work and philosophical introspection. A work like William James’s The Principles of Psychology, which magnificently integrates neuromuscular reflex arcs (physiology), optical illusions (laboratory psychology), hysterical trances (clinical psychiatry) and hypnotic ones (spiritualism), and the phenomenology of forgetting (introspection)— among much else, of course—indicates the rich space of scientific and parascientific theories of mind available to a scholar at century’s end. In the process, though, it also illustrates the effort and erudition needed to synthesize the findings of a Pierre Janet—the psychiatrist whose work with mentally ill women at the Salpêtrière placed him in a lineage extending directly back to Philippe Pinel, the eighteenthcentury innovator of the “moral treatment” for mental illness—with those of a Hermann von Helmholtz, pioneer in the significantly newer psychophysical tradition. Reaction times meant as little to Janet, treating his hysterics, as traumatic dissociation meant to Helmholtz in his laboratory; James’s attempt at a unified theory accounts for his status as founder of psychology as we know it. And yet, even in James’s tome of more than 1,300 pages, minds exist primarily in relation to objects and sensations: socks, shoes, trouserlegs; “a copy of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Florentine Academy”; a horse-car; a hallucinated candle and an imagined horse with wings; and of course, always, the self—both bodily and mental—which gets an entire chapter of its own.39 Things in the world and thoughts in my mind: these, for James, are the stuff of psychology. In his chapter on

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“Attention,” James offers a partial list of the stimuli that capture humans’ attention instinctively and automatically: “strange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, metallic things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.”40 The list is beautiful but perplexing for what it lacks: other humans. Apart from “words,” which offer an abstracted and materialized register of human intention, we find no indication of the human faces, voices, and bodies that we now know to be among the most salient stimuli for typical humans from birth.41 The point, of course, is not to criticize James for failing to mention a fact that had not yet been confirmed, but to emphasize the basic asociality of Principles and of psychology itself in the nineteenth century. The psychiatric practitioners of the prepsychological era sometimes used an unexamined model of typical social behavior to identify deviance as a symptom of mental illness, but their theories generally focused on the microscale of the solitary mind or the macroscale of what would now be called epidemiology: societal factors, often related to the upsetting of longstanding social hierarchies (the expansion of the franchise, the abolition of slavery, young women’s financial independence), that ostensibly accounted for greater incidence of individual madness.42 Indeed, these two scales often collapsed into one another: mental faculties were imagined as an unruly population in need of management, while the collective mind of the nation seemed susceptible to nervous illness.43 Yet the mesoscale of interpersonal interaction existed neither as an explanatory tool nor as a phenomenon in need of explanation; rather, it tended to appear as an untheorized, tacitly unscientific context for diagnosis and treatment. James’s textbook indicates that, even as experimental psychology claimed the terrain of typical reasoning and perception for its own, it continued to elide typical social cognition. Of course, the fact that a scientific discipline does not explicitly theorize a particular phenomenon does not mean it has nothing to say about it. One could profitably attempt to describe the model of social cognition implied in, say, what Courtney E. Thompson calls the “language of propensity” that phrenologists used to describe the supposed neurological causes of destructive or antisocial behavior; such

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a reading might compare “propensities” to the concept of “dispositions” in philosophy of mind, explore the kinds of individual and institutional behavior that the language of propensity licenses or forecloses, and investigate the way that propensity-talk interacts with other kinds of explanatory and predictive frameworks.44 But since such a model is only implicit, it is no more (and possibly less) theoretically reflective than the models of social cognition put forward in other, decidedly nonscientific venues—including works of literature. Precisely because, as Murison has noted, the “disciplinary consolidation” of neuroscience and psychology came relatively late in the nineteenth century,45 prepsychology work relevant to the contemporary sciences and philosophy of mind will be apt to come from unexpected places. While we should expect to find scientific concepts percolating through popular literature and media of the nineteenth century, as Murison, Britt Rusert, and many others have shown that they did, we should also expect to find popular or folk concepts of the mind in domains that we now consider “scientific.”46 Drawing upon the scholarship of the historian of medicine Akihito Suzuki, I am making a case here for, if not “the primacy of the lay over the medical,” at least “the independence” of folk psychological reasoning about the mind “from the psychiatry practiced by doctors.”47 While clinical and scientific texts will occasionally appear in this book, then, it will be primarily as narratives of interpersonal cognition—scenes in which one person has to make sense of what another knows, wants, or intends—that engage ad hoc theories of mind rather than as sources of specifically disciplinary knowledge. In other words, I approach these texts as sites of “folk psychology,” but in an unusually high-stakes context—much as I treat literary texts as sites of folk psychology in an unusually self-conscious context. In the following section, I will briefly elaborate on the underexamined features of nineteenth-century psychiatric archives that do give us a glimpse of real-world social cognition, before turning to the literary examples that make up my primary corpus. Though it may seem like a digression, this dive into the diagnosis and treatment of nineteenth-century mental illness not only functions as a case study in the methodological

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advantages of reading for social cognition, but also offers a preview and a précis of this book’s unconventional use of historical evidence: rather than looking to historical events and sources to provide context for literary analyses, Writing the Mind aims to reconstruct through literary analysis the history of cognition. Friends, Doctors, and Strangers

In the nineteenth-century anglophone world, the courtroom—or the tavern, tea house, or wherever legal determinations of sanity and insanity were made—was a key point of intersection between medical and folk theories of mind.48 When an individual’s liberty or competency was at stake, questions of intention and mental state that might otherwise have been allowed to remain open—Did she assault her husband because she was laboring under a delusion, because her affections were disordered, or simply because she was vicious? Did he write a will leaving all his belongings to the church because he was a religious maniac, because his mistress manipulated his weakened mind, or because he thought it was the right thing to do?—suddenly needed to be settled through some combination of medical expertise, community testimony, and legal judgment. If, as I have suggested above, physicians’ physiological understanding of the mind tells us little about typical social cognition in the nineteenth century, one might expect the confrontation of medical and folk knowledge to reveal insurmountable conflicts between the two. At times, it did: relatively new medical concepts like monomania (of which we will learn more in chapter 4) often produced counterintuitive explanations of behaviors that had plausible folk interpretations, leading to disagreement not only between physicians and jurists but between fellow members of the medical community.49 If such direct clashes were relatively rare, however, it was not because medical theories of mental illness and folk heuristics of psychological inference were aligned, but because doctors continued to use those folk heuristics even in their clinical practice. “Perhaps in no other branch of medicine,” Akihito Suzuki argues, “was the contrast [between] medical science and medical practice” so great as in psychiatry.50 Nineteenth-century models of mental illness

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demanded that a physician conduct a thorough physical examination of the patient before making any determination of insanity: if madness was the product of physical illness, its markers should be visible in the living body, or, in the worst case, in the dissected corpse.51 Yet historians of psychiatry like Suzuki, Sarah Wise, and Nancy Tomes have documented many cases in which patients were deemed mentally ill and committed to institutions on the sole strength of their relatives’ reports of their behavior, without any direct examination at all. When a lawyer criticized George Man Burrows, a prominent authority on mental illness in early nineteenth-century England, for just this practice during a “lunacy inquisition,” Burrows’s defense revealed the necessity behind this inconsistency: “it was perfectly in order to take a family’s version of events as the basis of certification [of lunacy],” he testified, “as these were the very people best placed to spot a change in behavior and to note down examples of oddness.”52 Burrows was not the only insanity expert who deferred to—or lamented his lack of—the intimate knowledge of dispositions, habits, and mental states that a patient’s family and friends could provide. Precisely because the developing field of psychiatry was generating new disease concepts, like monomania, that involved ambiguous or easily concealed symptoms, physicians’ claim to authority on mental illness went hand in hand with frustrating epistemic limitations. “If we could follow these people to the privacy of their own dwellings, narrowly observe their intercourse with their friends and neighbors, and converse with them on the subjects nearest to their thoughts,” Isaac Ray suggested in his influential Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, “we should generally detect some perversity of feeling or action, altogether foreign to the ordinary character”53—but because such profound familiarity with an individual’s behavioral repertoire was difficult for an asylum doctor to achieve, reports from the potential patient’s intimates had to suffice. Such case histories took on particular importance in light of the pervasive nineteenth-century assumption that mental illness was characterized by a “sudden change” in behavior or mood.54 Only those who had known the patient for some time could judge whether his actions were consistent eccentricities—for which psychiatric treatment

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was often deemed unnecessary—or whether disease had indeed transformed him “into a different sort of person.” 55 As physicians brought the mind and its disorders into their ambit, then, a “vacuum” opened up “resulting from [the doctor’s] obsession with the patient’s bodily state.”56 The near-exclusive concentration on behavioral and bodily symptoms did not obviate the need for interpretive judgments about the meaning of the patient’s actions in light of his mental states, but rather shifted that narrative responsibility onto the “client”—not, typically, the patient himself, but the friend or family member seeking treatment for the patient.57 The psychiatric practitioner and the laypeople who sought his diagnosis possessed complementary epistemes that co-constructed an implicit model of the typically functioning mind and an explicit model of madness. For my purposes, this symbiotic relationship between physiological psychology and lay etiologies of mental illness matters not primarily because of the institutional dynamics it showcases but because it reveals a significant, but hitherto unrecognized, role for typical social cognition in the psychological practice (if not the theory) of the nineteenth century. In identifying some of their family members’ behaviors as potential symptoms of insanity—that is, as stemming from mental states that were unrecognizable, incoherent, or radically inconsistent with their past selves—nineteenth-century laypeople not only identified instances of mental illness that served as grist for psychiatrists’ diagnostic mill; they also instructed those psychiatrists in the sociocognitive heuristics and expectations of their own community. Such instruction ranged from inadvertent and indirect to quite overt. Even as illustrious a figure as James Parkinson could be trained to modify his own expert judgment by lay testimony. Asked to certify a Mrs. Daintree as insane, Parkinson “found the patient rather rational” after examining her directly; nonetheless, he followed up by speaking with the woman’s neighbors and her son, who unanimously judged her to be mad. Parkinson then “went back to examine and interview the patient again,” an interview that “convinced [him] of her lunacy.”58 In recounting this anecdote, Suzuki hints that venal or at least pragmatic motives led Parkinson to reject his first diagnosis: particularly in cases

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of private confinement, physicians had reason to want to placate the clients who paid them, even when their training and professional ethics might have nudged them toward a verdict of sanity. Without dismissing the many nineteenth-century cases in which individuals were committed by those with transparently self-interested motives, however, I want to hold open the possibility that Parkinson did in fact learn something about Mrs. Daintree by speaking with those who knew her, and that he changed his diagnosis in reaction to that epistemic shift. As discussed earlier in this introduction, human beings learn to produce, recognize, and evaluate particular kinds of mental-state explanations for human behavior primarily by watching others do the same, whether in everyday conversation or in more specialized contexts— receiving training in psychiatry, for instance, or reading a novel. Most of us have learned several different systems of explaining and predicting behavior, and we can deploy them selectively in appropriate social contexts. If Parkinson saw something different in Mrs. Daintree in his second interview, it may be because his conversations with her family and neighbors instructed him in a different explanatory heuristic with which to make sense of her statements and actions. In light of pluralistic folk psychology, the evidence gathered by Suzuki, Tomes, Wise, and other historians of psychiatry takes on new meaning, shedding light on historical practices of social cognition in a way that neither these scholars nor literary historians of the materialistic psychological theories of the period have yet done. Everyday sociocognitive heuristics played a quiet but important role, then, in nineteenth-century physicians’ diagnostic practice. I have just offered one example of how social cognition appears in the interstices of scientific and medical theories of mind, but it is not the only one: questions of social cognition bore indirectly but significantly upon legal determinations of insanity in two other important respects. The first involves the symptoms that nineteenth-century US communities recognized as indicative of possible mental illness. For many Americans, the difference between eccentricity and outright insanity seemed to come down to one’s ability to negotiate with other people in one’s own interest. One antebellum New Jersey shopkeeper cited

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the inability of one of his clients to “drive a bargain” as evidence of his madness; another man’s “shrewdness . . . when conversing about his affairs” showed that his mental illness had lifted; and elderly individuals who too readily ceded to the influence of “opportunistic friends, relations, and household servants” in drawing up their wills regularly had their mental capacity called into question.59 In England, too, to be easily duped, or rather to be seemingly indifferent to the prospect of being duped, was to mark oneself as a potential lunatic: in the scandalous inquiry into Lord Portsmouth’s mental illness, the fact that “he knowingly let his wife and her lover carry on an adulterous affair” seemed to prove that he could not possibly be of sound mind.60 These particular examples reveal the role of psychiatric diagnoses in discouraging unconventional behavior in the economic and sexual realms: as Susanna Blumenthal makes clear, insanity was often tacitly defined as the inability or unwillingness to act in one’s own (perceived or assumed) material self-interest, particularly when it came to distributing property outside of the family line.61 The cases listed above rest on a more basic similarity, however: in each of these disparate scenarios, an inability to detect deception and control the communication of one’s own mental states—in other words, a failure of social cognition—appears as a symptom of mental illness. It is difficult to say whether these individuals simply wanted things that observers could not imagine anyone wanting (a plausible explanation in the Lord Portsmouth case), genuinely struggled to explain and predict others’ behavior, or used sociocognitive heuristics that departed from the normative mindreading model of the community. Whatever the case, the incapacity to drive a bargain, which requires a precise estimate of one’s interlocutor’s willingness to buy or sell that must be updated with each new exchange, or to detect deception, which requires one to postulate beliefs and intentions that conflict with behavior and to recognize the mental states that one’s deceiver is attempting to produce, constitutes a sociocognitive deficit that community members could recognize only by comparing the mentally ill person’s behavior with what they themselves would have done in a similar situation. In other words, nineteenth-century individuals not only invoked models

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of typical cognition to explain what made some people in their community eccentric or insane; they also understood the failure to engage in this kind of modeling practice as a symptom of mental illness. If, as I am arguing, nineteenth-century laypeople and experts alike understood mental illness as a challenge to social cognition, the practical implications of this challenge became most obvious when the symptoms of mental illness were themselves ambiguous and susceptible to multiple interpretations under multiple sociocognitive heuristics. When an action could readily be explained in terms of self-serving motives, jurists and physicians often chose to disregard insanity as a potential cause. “In the case of a monomania with tendencies toward theft,” for instance, the French psychiatrist Alexandre Bottex cautioned expert witnesses that “the doctor must be very careful in his judgment, because there is always a direct interest in theft unless the object stolen is of very small value.”62 But, as Blumenthal notes, the concept of “direct interest” itself became harder to pin down as financial systems grew increasingly complex over the course of the nineteenth century. When a merchant made what seemed to be a bizarre and foolish investment, did the other participant in the transaction have a responsibility to question his sanity, or should he merely assume that he was dealing with a bold and unconventional “speculator”?63 Are there interpersonal transactions that could only be undertaken by an insane person—that is, that would have no plausible explanation in terms of rational beliefs, goals, and intentions? If such unambiguously irrational behaviors do not exist, and if disorders like monomania are capable of cunningly hiding themselves, who should bear the consequences when a mentally ill person transacts business with a stranger who is justifiably unaware of his illness? In addition to pointing to a deficit in social cognition—the by now familiar failure of “shrewdness”—as a potential symptom of mental illness, these questions raise the possibility that some degree of sociocognitive competence is a prerequisite for forming contracts, or perhaps for engaging in the public sphere at all. Such competence would not be tested so often and so dramatically in a society in which individuals mostly interacted with family, friends,

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and neighbors with whom they had long-established relationships: even if one lacked direct experience with a person’s eccentricities, there would be a good chance that a mutual acquaintance would warn them. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, interactions between strangers became not only the default legal presumption but, in some cases, a normative ideal. Shifting away from earlier case law that expected “the insane person’s family and friends” to prevent him “from making inadvisable contracts”64—a doctrine articulated in the very Lord Portsmouth case mentioned above—the New Jersey Court of Chancery held by 1890 that, even when two parties in a business transaction are linked by “confidential relations,” the party who benefits bears the burden of demonstrating that the transaction was “fairly conducted as if between strangers.”65 The presumed disinterestedness of individuals without longstanding personal ties—or rather, their presumed interestedness in money alone, rather than in other kinds of social or emotional benefits—was presented in this oft-cited case as the foundation of any fair contract; contracts themselves, moreover, were presented not as specialized transactions embedded in a web of personal relationships but as the default mode of interaction between persons. It should be possible to swap a stranger chosen at random for either party in the contract without any change in the justness of the terms—an ideal that aligns with what Lloyd Pratt, in his discussion of the multiple forms of stranger-ness circulating in the antebellum United States, calls “the analogical account of the stranger, in which each of us may be substituted for any one of us.”66 In this world of normative stranger-ness, deprived of either the intimate knowledge of the community or the expert knowledge of the physician, the “reasonable man” became responsible for detecting mental illness in his potential business partners within the limits of common sense and rational observation—although precisely what counted as commonsensical signs of insanity remained carefully unspecified by late nineteenthcentury jurists.67 For mentally ill individuals themselves, the results of this shift toward a legal and social system based on stranger interactions were arguably mixed. Though potentially deprived of the guardrails that

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long-term relationships provided, at least in the mind of the judge in the Portsmouth case, the default to anonymity and one-off stranger interactions also provided an opportunity for the institutionalized and stigmatized to reinvent themselves. Indeed, one of the foremost asylum superintendents of the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Kirkbride, regularly tried to motivate patients to recover by assuring them that they could erase their illness from memory by successfully performing sanity: “There is no one anywhere,” he told one patient, “who will dream of your being insane after you leave here, unless you force that opinion upon them, by excitement of manner, striking peculiarity of conduct, or opinions.”68 For the purposes of this book, the problem of detecting mental illness in a stranger—seemingly a specialized and unusual circumstance—brings to light two important points that will also guide my interpretation of literary scenes of social cognition. First, by placing (vague and slippery) expectations of sociocognitive competence upon ordinary individuals, these cases reveal the material stakes of interpersonal cognition—ranging from financial security and access to the marketplace to the personal autonomy entailed in having one’s will or contract recognized as valid. Second, the specific challenge to interpersonal cognition in these cases involved determining not simply whether an agent was a rational actor in the economic sense—for, as the example of the financial “speculator” shows, one may perfectly well make seemingly or genuinely irrational contracts—but whether the agent possessed sufficient cognitive consistency, self-awareness, and self-management for his actions to be explained on the basis of propositional mental states. In other words, one of the crucial tasks of interpersonal cognition, as identified in nineteenth-century legal cases and psychiatric texts alike, is assessing whether the stranger with whom one is interacting has a mind that can be read in the first place. In the legal context, presumably, a negative answer to that question would end the exchange: if your potential partner in contract turns out to have a mind that you cannot model effectively by means of ToM, you may well decide to forego the contract rather than working to develop a predictive model adequate to the situation. The fictions discussed in this book, however, take this impasse as a starting

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point: I am faced with a stranger whose actions thwart explanation in terms of propositional mental states; what now? What obligations and opportunities arise for me? Can I salvage a personal or professional relationship? How can I protect myself from being harmed or exploited by this person? For some nineteenth-century American authors, these questions have, if not happy, at least hopeful answers, moving toward something like Pratt’s concept of “stranger humanism”—a process by which “people discover their differences from one another, but they are barred from trying to appropriate or penetrate those differences,” developing a sense of democratic solidarity rather than empathic entitlement to the stranger’s innermost being.69 Others remain in what Pratt calls “suspect-strangerhood,” constituting the behaviorally baffling stranger as a threat or an alien. But while the ethical differences between these stances form the substance of Pratt’s analysis, the two share a basic feature that constitutes the starting point for many of the fictions I discuss. As the psychiatric and legal histories discussed in this section demonstrate, interpreting the behavior of a stranger requires particular attention to the form of their actions as opposed to their history. The latter, which can offer a great deal of explanatory power (especially as a factor in ToM interpretations), is by definition inaccessible in one-off stranger interactions; in other contexts, like the antebellum plantation, an enslaver’s past actions may be known to an enslaved person but prove so radically incoherent or inhuman that they offer little interpretive help. In either case, one understandable strategy is to look for explanatory and predictive clues not in an individual’s background or social context, but in the structural features of their behavior—in other words, to adopt a kind of cognitive formalism. In lieu of the competing ontologies of stranger-ness that Pratt identifies, then, this book explores the epistemologies of mind that develop around the figure of the stranger—epistemologies that emerge not only in the courtroom and the asylum, but in literary form. Overview of Chapters

Inspired in part by Caroline Levine’s recent push to “broaden our definition of form to include social arrangements,” Writing the Mind takes

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as axiomatic that cognitive models, theories, and processes also have formal characteristics that may overlap or, sometimes, conflict with literary forms.70 The resulting mixed forms may look, in literary terms, like figurative tropes, character systems, narrative structures, or even simple phrases. Because cognitive forms are manipulable through fictional narratives but are not coextensive with them, we will find them coordinating textual phenomena on multiple scales in the course of the analyses that follow. This book’s four chapters are structured formally rather than historically: each chapter focuses on a particular dimension of sociocognitive variation along which the fictions in my corpus conduct their experiments. At the conference on anthropological theories of mind mentioned above, Tanya Luhrmann and her colleagues proposed five parameters according to which models of the mind can be organized and classified: • “the degree to which the mind is ‘bounded’ or ‘porous’” • “the degree to which interiority matters,” that is, the degree to which interior states are “understood to be causally powerful and significant” • “the epistemic stance” on the reality of mental contents • “the sensorial weighting” of different forms of perceptual input • norms of “relational access and responsibility,” which dictate whether it is socially acceptable to “display” one’s inferential awareness of other minds71

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While this list is doubtless imperfect, it represents the only attempt I have found to imagine a kind of formal and functional space in which to locate models of mind, and so it has immense conceptual utility for this book. Sketching any such space, however provisionally, allows us to compare the coordinates of theories of mind belonging to different cultures, communities, or even genres or texts. Luhrmann’s categories allow us to see, for instance, that ToM conceptualizes a bounded mind in which propositional mental states are causally efficacious but epistemologically virtual (that is, they can only be inferred, not perceived directly) and, as a result, ontologically a bit ambiguous (in that they are

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real but disembodied and inaccessible to anyone but their “owner”). Each of my chapters takes up one of Luhrmann’s parameters, with the goal of mapping and explaining the structured diversity of textual models of social cognition in nineteenth-century US literature.72 Still, it may not be coincidental that the chapters do enact a kind of crude temporal progression from the early republic (chapter 1) to the antebellum and Reconstruction periods (chapters 2 and 3) to the Gilded Age (chapter 4). Given the endlessly self-referential environment of early American literature, the paradoxes and contradictions of mindreading that Charles Brockden Brown, for instance, identified in the 1790s could constitute a kind of database of known formal problems for subsequent writers, whether they attempted to solve those problems or, on the contrary, to deepen and complicate them. Chapter 1, “Boundedness,” traces the history of an exemplary cognitive form. The novels of Charles Brockden Brown systematically dismantle a particularly potent conceptual metaphor associated with ToM, one that figures the mind’s relationship to the propositional states it “contains” as a physical vessel containing written texts. Brown’s fictions obsessively return, even at the risk of derailing narrative momentum or confusing the reader, to a particular scenario: a chest or box is supposed to hold crucial papers—usually letters or diaries—but after being forced open turns out to hold nothing, or is destroyed before the hypothetical papers can be accessed. By repeatedly staging the investment of a precious interior with textual objects, only to violate the container and obliterate the texts, Brown exposes the distinctive frailties of the “mind as container for texts” analogy: vulnerability to invasion or evacuation, inability to distinguish between genuine and “forged” or externally induced mental states, and paranoid obsession with determining the originary source of one’s own and others’ actions. Such moments of what I call “cognitive emergency” register a fundamental pessimism about the explanatory power and ontological stability of interiorizing models of the mind—a pessimism that reverberates down to the level of syntax, where Brown’s surprising use of passive constructions to describe cognitive actions (“a memory was retrieved,” “a thought was had,” and so on) both emphasizes the

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role of the agent (a thought was had by whom?) and evacuates it. The trope of the missing or destroyed text thus enacts a failed attempt to render mental states as legible propositional statements—a staged impasse that recurs over the course of the century in texts as diverse as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life, Henry James’s The American, and Charles Chesnutt’s “Baxter’s Procrustes”. This chapter’s close examination of Brown’s novels not only sets the stage for the suspicion of interiorizing metaphors of mind that persists throughout the American nineteenth century, but also reveals the interlocking layers of textual devices with which writers articulate cognitive forms. Chapter 2, “Epistemic Reality,” takes up the epistemological consequences of skepticism about the ontological status of mental contents. Through readings of Poe’s Dupin trilogy and Melville’s “Bartleby,” I develop the concept of a pragmatics of behavior, highlighting the way that formal and narratological choices steer a reader’s ad hoc epistemic stance in real time. Both authors entertain a kind of behaviorism as one in a suite of strategies for explaining actions that violate the norms of intentional reasoning. By focalizing these texts through narrators who shift from one psychological model to another under pressure from a seemingly inexplicable series of actions (whether human or, in the case of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” of ambiguous origin), Poe and Melville not only define a spectrum of epistemic stances toward the propositional contents of other minds, but also indicate the utilitarian goals of enforcing laws, managing subordinates, and maintaining a good-enough social harmony that inform even the most abstract theories of will and psychological interiority. As tightly controlled as philosophical thought experiments, these fictions delineate the conditions under which behaviorist explanations and predictions are more successful than intentionalist ones. On a formal level, however, their positioning in a series of structurally similar texts (the three Dupin stories, or Melville’s return to problems of behavioral interpretation in “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man) underlines the iterative nature of social epistemology while hinting at a flexible form of social cognition that would pragmatically adopt aspects of multiple psychological models.

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The pragmatics of behavior affect not only our reactions to others’ signals of intention and desire, but also our ability to see ourselves as agents whose mental states have consequences in the world. Chapter  3, “Causal Power,” focuses on textual representations of slavery that figure the plantation as the site of a mindreading arms race—one that has a particularly disorienting effect on the causal link between mental states and actions. The sociocognitive problem, which is also a problem of cognitive form, emerges both in nonfictional accounts like Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies and the interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted by the Works Progress Administration, and in fictions like Martin Delany’s Blake, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, and Charles Chesnutt’s conjure tales. Its characteristics are twofold: on the one hand, the contradictions folded into the white supremacist cognitive model, insofar as they simultaneously scripted inconsistent attitudes—from violent outbursts to paranoid scrutiny to condescending dismissal—from whites with respect to African Americans, created erratic behavior patterns that placed considerable strain on enslaved people’s efforts to predict and manage the actions of whites. On the other hand, like any implicit interpersonal model of the relationship between cognition and behavior, the ever evolving white supremacist model acted as a framework within which and against which enslaved people developed an understanding of the causal efficacy of their own mental states. Resisting the representation of Black personhood as somehow in question or in flux while white personhood remains unscrutinized, this chapter reads scenes of Black minds reasoning about white minds as interventions in the project of diagnosing and resisting the sociocognitive scripts of white supremacy. Chapter 4, “Responsibility,” delves more deeply into the effect of inequality on social cognition by identifying a method of nonmentalistic deception, which I term “fooling,” that comes into focus in two of Mark Twain’s texts: the hypercanonical Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the decidedly minor “A Double-Barreled Detective Story.” When Twain’s characters deceive, they do not communicate deliberately false information to their victims, but instead create scenes filled with material clues designed to activate a misleading behavioral schema. Because this form of deception does not rely on social trust, fooling is

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especially well suited to deception across a power or status differential. Much as the strategies for recuperating the causal efficacy of mental states that emerge in chapter 3 existed both in literary form and in social praxis, the capacity of fooling to ameliorate what the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice” makes it a recurring motif in both fictional and nonfictional texts. In particular, fooling appears as a subterranean force in descriptions of two important social spaces in the antebellum United States: the slave auction, where enslaved people could leverage their own exclusion from epistemic credibility in order to influence a potential buyer’s behavior; and the asylum, where the “moral treatment,” used by postrevolutionary psychiatrists in both France and the United States, sometimes employed curative fooling as a means of restoring a mentally ill individual to health. The source of fooling’s particular power, however—its ability to elicit desired behavioral outcomes without trying to change the deceived individual’s mind—also defines its limitations as a form of political action: fooling focuses on ameliorating the effects of a false belief rather than extinguishing it. In the book’s closing pages, I continue to explore the cognitive impact of Gilded Age inequality by examining the reasons for what Henry James represents as the inverse correlation between wealth and mindreading capacity. James’s fictions suggest that part of what money can buy is relief from the responsibility to be aware of one’s own and others’ mental states and attitudes. Significantly, this relationship between money and mindreading is both gendered and national: James’s obsession with the “international theme” represents, among other things, an attempt to define the American literary tradition in opposition to its continental counterparts along an axis of sociocognitive difference. Writing the Mind concludes by revealing that James integrated a number of familiar metaphors of mind from nineteenth-century US fiction in his effort to situate his own psychological experiments in an American tradition of sociocognitive experimentation. S N L 34

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Boundedness

The Mind Is a Container

Toward the end of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, set in the seventeenth century, the central character, an enslaved woman named Florens, surveys the house on whose walls and floors she has scratched a written account of her life. “If you never read this,” she muses, addressing the phantom of her lover, “no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves . . . Or. Or perhaps no.” Perhaps, rather than entombing herself in her own verbalized thoughts, Florens will disperse them by destroying them: “Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth.”1 By setting fire to her own narrative, Florens hopes to widen the scope of its audience beyond even the human—or, rather, to substitute for the hermeneutic relation of text and reader an unmediated physical relation. If there is one thing on which both everyday speech and the genre of the novel seem to agree, it is that a text is a sealable container into which the writer pours their thoughts in order to transmit them to a reader.2 From Pamela’s letters to Humbert Humbert’s confession, the

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novel has depicted both its own boundaries and the texts it represents or embeds within itself as storage units for the contents of their composer’s consciousness. Yet while Morrison begins by adopting this metaphor and rendering it literal—Florens’s words physically enclose their owner’s mind and body—this material instantiation ultimately enables the metaphor’s destruction and replacement by an alternative model of text as contagion: whether benignly or malignantly, Florens’s writing permeates the air, earth, and water of the surrounding landscape with the infectious potency of the smallpox epidemic that ravaged the village of Lina, Florens’s Indigenous peer, or the yellow fever that would plague New England cities in the early days of the republic. What the text, transformed into ash, loses in propositional clarity it makes up for in ubiquity: although Florens’s words no longer have the prospect of being read by receptive minds, their absorption into the material world saves them from the isolated eternity of “talk[ing] to themselves” that their author had envisioned. If I begin this study with an unexpectedly contemporary example, it is in part because A Mercy, written in the twenty-first century and set in the seventeenth, conveniently straddles American literature’s nineteenth-century epicenter and in doing so condenses the history of a fundamental conceptual metaphor. More particularly, though, A Mercy serves as my starting point because Morrison’s method of revising the trope of the text as embodiment of mental states—constructing and then destroying a literal embodiment of the analogy so as to suggest its inadequacy and gesture toward an alternative—will reappear throughout this chapter as a primary mode by which American writers reconfigured a familiar model of the psyche. In attempting to characterize the mutually constitutive relationship between textual metaphors for mental states and the broader sociocognitive system of ToM, I draw on the work of cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Lakoff and Johnson popularized the term “conceptual metaphor” to characterize the systems of interdependent analogies, enacted both in everyday language and in our habits of reasoning, that humans use to understand abstract concepts ranging from time and agency to emotions like love and anger to the mind

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itself. Crucially for both their argument and mine, conceptual metaphors are not unitary but internally differentiated: a basic metaphor— for instance, “The mind is a container,” one of the first that the duo articulated—logically implies a structure of related metaphors based on “subcategorization relationships,” a phenomenon they call metaphorical “entailment.”3 By manipulating these entailed particulars, I will argue, the authors I discuss in this chapter are able to call into question the basic metaphor that supports them, exploring different instantiations and implications of the mind-as-container metaphor to test the limits of its usefulness: What is inside that container? What does it mean for it to be “open” or “closed”? Is it opaque? Does it lock? That even a basic conceptual metaphor might be locally rejected or replaced separates my use of the concept from that of Lakoff and Johnson, for whom the “we” in the title Metaphors We Live By seems more or less coextensive with the human species. While there may well be some metaphors fundamental to human cognition that obtain across all known cultures, the evidence from psychological anthropology discussed in my introduction suggests that different cultures conceptualize the mind and its faculties in a wide variety of ways—even though the hegemony of Western Europe and the United States (particularly, as we have seen, in the context of academic research psychology) gives those cultures’ metaphors of mind a universal sheen. In offering a schematic summary of one of the cognitive forms that pervades the anglophone novelistic tradition, I do not mean to suggest that metaphors of textual containment were or are the only way that the novel, even in its most ToM-dependent manifestations, imagines minds. Brad Pasanek’s indispensable “manual of folk psychology” in eighteenth-century anglophone texts, Metaphors of Mind, reveals that any given text is likely to deploy an eclectic range of metaphors when representing the workings of the mind, which of course includes activities as varied as remembering, reasoning, hating, and smelling.4 If the picture I paint is simpler and narrower than Pasanek’s, it is largely because of my specific focus on the ontological question of the mind’s boundedness in relation to the epistemological question of its interpersonal knowability. The difference is partly generic, too: when it

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comes to defining the background of models of the mind within and against which my key texts developed, the novel (rather than the lyric or the essay) is the most salient comparison, but nonallegorical novels are less likely to develop explicit extended metaphors than the poems that make up much of Pasanek’s corpus. In realist fiction, conceptual metaphors of the Lakoff and Johnson variety are likely not to be elaborated as metaphors, but to be literalized in plot or instantiated in style. Take, for instance, the most important formal innovation of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel: free indirect discourse (FID). A familiar account of the device’s social and narrative purpose suggests that free indirect discourse offers a “compromise” between social oversight and personal autonomy: the narratorial voice adopts the most value-laden features of a character’s speech while keeping the utterance at arm’s length by adjusting its tense and pronouns to fit the narrator’s ostensibly unsituated perspective.5 Yet whereas scholars tend to stress the ideological function of this device—from more or less benign assimilation into the community to oppressive authorial surveillance—any such function must rest on FID’s formal instantiation of one of the metaphoric prerequisites of ToM: the notion that mental states, although private, are inherently legible. That a narrator can ventriloquize thoughts that a character has not articulated, after all, implies that those thoughts, even when not yet conscious, constitute an array of linguistic propositions whose exposure and decoding constitutes “mindreading” in its most literal sense. One might not, so to speak, “see” these mental sentences—they are “inside” the opaque container of a person, who may or may not “open” their mind to you— but as soon as one does, their meaning will be instantly and transparently intelligible. Thoughts are not only textual objects, but texts in a language endorsed and understood by the community to which one belongs.6 This reassurance becomes crucial in the context of ToM’s model of the mind as both bounded and causally efficacious. Imagining the mind as a container for quasi-textual mental states raises the troubling possibility that the container may remain opaque and its contents inaccessible—a serious problem in a society that uses determinations of intention not only to explain and predict behavior but also to assign

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blame and credit. In some philosophical accounts, indeed, intentions cannot be separated from the cooperative social process of accounting for actions: for Elizabeth Anscombe, intentional actions are those about which we can effectively pose the question “why”—a model that builds a kind of social accountability into the very experience of intending.7 Free indirect discourse allows novels to represent the mind as both securely self-contained and interpersonally accessible. When combined with ToM’s presumption that mental states are propositional in form, the mind-as-container/mental-states-as-texts conceptual metaphor implies that each individual possesses an array of verbal statements that constitute their thoughts, imagined as textual objects inside a container to which they have privileged access and which they can open or close to others as they see fit. It is as if each of us carried around a little box holding a continuously updated manuscript that detailed our daydreams, motivations, and experiences, consulting it for guidance whenever we were unsure of how to act, and ready to disclose a few of these papers (or perhaps some forged ones, if we plan to deceive) to others when we need to explain ourselves. But in the typical realist novel, of course, it is only “as if”: barring the Richardsonian epistolary novel, whose characters’ ceaseless transformation of thoughts into texts anticipates the subtleties of FID that we find in Austen and Eliot, this set of mental metaphors rarely finds literal embodiment in the plots of the novels that endorse it. We will see in this chapter, by contrast, that nineteenth-century American fiction, from Charles Brockden Brown at one end of the century to Charles Chesnutt at the other, approaches these implicit conceptual metaphors with remarkable literal-mindedness. In order to revise a cognitive metaphor, Brown and his descendants suggest, it helps to render it not only explicit but concrete: not until the figurative textfilled container of the mind is literalized can it be invaded, burned, lost, locked, or simply emptied. Empty Chests and Missing Texts

In Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), the novel’s title character is investigating the mysterious and violent past of one Clithero Edny, whose fate may be somehow connected to that of

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Huntly’s murdered friend Waldegrave. At his most recent residence, Clithero has left behind “a square box, put together by himself with uncommon strength,” in which Huntly suspects that Clithero has concealed a manuscript that will clarify his history, providing both “a thorough knowledge of his actions” and a disambiguation of his “thousand conceivable motives.” Yet this chest is a most peculiar construction, offering no means of access whatsoever to the outsider: it lacks any visible lock or keyhole, and its joints, although seamlessly taut, are secured by some “invisible” means—“not by mortice and tennon; not by nails, not by hinges.”8 Although Huntly fancies himself a “mechanist,” having built for himself an exceptionally secure writing-cabinet, Clithero’s chest seems to exceed his skill, even as his initial reluctance to pry into its contents is replaced by an overpowering desire to examine them. The chest does eventually open, by means of a concealed “spring” that Huntly stumbles upon by accident and whose existence, “elud[ing] the senses,” can only be inferred: a climactic event, whose significance is signaled by a chapter break that separates Huntly’s discovery of the container from the “fortuitous” disclosure of its interior. And this scrupulously guarded interior contains—nothing, nothing, at least, “of moment,” nothing resembling the authoritative text that Huntly had expected to find. “Tools of different and curious constructions,” he recounts, “and remnants of minute machinery, were all that offered themselves to my notice.” Having at considerable risk and inconvenience infiltrated Clithero’s most private container, Huntly finds there not propositional content but an incoherent, nonfunctional mechanism.9 In the same year, the protagonist of Brown’s Arthur Mervyn takes possession not merely of a chest assumed to contain texts but of a physical book: the memoirs of a dead Italian aristocrat, according to the criminal Welbeck. Although it is unclear why the now vanished Welbeck should have had any interest in keeping this text concealed, he has forbidden Mervyn to enter the room in which it is stored, making Mervyn’s attempt to read the book—fueled, he claims, by an “irresistible desire” that remains diegetically hard to explain10—as explicit a defiance of its owner’s wishes as Huntly’s opening of the chest.

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Nonetheless, Mervyn’s enterprise initially meets with much more success than Huntly’s: he manages to lay his hands on the memoir, to open it, even to read some of its contents. Only upon reaching a sort of cliffhanger in the narrative does Mervyn find his progress impeded “by the following leaves being glued together at the edges”—an unexpected barrier whose penetration puts the very textual contents of the book at risk. “To dissever them without injury to the written spaces,” Mervyn explains, “was by no means easy.” Willing to mutilate the text in the interest of accessing its meaning, Mervyn informs us that “the edges were torn away, and the leaves parted,” an expedient that should have made it possible for him to resume the narrative: “but no.” In place of the continuous and linear text that he is pursuing, Mervyn tells us, he “opened, and found—a bank note!”11 The excitement and emphasis here are Brown’s, not mine, and with good reason: the book Mervyn has so fervently sought is revealed in this moment to be not a book at all but a storage place for money, a form of paper as impersonal, profligate, and fungible as the wished-for memoir is private, securely enclosed, and symbolically fixed. Although these bills are apparently genuine, it is no accident that Welbeck himself was a counterfeiter; as a substitute for text, money not only fails to deliver on, but permits the forgery of, the subjective richness that the memoir seemed to promise. In Ormond—same year, same author—Sophia Courtland, supposedly at the behest of an acquaintance, is composing an account of the life of her friend Constantia Dudley, whose persecution by the slippery title character forms the chief drama of the novel. Like any good novelistic heroine, Constantia has been providing the materials for this task by “engag[ing] to preserve, for the use of her friend, copious and accurate memorials of her life” that were to be sent to Sophia in installments during her travels overseas.12 Eager to draw upon this written chronicle in an attempt to find Constantia and understand the circumstances that led to her entanglement with Ormond, Sophia realizes with alarm that, despite her faith in Constantia’s “punctuality,” she has never received any of these letters, and conjectures that they may have gone astray “at the bottom of some closet or chest,” perhaps in the possession of an owner “careless or unconscious of their value.”13

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Much as Sophia’s portrait, which originally belonged to Constantia, has just turned up in the hands of a stranger—and one, Sophia notes with some disgust, “whose character and manners entitled him to no respect”—Constantia’s letters have escaped the intention that originally animated them, which suggests, in both cases, that the originator of a self-representation has little control over its afterlife. Even the most “precious memorials” of one’s mental states are not bound to their owner, and may become inaccessible not by being destroyed but simply by being treated as physical objects (papers stuffed in the bottom of a trunk) rather than as carriers of meaning.14 Yet Sophia’s revelation bears a disturbing narrative corollary: if the documents recording Constantia’s recent experiences have been lost, where did Sophia gather the information for the detailed omniscient narrative of those events that we have just read? (Only in chapter 25, or four chapters from the end of the novel, do we learn that the letters have gone astray.) The vanishing of Constantia’s manuscript forces us to reimagine the entire novel as a substitute for a missing text (or series of texts)—not a Richardsonian document of our heroine’s real-time subjectivity, but an attempt to retroactively assign motivating mental states to a series of actions knowable only through external behavioral evidence. Perhaps no writer has visited upon diegetic texts—letters, memoirs, confessions, narratives—as many (or as perplexingly gratuitous) tribulations as did Charles Brockden Brown. The interlocked metaphors through which the eighteenth-century novel habitually conceptualized the privacy of the mind—mental states imagined as texts, minds imagined as containers—lead Brown’s characters to believe that they can secure the continued existence and integrity of their consciousness simply by generating and protecting texts. Yet while teeming with technologies, of which locked “chests” or “closets” containing manuscripts are the most prevalent examples, that attempt to localize consciousness and securely circumscribe its contents, the four novels that Brown produced over the course of eighteen months—Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly—obsessively return to scenes in which these containers are violated or revealed to be empty, casting doubt on characters’ ability to voluntarily disclose or conceal their

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own mental states and to access those of others. The more feverishly Brown’s protagonists produce texts, the more inaccessible those texts become, not only to outsiders, but also to their owners. It is no accident, perhaps, that in Brown’s novels scenes of reading and writing are so frequently interrupted by violence.15 The attempt to reflectively construct interiority via the translation of mental contents into text is prey to and perhaps even invites such invasion by insisting upon a private, integral subjectivity that is in fact merely wishful thinking. The remainder of this section tracks the construction, undermining, and final implosion of the container-text dyad in Brown’s Wieland—the first in a series of novels that attack the very model of cognitive ownership on which the novel as a genre is founded.16 Brown’s novel effects this dismantling over a few key scenes of what one might call cognitive emergency: moments when one’s own mind behaves in a way that one had believed impossible, creating both an epistemic failure and a sense of self-alienation. At the core of these cognitive emergencies lies the compelling, confusing figure of Carwin. What enables this character to serve as a catalyst for the Wielands’ insecurities about self-possession and agency? The most obvious explanation is Carwin’s famous “biloquism,” which, even in its literal mechanics, undermines ToM’s fiction of a motivating mental state behind an intentional action such as speech. As Brown explains it, Carwin’s talent works by simulating the conditions of a sound’s reception rather than its production, by reproducing “the variations of direction and distance”—the external physical circumstances—that shape the sonic quality of an utterance.17 Only in the interpreting mind of the listener do these sounds become attached to a particular place and person of origin: Carwin is able to make the sound “appear to come from what quarter, and be uttered at what distance I please,” but this appearance is itself the product of an inference based on the assumption that the sensory information entering one’s ears can be traced back to a determinate originary point at which one will find an intending agent.18 When Clara expresses surprise that the mysterious voice near her favorite outdoor seat seems to be emanating from “a chasm not wide enough to admit a human body,” she registers but cannot overcome

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the invalidity of her automatic supposition that the voice must be contained within a particular space, just as it must be interpretable as a deliberate communication from the localized, fixed (“stationed”) consciousness of “he that spoke.”19 Despite its obvious incompatibility with the evidence of Clara’s senses, the instinctive inclination to attach behavior to an originary agent persists strongly enough that Clara imaginatively constructs such an agent—“a being . . . apprised of the true nature” of her father’s death and her own circumstances—when no plausible such “being” exists in her social network.20 Even for Carwin himself, who repeatedly asserts (albeit, perhaps, self-servingly) that his moments of ventriloquism proceed from “a mechanical impulse” rather than a deliberate decision, Carwin’s vocal performances raise the specter of behavior without agency—a prospect more frightening for Brown’s characters than the literally spectral, “super-human” presences (“conscious beings, beside ourselves . . . whose modes of activity and information surpass our own”) whose existence Clara posits as an explanation for the voices haunting Mettingen.21 As is revealed by Wieland’s willingness to ascribe the voice he hears (whose origin Brown leaves ambiguous) to an angry God or to “a daemon,” a malevolent agent is still infinitely preferable to no agent at all—to an actor who, as Carwin stammers, “meant nothing” by his actions.22 As his first encounter with Clara in chapter 6 of Wieland indicates, Carwin casts doubt on the explanatory power not only of the physical and psychological “causes” of behavior, but also of its social origins. When Carwin’s mysteriously moving voice first drifts through Clara’s kitchen window, she finds herself imagining the human being from whom, she assumes, it must have originated: “a form, and attitude, and garb, were instantly created worthy to accompany such elocution; but this person [that is, Carwin in the flesh] was, in all visible respects, the reverse of this phantom.”23 The dissonance that Clara perceives between Carwin’s voice and his “person” hints at the forced and faulty reasoning process that connects the two (note that the image is “created,” not inferred or deduced); the scene offers a mild premonition of the dislocation of behavior from any discernible human source that characterizes Carwin’s ventriloquial pranks. Even before this jarring

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revelation of the weakness of her capacity to securely connect behavior to its origin, though, Carwin’s presence has shaken Clara’s ability to interpret her own actions and affects as originating in discernible propositional states: Clara’s intense emotional reaction to Carwin’s voice represents itself “to [her] own apprehension” as “a subject of astonishment” that could “scarcely be comprehended by [her]self.”24 Unable to explain this physiological response in terms of beliefs that she recognizes as hers, Clara experiences it as an “involuntary and incontroulable” effect of the external stimulus of the voice; far from constituting the starting point and cause of behavior, subjective consciousness becomes merely a confused latecomer to the mental scene, finding its privileged interior position usurped by an invasive force.25 This experience, here represented in straightforwardly psychological terms, is enacted as a material dispossession in the episode of the closet that closes the same chapter. Before discussing that scene, though, it is worth pausing to address in some detail the consequences of this dispossession for two major strands of critical response to Wieland. The first ascribes to Wieland, and to Brown’s work more generally, “a devastating critique of eighteenth-century rationalism based on sensory impressions”— certainly a plausible claim, given Wieland’s interest in fraudulently produced and incorrectly attributed sensory experiences.26 Whereas Brown’s fictions have often been read as either an enactment or a refutation of Lockean psychology, however, it is essential to disentangle two disparate tendencies in Locke’s own thought before rendering a verdict on Brown’s use of his ideas. The Locke we encounter in Brown’s work is less the confident theorist of subjective experience—the one who declared that “every man has a property in his own person” and founded selfhood on the continuity of this psychic ownership—and more the tentative, epistemologically uncertain theorist of others’ actions, preferring behavioral descriptors to the causal language of intention, that Jonathan Kramnick finds in the first version of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.27 Rather than rehearsing familiar arguments for Brown’s deconstruction of Lockean phenomenology, then, I focus on practical reasoning, and in particular on the problem

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of explaining and predicting human actions. Precisely because the Brownian character lacks privileged knowledge of their own intentions and experiences, they are ultimately reduced to applying to their behavior the same problematic inferential process that they use to understand others’ actions. The dethroning of Locke’s sovereign consciousness is indisputably part of Brown’s project, then, but it is only a step on the way to a larger question: if we cannot base our interpretation of others’ actions on a core of our own integral experience, what foundation, if any, can our engagement with other people claim? Is it better to grant limited credit to the fiction of our own conscious agency in the interest of social harmony, or to insist upon the impossibility of specifying mental states with certainty and to attempt to build a democratic community on these grounds? A second major critical approach faces these questions more directly, finding in Wieland an exploration of the problem of hypocrisy, a “preoccupation with ‘genuine’ character versus mere appearance.”28 Brown’s aim, according to such readings, is to illustrate the dangers of a social universe in which familial origins, ethnic affiliations, and class markers are so obscure that individuals are free to adopt multiple false personae in the interest of personal gain. Yet although this analysis conforms to the explicit statements of the text itself—which from its epigraph places special emphasis on the destruction wreaked by the “double-tongued”29—it also elides the process by which our narrator’s increasing lack of control over her own interiority undermines the distinction between “sincerity” and duplicity by revealing both to be facets of a no longer tenable model of the mind. Both sincerity (the voluntary disclosure of the contents of one’s mind) and hypocrisy (the systematic and deliberate concealing of them) presume precisely the privacy and communicability of mental states that Clara attempts to secure by figuring those states as texts—a strategy whose failure Brown demonstrates with increasing intensity over the course of the novel. Nor is this implicit critique of sincerity unique to Wieland. Brown’s most sustained debunking of this Godwinian virtue occurs in Arthur Mervyn, where the protagonist’s complete transparency with respect to his actions—“I felt no scruple on any occasion,” he declares,

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“to disclose every feeling and every event”—neither protects him from the malicious gossip of his neighbors nor, more significantly, provides him with particular clarity as to his own intentions.30 Like Clara Wieland, Mervyn persistently expresses confusion about the motives behind his own behavior, finding himself in moments of crisis “nearly unconscious of my movements” or impelled by “a sort of mechanical impulse” and confessing at one point: “Nothing, indeed, more perplexes me than a review of my own conduct.”31 Despite William Godwin’s well-documented literary and philosophical influence on Brown, then, the tropes and formal decisions by which Brown calls into question the individual’s “ownership” of their own mental states are devastating blows to the ideal of voluntary self-disclosure that could, according to Godwin, “redeem a nation from vice.”32 It is thus less strange than it may at first seem that Peter Kafer titles one of his chapters on Brown “The Anti-Godwin,” for even Brown’s unmistakable imitations of Caleb Williams (especially in Arthur Mervyn and the Memoirs of Carwin) hide behind their borrowed tropes a fundamentally different set of cognitive assumptions. To confirm this discrepancy, one need only turn to a pivotal scene of chest-opening in Godwin’s novel, where this gothic device serves to tighten the network of conspiracy and persecution surrounding the title character. When Caleb falls under suspicion of having stolen from his employer, Falkland and Forester open his trunks, where they find the same “watch and several jewels” that had gone missing.33 Rather than an unexpected vacancy, then, Caleb’s trunk discloses an unexpected presence: a servant’s interior, both literally and metaphorically, is supposed to be empty—that is, to contain neither objects nor thoughts that might undermine or conflict with his employer’s authority—yet Caleb’s harbors contents that are neither originally his nor, since we know him to be innocent of the theft, in his intentional possession. The predicament may at first seem analogous to Carwin’s invasion of the many enclosed spaces of Mettingen, from its secluded walks to Clara’s bedroom. Yet because Caleb remains unshakably certain of his own blamelessness, he reacts to this intrusion not by abandoning mentalistic reasoning but by intensifying it, asking his accusers to model his likely intentions

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and evaluate whether they are consistent with his supposed actions: “I asked Mr Forester whether it were probable, if I had stolen these things, that I should not have contrived at least to remove them along with me? And again, whether, if I had been conscious that they would be found among my property, I should have indicated the place where I had concealed it?”34 Even though Forester rejects the “probabilities and conjecture” of mindreading in favor of “incontestable facts,” then, it is significant that mentalistic reasoning is here championed by the persecuted hero through whom the novel’s action is focalized.35 In Caleb Williams’s world, intentional explanations are so ingrained that they can only be cast into doubt by the most systematic abuses—and even these are not sufficient to unseat Caleb’s own consciousness of his guiltlessness, but must be content with publicly discrediting him. Nothing could be more different from Caleb’s rational, albeit terrified, protestations of innocence than Clara’s reaction to Carwin’s intrusion into her closet. Significantly, Carwin’s first “entry” into this closet is merely simulated through his ventriloquism: the small room is still securely locked when Wieland and Pleyel return to investigate with “lights and weapons”—technologies designed, like texts, to securely localize consciousness and prevent invasions of one’s “closet.”36 (Texts stabilize mental contents by giving them propositional form; lights not only make reading possible, but enable one to seek out the human origin of mysterious physical phenomena; and weapons are used to defend the boundaries of the physical objects—chests, closets, houses, bodies—that are believed to contain consciousness, whether literally or figuratively.)37 This first, fantasized invasion arises directly from Clara’s own assumptions about the integrity and impermeability of her closet. Clara’s description places particular stress on this feature of the room, noting that its only window is “a small aperture” that “would scarcely admit the body”; the curious use of the definite article (not “a” particular body, but “the” abstract body) suggests that the protection of mental contents (the “books and papers” locked inside the closet) from physical influences is as much at stake as Clara’s personal safety in the construction of the closet as impenetrable.38 Moreover, the additional fact that, apart from this window, the closet is accessible

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only through “the room adjoining”—that is, Clara’s own—confirms the closet’s function as the unimpeachably private center of Clara’s interiority: Clara’s closet is meant to be “the most private of private property, property both ‘hidden’ and ‘owned.’”39 When Clara assumes that the voices she hears must come from a human being inside her closet, then, she is not only obeying the same automatic instinct to trace behavior back to a human agent that, as we have seen, Carwin’s ventriloquism invariably exploits; she is also constructing a conscious interiority behind the voice according to the same logic by which she has localized her own consciousness in the text-filled closet. Clara’s attempts to ensure the privacy of her mind thus have precisely the opposite effect, allowing alien presences to intrude more easily, and with Clara’s own help, into the carefully circumscribed and regulated space. Carwin’s presumed intrusion literally dispossesses Clara of the room—she immediately flees and is able “to resume the possession of [her] own dwelling” only after a week has passed—and also figuratively dispossesses her of consciousness: no longer guided by intentions (“I deliberated not a moment”), Clara’s actions become involuntary and unpredictable even to their supposed agent, who ascribes them to “a mechanical impulse.”40 Significantly, this evacuation of consciousness coincides with “the process of turning keys, and withdrawing bolts”—that is, with the management of the barriers between interior and exterior, privacy and publicity. The model of the mind as container breaks down first (“It was an impulse of which I was scarcely conscious,” Clara confesses on the night of Carwin’s second incursion into her closet, “that made me fasten the lock and draw the bolts of my chamber door”) at the threshold separating the center of consciousness from the external world, and Clara’s inability to remember unlocking the door reveals that the interiority that such locks are intended to protect has already been compromised.41 Clara’s blocked access to the contents of her own “closet” and thus her own consciousness, merely assumed on the first night of Carwin’s ventriloquial manipulations, becomes actual in his second, bodily invasion of her chamber: it is almost as though Brown means to stage the failure of Clara’s attempts to contain and regulate access to her

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own mental states in an increasingly material form. Seeking to extract a text—specifically, her father’s memoirs, another account of a life shaped (and destroyed) by an insistence on the privacy of belief 42— from her closet, Clara is suddenly seized by a reluctance to enter that she herself does not recognize as her own: “A sort of belief darted into my mind,” she relates, “that some being was concealed within.”43 This construction not only imagines belief as an entity that possesses the mind rather than being possessed by it, but also, by qualifying Clara’s mental state as only “a sort of belief,” suggests that her subjective experience cannot be assimilated to the linguistic convention that equates mental states with propositions, and propositions with declarative sentences. When, in the next paragraph, Clara finds herself unable to assign any “precise object” to her “fear,” Brown confirms the hint: insofar as Clara still has affects and attitudes, they are not representational, not “intentional” in the philosopher’s sense.44 The causes that do impel her behavior come from without, like the cry of “Hold! Hold!” that, at first, stops Clara from attempting to open the closet. The command supports Clara’s own fearful impulse, but does not originate in her own consciousness; indeed, the “tone” of the utterance, in which “the whole soul seemed to be rapt up,” affects Clara far more immediately than the verbal content, which she specifies only after two paragraphs describing the physiological effects of the voice.45 Clara’s mind becomes less accessible to her as it becomes more permeable to external forces—a shift reflected in Clara’s description of her actions as caused by “involuntary impulse” rather than motivated by conscious beliefs or decisions, and also, more dramatically, in her literal inability to access the contents of her closet.46 The door to this small chamber, which could previously be opened, Clara relates, readily and “without any effort of mine”—with the ease, almost, of thought—now for the first time resists Clara’s entry, not because of the lock that she herself is accustomed to fasten (Clara has already withdrawn the bolt), but because of a “human force” holding it closed from within. The small space in which Clara confines the texts that give her thoughts verbal and tangible representation is a physical manifestation of the interior space of consciousness that we imagine as

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“containing” the motives for our behavior, just as Carwin’s installation in Clara’s closet is simultaneous with and analogous to the installation in Clara’s mind of that inexplicable “phrenzy” that begins, in place of rational resolutions, to determine her actions.47 When these privileged spaces implode, so does the capacity to claim ownership of one’s own thoughts and actions. It is all too understandable, then, that when Clara later returns to the house in which her sister-in-law was murdered and her own life menaced, she does so for the specific purpose of recovering a “journal” that she has left behind, a “manuscript” that “contained the most secret transactions of [her] life.” Yet the trauma of Wieland’s madness and Carwin’s biloquism has transformed Clara’s approach to the contents of her mind: rather than securing the text in a private place, Clara is “desirous of destroying” it.48 The aim to construct a truly private consciousness, one that cannot be invaded or even observed (Pleyel’s “imperfect sight” of the contents of this shorthand manuscript, Clara recalls, led directly to his “fatal errors”), can only end with the complete emptying of that consciousness in a last, desperate attempt to preserve its integrity—desperate and, most important, failed. Clara attains the manuscript only to discover that her house is already occupied by Carwin, whose presence in her thoughts is as constant and torturing as his recurrence in her life.49 The closet that stood in for Clara’s private consciousness is now haunted even when empty, and the texts in which she has inscribed her interiority entail, between the lines, their own destruction. Using the metaphors of ToM to undermine ToM’s own premises by identifying the mind not with a secure, text-filled chest but with an invaded chest and a missing text, Brown’s fictions sketch the contours of a trope that endures throughout the American nineteenth century (and beyond). That troubled lineage will be the subject of a later section of this chapter; before we track the continued evolution of this dismantled metaphor, however, it will be useful to tease out its repercussions in Brown’s own works—specifically, the syntactic contortions that echo on the formal level the novels’ thematic dismantling of agential interiority. The narrative breakdown around which Brown’s major

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works are structured—the progression from an obsession with localizing consciousness to the evacuation of consciousness—besets not just human but also grammatical subjects, exposing and troubling the assumptions of agency and interiority that inhere in the very conventions of linguistic representation. Although Brown’s interest in undermining consciousness’s authority over intentional action has its roots in the metaphorics of the mind, the following interlude will show that its representational consequences pervade even the verbal substrate of his novels. Passive Subjects

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If free indirect discourse stylistically enforces the metaphors about mental legibility and accessibility that underwrite—but rarely appear explicitly in—the typical novel, we might expect it to fare poorly on transplantation to a Brownian narrative universe that rejects intentionalistic explanations of behavior as incoherent or misleading. Although formal devices are by definition extractable from the cognitive contexts in which they arose, they are, I posit, far from cognitively neutral. A given technique will thrive when its intratextual neighbors—thematic concerns, plot structures, patterns of figurative language—confirm the cognitive form on which it is predicated; a technique will struggle when it is unsupported by or incompatible with a text’s other assumptions about cognition. Before we survey the career of literalized textual metaphors in nineteenth-century American literature, then, it is worth pausing to investigate what becomes of FID in Brown’s universe. Is it possible? Is it successful? Does it serve the same function that it does in the typical nineteenth-century novel—that is, bringing a character’s mental states into public legibility? Perhaps the most startlingly unconventional use of FID in Brown’s work occurs when Clara Wieland is recounting her strangely persistent efforts to open the closet in which Carwin is hiding. The paragraphs in which she attempts to make sense of her actions establish a rhythm of motive-generation and -rejection, repeatedly encouraging the reader to form conjectures about Clara’s intentions and actions—“What could be supposed but that I deserted the chamber and the house? that I at

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least endeavoured no longer to withdraw the door?”—only to counter them with the persistent claim that Clara’s behavior was senseless, “dictated by phrenzy,” “utterly bereft of understanding.”50 At times, Clara’s narrative voice seems to be ventriloquizing, in an almost confrontational tone, the confusion and criticism that she attributes to the reader. Coming immediately after a sentence noting that “a casual observer” might mistake her actions for conscious bravery rather than compulsion, Clara’s rhetorical question—“Whence, but from an habitual defiance of danger, could my perseverance arise?”—is unmistakably cast in the voice of that “casual observer.”51 The latter may seem at first like a stand-in for the reader—but, from a structural perspective, this hypothetical observer actually does the work of a third-person narrator: inscribing Clara’s actions into a system of socially accepted reasons that supposedly motivate them. By giving this figure an explicit (though minimal) social location, as the “casual observer,” Brown emphasizes the dependence of mental states on a community of observers and interpreters—a fact that an invisible, omniscient narrator would tend to obscure and naturalize.52 When Clara’s channeling of her audience’s assumptions breaks into full-fledged free indirect discourse, then, it fittingly represents not Clara’s consciousness but the thoughts that the reader attributes to Clara. “Surely,” Clara declares after recounting her discovery that the door of her closet was being held shut, “here was new cause for affright. This was confirmation proper to decide my conduct. Now was all ground of hesitation taken away.” The coexistence of the deictics “here” and “now” with verbs in the past tense marks this passage as FID, but the mental states that it represents are marked as an external observer’s likely assumptions about the contents of Clara’s consciousness, not as the contents themselves. On the contrary, Clara’s consciousness was at that moment, we are repeatedly informed, quite empty: “Have I not said that my actions were dictated by phrenzy? My reason had forborne, for a time, to suggest or sway my resolves,” she asserts, denying the hypothetical interiority that she has just constructed.53 Brown here makes use of a stylistic device that represents mental states as textual objects only to emphasize more starkly the inaccuracy of that

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metaphor, insisting that the beliefs and intentions inferred by an observer do not correspond to any such structures in the protagonist’s emptied mind. The limitations of FID are, for Brown, not only philosophical but formal. A later and more standard use of the technique, when Clara is contemplating possible plans of action in her darkened house (“I would see this man in spite of all impediments; ere I died, I would see his face”), begins with a question that, although it could be mistaken for an example of FID, is in fact radically opposed to it: “What purpose did I meditate?”54 Precisely because this question confesses an ignorance of the contents of one’s own mind, it cannot be a retrospective representation of Clara’s consciousness at the time; rather, the question indicates that Clara is about to engage in the same kind of hypothetical reconstruction of intentional states that the “casual observer” of the earlier scene attempted. Ascribing textual content to a consciousness that was in fact vacant, the FID that follows this question seeks to fill an experiential and mnemonic void by inventing a post hoc and wholly fictional representation of her motives and sensations at the time.55 This instance of free indirect discourse, then, is framed by a sentence that brackets it as merely conjectural: the sentence “What purpose did I meditate?” uses the superficial formal characteristics of free indirect discourse to evoke a mental state that is incompatible with the technique’s implicit psychological assumptions. This foray into the retroactive attribution of intention, moreover, proves taxing and unsatisfying for Clara herself, who breaks into direct discourse after a few paragraphs: “Alas! . . . now I know what it is to entertain incommunicable sentiments.”56 If free indirect discourse serves in Wieland not to grant the reader a window into Clara’s consciousness but, on the contrary, to assert the impossibility of such access, drawing attention to the discrepancy between the reasonable inferences a reader might make about Clara’s motives and her own subjective experience of her actions, what syntactic form can register the precariousness of the mind-as-container metaphor? The answer lies in Brown’s most prominent and perplexing verbal tic: his constant, even intrusive use of the passive voice, especially with respect to verbs of cognition. Using verbs like “to think,”

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“to remember,” “to suspect,” or “to believe” in the passive voice seems almost paradoxical: surely these actions are meaningful only when executed by a particular mind, whether individual or collective, named or unnamed. Since the very notion of “thinking” seems to imply the existence of an agent who thinks, it is hard to see what could be gained by distorting the clear proposition “I thought X” into the confusingly tangled “X was thought by me.” 57 Yet Brown frequently recasts verbs of mental action in just this way; indeed, the more common case by far is for Brown to drop even the secondary identification of the verb’s agent at the end of the sentence (“by me”), leaving the identity of the individual performing the action implicit in the context of the clause. Passive constructions tend to proliferate most during set pieces of what I have called cognitive emergency, when the protagonist finds it difficult to explain even their own behavior in terms of an internally localized reason. Drawing exclusively upon Wieland, for example, we find that during the scene in which Carwin occupies Clara’s closet, a course of action “was preferred” and a “resolution was instantly conceived”; in Clara’s account of her return home on the night of Wieland’s killing spree, “a fearful glance was thrown backward,” “some object was expected to be seen,” and “Carwin’s hand was instantly recognized”; under the psychic stress of Carwin’s first appearance, “a form, and attitude, and garb, were instantly created” in Clara’s imagination to match the melodious voice she heard; and during the scene of Clara’s waking dream at her rustic seat, the voice that interrupted her reverie “was immediately recognized” as the same one that had carried on a whispered conversation in her closet.58 Although the passive voice predominates in scenes of crisis, however, it is not restricted to them and pervades even the calmer moments of the novel.59 These reconfigured verbs of cognition are frequently awkward to the ear, and at times seem to strain the limits of grammaticality and sense—yet they are such a regular feature of Brown’s narrative discourse that we need to scrutinize their effect on the reader’s understanding of intentionality and mental processes. One counterintuitive feature of the passive voice, when applied to mental verbs, is its requirement that the contents of the mind—the “suspicion” being entertained, the sight being “recognized,” and so

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on—remain in the patient position, acted upon rather than acting: passive constructions, however paradoxical it may seem, demand a human (or at least a thinking and intending) agent. The distinction is well illustrated by an instance that occurs late in the novel as the distraught Wieland lights upon a new idea: “A beam,” Clara relates, “appeared to be darted into his mind.”60 The alternative construction “A beam appeared to dart into his mind” would perhaps have sounded more natural, but it would have positioned the beam as the agent of the sentence; for the beam “to be darted into his mind,” by contrast, an entity must exist to do the darting, while the beam remains merely the passive object of the action.61 The clause only makes sense, then, if the beam was darted into Wieland’s mind by someone—and yet it is precisely that last attribution that Brown withholds: Clara’s complete sentence tells us only that “a beam appeared to be darted into his mind, which gave a purpose to his efforts,” without specifying any agent who might plausibly have darted the beam. The omission is particularly glaring in this instance, since the surrounding text provides us with no way of inferring the identity of this implied darter—an ambiguity that reinforces the reader’s uncertainty about the divine, human, or perhaps physiological source of Wieland’s epiphany. Even when the subject of a passive verb is clear from the context of its sentence, however—indeed, perhaps especially in such cases, since an active construction would be both more expected and more economical—Brown’s passive constructions emphasize the implied agent position for the sole purpose of emptying it, simultaneously calling attention to and undermining the assumption that mental actions are necessarily performed by the “possessor” of the mind in question. The agent position is thoroughly denaturalized even in those relatively rare cases when Brown does identify the person performing the action of a passive verb, as when Clara recounts “the ideas that . . . were tumultuously revolved by me” or when Wieland tells Clara that her implausible stories “are believed by me.”62 By transforming the actor into an afterthought rather than (as is typical in English) the first word of the sentence— the origin, so to speak, of the verb that follows it—Brown implies that an agent is not the upstream causal source of an action, but rather

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an explanatory construct assigned belatedly by those observing or recounting that action. A revised metaphor for consciousness that leads to an evacuation of characters’ agency that leads to a grammatical distortion  .  .  . My analysis, I hope, has shown that the rejection of mentalistic logic, however casually it may be undertaken, reverberates throughout a writer’s subsequent formal and thematic decisions, creating a fiction that embodies a cognitive form startlingly distinct from the norms of Theory of Mind. Yet this entailment extends not only across levels of analysis within a single text, but also, in the incestuously tiny literary scene of the early United States, across texts and authors. Whether through Brown’s direct influence or simply because these images conveniently crystallized a familiar cognitive model, stolen texts and invaded chests remained ready to hand—ready to be appropriated, enriched, and creatively misread—for American authors in the century that followed Brown’s flurry of productivity. Mss. Found in a Bottle

Having identified a trope, one often does end up seeing it everywhere. Still, the missing or destroyed text has more of a presence than one might expect in some of the best known texts of nineteenth-century US literature. This section briefly gestures toward several substantial contributions to the “mind as container” and “mental states as texts” conceptual metaphors: fictions that use these tropes to establish genre conventions, navigate authorship, and redescribe the relations between races, classes, and nations in terms of different models of the mind and its boundaries. I will present four troubled texts, three fictional and one actual; two are from the mid-nineteenth century and two from the very early twentieth. I reserve particular attention, however, for a short story published more than a century after Brown’s novels that, through a satire of pretentious bibliophiles, manages to puncture the mystique of the text (real or missing) as a material standin for cognitive contents. Text number one is shredded. When Arthur Gordon Pym, striking a match to read a note mysteriously dispatched to his dark hiding place

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by means of his dog Tiger, finds the paper blank, he tears it up in a rage—only to realize belatedly that he had only examined one side of the sheet and that there might well have been writing on the other. Yet the fragments of the note that Pym retrieves with Tiger’s help are so disjointed and Pym’s brain is so feverish that he can only make out a few words, of which “blood” is ominously one.63 Rather than enabling the secure transmission of interpretable (albeit, consequently, misinterpretable) content from one mind to another, Pym’s shredded text represents an aggregate of clues—non-propositional stimuli that bypass hermeneutics altogether. Pym reacts to the word “blood,” after all, not in its intentional capacity—not as though someone is speaking to him about blood—but as though he has seen a puddle of actual blood: no longer a symbol, the word, “disjointed . . . from any foregoing words to render it distinct,” has become an index, a causal trace of violence elsewhere much like the clues by which Poe’s detective Dupin reconstructs crime scenes.64 Pym’s hysterical reaction to the note reminds us that, as we have already seen suggested in Brown, the categories of “conscious” and “unconscious” reflect the epistemological habits of the observer more than the real origins of the behavior observed: although Pym’s friend Augustus wrote the note with the definite intention of warning his addressee, Pym’s mentalistic incompetence means that the note seems to him either empty or incoherent. Yet to interpret this simply as a failure on Pym’s part would be to ignore the real indistinguishability, as Poe represents it, of the two sides of the note: the intentional communication and the unintended blank. The empty surface of the note is surface only because Pym happened to look at it first, just as “the other, or under side”—the enclosure where propositional mental states are supposed to be located—emerges as such because of its belated place in the sequence of Pym’s investigations. The qualitative difference between inside and outside that powers ToM lacks an observer-independent basis and therefore cannot be arrived at except by one already familiar with the metaphorical constructs of mindreading. That minds carry texts inside them may be merely a metaphor, but what about a text that resides inside a human body? The question arises as we turn to text number two, which is ingested. “Eat it

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with your biscuit,” Frederick Douglass tells his comrades when they are caught in an escape attempt, instructing them to swallow the passes they have forged.65 It should be no strain, at this point, to see the literacy forbidden to enslaved people as both a material corollary and a figurative representation of the conscious interiority that they were not supposed to have. The act of reading or writing a text, imagined as a silent communion between verbalized minds, implies, when performed by supposed chattel, the unnerving existence of private and voluntarily disclosable mental contents, threatening the enslaver’s confident disregard for his captive’s mental states. In eating the passes, then, Douglass and his companions are engaged in a deception that consists of denying their own ability to deceive, a close relation of the “fooling” that we will encounter in chapter 4. Actively literalizing the metaphor of the textual interior—the written documents that Douglass has produced to allow his mobility are now physically inside him and his companions, just as ToM imagines mental states to be—also obliterates the evidence of that interior: it is precisely because Douglass has labored to construct a textual consciousness for himself that he is able, when necessary, to perpetuate the pretense of his own psychic emptiness. Advising his companions to “Own nothing!” Douglass wants them not only to admit nothing but also, more basically, to revoke for the moment the ownership of one’s own mental states that ToM presumes, strategically assuming the dispossession associated with their enslaved status.66 Yet there is another oddity about the particular directions that Douglass gives to his fellow escapees. For if the most literal method of incorporating a text into oneself entails destroying it, this destruction has the effect of transforming the text from abstract message into material substrate—into the flesh and blood of its possessor. The order to eat the passes thus constitutes a kind of pretense in itself, even independent of the documents’ destruction: namely, the pretense that these texts are objects governed by physical causality rather than interpretive heuristics. This strategy of making a text illegible—but thereby capable of being absorbed into the material world—parallels Florens’s determination to burn her house of words, allowing its ashes to penetrate the surrounding landscape.

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Henry James’s novels contain their fair share of burned texts as well, from the manuscripts of “The Aspern Papers” to the Bellegardes’ family secret in The American. Coming from James’s wealthy, white protagonists whose ownership of their textualized mental states is taken for granted, however, an action like Christopher Newman’s burning of the Bellegardes’ document has much in common with Clara Wieland’s destruction of her diary. Rather than continuing to withhold the Bellegardes’ secret or selectively revealing it—rather than, in either case, becoming the agent of its concealment or dispersal, as ToM would posit him to be—Newman rejects the responsibility by destroying this objectified mental state, burning a precious text to free himself from the burden of having to protect it. Yet not all of James’s characters bother to engage in such Brownian histrionics. My true third text is not Newman’s burned document, but Merton Densher’s unopened one. Rather than reading the will that Milly Theale leaves behind, Merton Densher deliberately ignores its contents, leaving to his and Kate Croy’s imagination the “stupendous” quantity of the inheritance bequeathed to him.67 In one sense, of course, the decision to leave the will unopened merely reflects Kate and Densher’s equally “stupendous” confidence in the fullness of their own shared consciousness: if Milly is permitted at the last, as she has been throughout the novel, to remain inviolately empty of mind and void of agency, it is because the network of furiously inferring social minds around her has willed for her, has not simply anticipated but actively supplied the intention with which she ends her life.68 Equally present in Densher’s decision, however, is an impulse to jettison the mentalistic freight with which his and Kate’s enterprise has left him, a “desire,” as the ever cleareyed Kate diagnoses it, “to escape everything”—echoed gratefully by Densher: “Everything.”69 Both explanations, as is usually the case in James, must be kept in play—and both suggest that if James’s transatlantic plots often begin by representing psychic emptiness as a national or congenital characteristic (Milly’s lack of agency, Newman’s innocence, Maggie Verver’s radiant blankness, and so on), that vacuity becomes by the end of these novels a hard-won prerogative, both liberating and risky. To resist interiority when pulled into a network of

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mutual mindreaders, James’s novels suggest, requires an act of definitive refusal best represented through the literal unmaking of ToM’s metaphoric materials. Like Milly’s will, text number four is, or at least appears to be, intact. Two years after the publication of James’s The Wings of the Dove, Charles Chesnutt published in Atlantic Monthly a wry riff on the missing-text trope that resituated it in the literary marketplace itself. Just as in James’s novels, the gesture of not reading is one of “great delicacy” among the members of the Bodleian Club, the coterie of book collectors in which Chesnutt’s “Baxter’s Procrustes” is set. Rather than evidencing an abundance of interpersonal trust, however, the unread text represents profit for Chesnutt’s narrator: among book collectors, an uncut copy stamped with an unbroken wax seal is “a sort of holy of holies” whose “inviolateness” renders it exceptionally valuable.70 The value system of the Bodleian Club is grounded in and, in a sense, parasitic on ToM’s metaphors of mind: books are precious because they contain the textualized mental states of great men, just as the “personal mementos of distinguished authors” that the club collects—among them “a lead pencil used by Emerson” and “a chip of a tree felled by Mr. Gladstone”—are precious for their indexical connection to genius.71 Even though the artistic and rhetorical intentions of these figures are presumably what gives their books and possessions value, however, Chesnutt registers the same fundamental tension between communiqué and clue that we observed in Poe. Of “the qualities that make a book valuable in the eye of collectors,” Chesnutt’s narrator notes, the beauty of the binding and the quality of the paper can be reproduced in the club’s own publications, but “age could not, of course, be imparted”: as a collectible object, a book derives much of its worth from material traces that escape not only the author’s but anyone’s intention, a fact that sits uneasily with the Bodleian Club’s valorization of literary genius, and one that the Carwinian trickster of the title finds a way to exploit.72 Recognizing the potential for profit in the club members’ mania for uncut copies, Baxter decides to publish an extremely limited edition in the Bodleian’s own imprint. His long poem, the Procrustes of

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the story title, may be a denunciation of conformity, a social Darwinist screed in the manner of Herbert Spencer, a collection of gemlike aphorisms in the manner of Omar Khayyam; no one is quite sure, because no one, including the narrator, can bring himself to break the seal on his edition.73 After a sealed copy of the poem sells for $150 at a club meeting, a feedback loop opens: seeing that others value the sealed Procrustes more highly, the narrator realizes that “a proper regard for my own interests would not permit me to spoil my copy by opening it,” which in turn leads him to speculate ever more ambitiously about the contents of the sealed text.74 An act of mindreading grounded in economic self-interest, like those that the communities mentioned in my introduction deemed to be fundamental to competent social cognition, slips into irrational speculation when the commodity at issue derives its own value from its ability to stand in for an intention. Trapped in this cycle of overvaluation, the collectors tasked with reviewing the Procrustes at the next club meeting attempt to save face by appealing to the book’s status as a metonym for Baxter’s mind, concealing their ignorance by declaring the poem to be “an emanation from Baxter’s own intellect.” “By knowing Baxter,” one Thompson promises, “we are able to appreciate the book, and after having read the book we feel that we are so much the more intimately acquainted with Baxter”: consciousness, insofar as it is meant to be self-contained and selfauthorizing, winds up in tautology.75 Thompson is not entirely wrong, though: the book’s opacity is, in fact, the most Baxterian thing about it. When the narrator finds Baxter eavesdropping on this conversation about the Procrustes, he notices Baxter’s amused expression—but the narrator has “already learned,” he stresses, “that Baxter’s opinions upon any subject were not to be gathered always from his facial expression.”76 This is neither the first nor the last time that Baxter thwarts the narrator’s attempt to use physiognomy as a supplement or alternative to mindreading. When the character is first introduced, we learn that his “gloomy” personality is “foreign to the temperament that should accompany his physical type”;77 at the climax of the story, the narrator, not having learned his lesson from this discrepancy, tries to offer a review of the

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Procrustes via a close reading of the book’s cover, an enterprise structurally similar to reading the mind in the face—and just as doomed. In the case of Baxter’s eavesdropping, the narrator takes the discrepancy between interior and exterior as license to speculate freely, concluding that Baxter’s grin—which Baxter himself explains by pointing to an amusing picture on the wall—is a “bluff ” to mask his shy gratitude for the group’s appreciation of his work.78 Not until the Procrustes is finally displayed in public does the true nature of Baxter’s “bluff ” come to light: the book is empty. Knowing that (mind)reading behaves, in this small society, something like a financial bubble—since the taboo on scrutinizing their contents directly allows books and minds to be invested with textual objects well beyond what they could plausibly contain—Baxter has correctly intuited that the value of a book lies in the propositions it licenses the possessor to project, producing a volume that is, in the words of the club president, “all margin.”79 Since this fraud depends on a hysterical exaggeration of novelistic ToM much like Clara Wieland’s counterproductive defense of her closet, it seems beautifully appropriate that the scam is eventually discovered, not by any of the faithful Bodleianites, but by someone’s “young English cousin . . . on his first visit to the United States.” (“‘You see,’ he exclaimed, holding up the volume, ‘you fellows said so much about the bally book that I wanted to see what it was like; so I untied the ribbon, and cut the leaves with the paper knife lying here, and found—and found that there was n’t a single line in it, don’t you know!’”)80 A century before Chesnutt, Brown had demonstrated that an obsession with establishing the boundedness of the mind was destined to leave it empty, offering an implicit critique of his English novel-writing peers’ assumption that mental states can be both private and legible; now, in 1904, an Englishman discovers and quickly punctures an entire formal and social system based on not reading minds. The precariousness of American books’ relationship to British ones could hardly be clearer. And yet Chesnutt’s caricature of literary value also hints that the apparent failure of US literature, that familiar elision of interiors, could, under another guise, be its salvation—not only for Baxter, whose Procrustes turns out to be worth more as a hoax than

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as a poem, but for the handful of writers who would eventually make up the American canon. At one of the club auctions, our narrator recounts before Baxter’s prank, an “Emerson essay rose from three dollars to seventeen”—whereas one by Thoreau, “being by an author less widely read, and by his own confession commercially unsuccessful, brought a somewhat higher figure.”81 Decades before it paid off in anthology slots and syllabus listings, the alchemy that Chesnutt hints at here is already capable of transmuting commercial unsuccess into literary worth. “If Some Bundles Could Speak”

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When it comes to the texts whose pages nineteenth-century readers did cut—the novels by American writers that found some traction in the US marketplace—the analogy between texts and mental states is put to dramatically different use. Although the literary lineage I have been tracing shows itself sharply critical of ToM—and ready to demolish ToM’s fundamental metaphors as proof of their inadequacy—such texts, despite their eventually canonical status, hardly represented the dominant strain in antebellum US fiction. The most commercially successful novels of the period, on the contrary, painstakingly constructed story-worlds that established the legitimacy of ToM’s cognitive metaphors even in the face of challenges and doubts. Sentimental fiction developed one set of strategies, grounded in mindshaping techniques like pedagogy and emotional mirroring, for shoring up the boundedness and legibility of the mind.82 I close this chapter by considering another approach, more closely related to the sentimental strand than it may at first appear: James Fenimore Cooper’s use of the mind-ascontainer metaphor in The Deerslayer. When Judith and Hetty Hutter need a valuable object with which to ransom their father, they turn to a large and mysterious chest that, although it has been present in the Hutter household for as long as the girls can remember, was always held in such “reverence” that their parents refused even to name it: “there appeared to be a silent convention,” Judith recalls, “that in naming the different objects that occasionally stood near it, or even lay on its lid care should be had

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to avoid any allusion to the chest itself.”83 None of the available keys seems to fit the trunk’s lock, which only Hetty—the “Feeble-Mind,” as Chingachgook calls her—has seen opened; the key, we eventually learn, had been placed in one of Hetty’s pockets without her knowledge, and it is Chingachgook who finds it there. A container so secret that its owners would rather not acknowledge its existence; a container opened only in the presence of a girl so simpleminded as to lack, in the eyes of her family, any consciousness of what she might see inside; a container sealed with “steel bands” and “heavy padlocks,” so cleverly constructed that to access its contents at first seems a hopeless endeavor; a container whose key finally appears not as a deliberately withheld piece of information but as an involuntary clue, accessible by detective-like methods . . . 84  Apart from some details—for instance, the incongruously social staging of the chest’s opening, attended by no fewer than four people—this setup resembles nothing so much as a scene from one of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, where a character’s obsessive efforts to localize and secure the contents of his consciousness would end in the construction of a “chest” impregnable not only by outsiders, but by the owner himself. A reader trained on Brown’s fictions, then, is fully prepared to discover that the key does not work, that there are too many layers of protection to breach, that the trunk is empty, or that its contents have been tampered with. In the nineteenth-century works we have already examined, this outcome would shake the characters’ false confidence in the accessibility and legibility of their own and others’ mental contents. Yet the container is opened, and in it we find—exactly what Cooper’s characters hoped to find: layers of valuables (antique clothes and pistols, a “mathematical instrument” for navigating at sea, a fine chess set), and, later, in one of the bundles buried in the bottom of the chest, another “small trunk” that “was nearly filled with papers.”85 If Hutter’s chest is a stand-in for his mind, one must admit that it serves that purpose excellently: forbiddingly sealed to most bystanders, it is nonetheless accessible to anyone who holds the key, and its most significant contents—the letters and documents that provide Judith with clues to her family’s history—are well concealed but perfectly preserved. It is

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almost as though Cooper has decided to rewrite the traumatically unsuccessful chest-opening scene in Edgar Huntly, replacing the scraps of mechanism that so disappointed that novel’s protagonist with several strata of interpretive riches. (“That flag must have some meaning to it,” Judith asserts when Natty discovers the cloth that the letters are wrapped in, and she is absolutely right.)86 Indeed, the chest’s integrity (and that of its openers) proves so strong that the examination of its contents does not compromise its future security: Cooper takes pains to specify that, once the ransom had been extracted, “the lid was lowered, the padlocks replaced, and the key turned.”87 Cooper’s literal rendering of the mind-as-container and mental-states-as-texts metaphors, then, works not to undermine but rather to buttress the psychological model with which they are associated; when the chest is persuaded to disclose its secrets, they prove as complete and coherent as any intentionally assembled autobiography. Cooper’s fidelity to the expectations of novelistic ToM is perhaps unsurprising in the context of his literary career: his first published book, after all, was an Austenian novel of manners titled, rather hilariously, Precaution (1820).88 (The book’s commercial and critical failure suggests that Cooper was not especially good at capturing the Austen magic, but the attempt, in the context of antebellum American literature and of Cooper’s later work, is surprising and noteworthy in itself.) In social matters, too, Cooper’s love of England and the Continent was notorious: Leslie Fiedler labels him “the most self-consciously civilized and gentlemanly of our writers,” a man whose major novels constitute simulacra of America for the benefit of English and French readers, while D.H. Lawrence cites Cooper as evidence that “European decadence was anticipated in America.”89 Yet, as one might expect given Cooper’s frequent valorization as the most American of American authors, this fascination with the English novel and its cognitive norm of ToM was not unmixedly positive: rather, Cooper represents the prospect of determining another person’s mental states as both tantalizing and terrifying. This tension finds its way into The Deerslayer’s chestopening scene in the contrasting attitudes of Natty and Judith: whereas the young woman can barely contain her “feverish impatience” to view

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the letters within her father’s trunk, Natty is much more reluctant to intrude upon the sanctity of that interior, and agrees to open it only because its owner is in imminent danger.90 Natty also resists, although equally unsuccessfully, Judith’s desire to keep exploring the trunk even after an adequate ransom has been found, disclaiming any interest in “prying into other people’s secrets.” When, once the trunk has been sealed again, the group is surprised by a Delaware youth, Natty—quite illogically, given the actual sequence of events, but revealingly—blames the mishap on their decision to snoop: “This comes of prying into another man’s chist!”91 Although Cooper confidently assures us that our mental containers are safely locked and do hold the textual treasures we suppose, to actually access those contents is, in the eyes of his hero, an ungentlemanly violation not much better than scalping, which similarly exposes the protected contents of the skull. It is no accident that Natty’s opponent in the chest-opening scene is a woman. If Cooper’s forest functions as a kind of behaviorist Eden, substituting the detective-like tracking of external clues for intrusive mentalistic reasoning, it is largely its maleness that makes it so. On hearing of Hurry Harry’s interest in Judith, Natty advises, “I would think no more of such a woman, but turn my mind altogether to the forest; that will not deceive you, being ordered and ruled by a hand that never wavers.”92 ToM is not impossible in the wilderness, but simply unnecessary: in the absence of a gap between material signs and immaterial intentions, there is no point in ascribing to any of the forest’s creatures an interior set of beliefs and desires in excess of their surface conduct. The “cur’osity” that, according to Natty, tempts us to investigate others’ mental states—“and sometimes to fancy them, when [we] could’n’t find ’em out!”—is “a woman’s, and not a man’s failing”: whereas the Deerslayer has chosen a life that minimizes both his desire and his opportunity to reason about other humans’ beliefs and intentions, Judith is immersed in such reasoning, from her choice of a mate to her exploration of her family’s past.93 Given the persistent analogy between texts and mental states, then, it should come as no surprise that, according to Cooper, women have privileged access to written texts as well as psychological contents. “I never thought fathers could

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read much,” Hatty says simply, discussing the illiterate Deerslayer with her sister, “but mothers ought to read, else how else can they teach their children. Depend upon it, Judith, Deerslayer could never have had a mother, else he would know how to read.”94 If the logic of the forest, as articulated by Hurry Harry—who asserts bluntly that “skin makes the man. This is reason; else how are people to judge of each other”95— restricts itself to the description of surfaces, the feminine universe, embodied in Judith, demands the interpretation of depth: the meaning of a word or a gesture, the interior of a book or a brain. Skin makes the man, but consciousness, in Cooper’s world, makes the woman.

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The Failed Flâneur

Much like another historical transition often invoked by literary scholars—the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe—the rise of contact between strangers in the United States seems to have taken place over a multicentury span, and where a scholar locates its epicenter arguably depends more on their period of study than on any historical watershed. James Salazar sees the phenomenon of “strangers . . . acting across regional, cultural, and racial divides” cresting in the 1850s in America; Eve Tavor Bannet finds that “the problem of mobile or migrating strangers whose true situation and character were unknown” was an obsession even in the novels of the early republic, approximately seventy years before Salazar’s estimate; Stacey Margolis, looking toward the Gilded Age, attributes an increasing and epistemologically confounding “need to define obligations between strangers” to “the rise of tort law in the second half of the nineteenth century.”1 My goal in citing these multiple timelines is not to cast doubt on their historical accuracy, but rather to suggest that the stranger problem was less the product of a discrete moment in the nineteenth century and more a condition of American existence that flared up or forced its way into consciousness at irregular intervals. Yet whether a historian

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pegs the transition from legible communities to anonymous crowds to the late eighteenth, the mid-nineteenth, or the late nineteenth century, scholarly accounts largely agree that one of its effects was a profusion of character typologies. These texts, which attempted to classify anonymous individuals by the visible marks of their profession, social status, or nationality, were usually associated with urban settings: as Dana Brand notes in his study of the genre, “whether or not cities in the nineteenth century were in fact becoming more dangerous, it was perceived that they were becoming more dangerous . . . Whether or not . . . they were becoming more illegible or . . . the conditions of social alienation in them were intensifying, they were perceived as more illegible and alienating.”2 Brand’s focus is London, but the US example suggests that such anxieties were less about density than about mobility and social fragmentation, as relevant to the scattered towns of the western frontier as to the crowded cities of the eastern seaboard. This relative rootlessness, Salazar argues, meant that “individuals could no longer make recourse to the sedimented reputation of familiar members of a local community and thus grew increasingly reliant on the ability to read at a glance the character of strangers.”3 Reading at a glance: the phrase suggests mastery and epistemological confidence, a kind of panoptic power in the manner of Foucault. Most accounts of character in the nineteenth-century United States suggest that the taxonomic categories of urban spectatorship serve an essentially disciplinary function, organizing the unstable populace into a self-policing system where the (white, middle-class, usually male) flâneur monitors the bodies of marginalized individuals.4 Yet what is most remarkable about the act of “reading” character as represented in American literature is that it so often fails—fails not simply to register the complexity of any individual’s behavior and motivations, which is surely not the goal of such taxonomic strategies, but even to provide the “reader” with the sense of clarity and solidity he desires. Take, for instance, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” whose proto-Holmesian savvy allows him to detect clerks by their “right ears,” which have “an odd habit of standing off on end,” and gamblers by “a more than ordinary extension of the thumb at right angles with

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the fingers”: in this story’s transparent London, every individual comes tagged with the marks of their ethnicity, profession, and habits.5 It does not take long for this sense of cognitive ease to be broken, however, by the title character, whose physiognomy stymies and fascinates the narrator not so much because it “lasst sich nicht lesen” (as the story’s first sentence has it) as because it generates too many potential readings.6 At the narrator’s first glimpse of the man “there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind,” he recounts, “the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair”: even the syntax of this statement, which positions the narrator’s mind as a passive receptacle in which affects and personality traits play out an obscure drama, instantly differentiates it from the untroubled and agentic acts of interpretation that preceded it: “I discerned,” “I observed,” “I descried,” “I could always detect.”7 This confused initial impression inspires the narrator to follow the man through the city, but sustained observation of the man’s behavior, far from disambiguating his character, ends up underlining the inadequacy of the narrator’s method. The taxonomical model of character with which the story opens—the faith that individuals can be classified into discrete types, and that those types are visible in the bodies and bearing of those who belong to them—is most successful at the margins of interpersonal contact: the nineteenth-century bourgeois flâneur categorizes strangers passing in the street both because he knows almost nothing about them and so that he does not need to know more about them, so that he can identify them as the kind of people with whom he would prefer not to associate. As a result, these schemas do possess a certain self-confirming predictive power: you expect to be assaulted by certain “criminal types,” so you avoid these types; when you are not assaulted (a more likely outcome than the alternative, even in a dimly lit and dangerous nineteenth-century city), you feel as though it is the action you took that protected you. The problem arises when one begins to ask for explanatory power from these typologies of personality—when, as the narrator does in the latter half of “The Man

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of the Crowd,” one attempts to discern the causal mechanisms behind a given series of actions. The narrator seems to believe that resolving the conflicting messages sent by the man’s face and demeanor would automatically give him insight into what drives the man’s ramblings, which otherwise seem simply “without aim,” unmotivated by intention. Yet, after repeatedly confessing himself “utterly amazed” by and “at a loss to comprehend” the man’s behavior, the narrator’s eventual conclusion is transparently tautological, solving the problem of the man’s motivation simply by redescribing his behavior in terms of a generalizable character type: “He is the man of the crowd.”8 Why does the man seek out the most crowded streets? Because “he refuses to be alone”9—an answer about as satisfactory as the assertion that criminal types commit crimes because they are criminal types. Such explanations, which work by taking repeated behavior patterns as evidence of an inherent disposition to perform that behavior, possess a certain quick-fix appeal, but they lack the nuance and generalizability of an intentionalistic explanation—and they certainly do not tell us much about how and why events come to pass in the modern city. That search for the sources of human action, as we saw in chapter 1, typically forms the province of ToM, which addresses the question by appealing to motives—that is, to propositional attitudes like “he wanted to steal her jewels” or “she hated him for his infidelity.” If motives are elusive, however, and typologies inadequate, what might a nonmentalistic system for explaining behavior—one that provided useful interpretations of others’ actions and offered that subjective sense of epistemic confidence—look like? This chapter reads short stories by two canonical writers as efforts toward an answer. Poe himself invented a genre that structurally resists mental-state reasoning: the detective story, whose protagonist’s job, even more than bringing criminals to justice, is reconstructing the causal chain that gave rise to a particular event so as to nullify the need for reason-based explanations. Melville, meanwhile, used the stubbornly empty character of Bartleby to draw attention to the automatic and unconscious substrate of everyday social life, revealing how that substrate molds and constrains the mentalistic interpretations on which our ToM supposedly

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rests. If Poe’s Dupin stories return again and again to a forensic plot structure, and if Melville represents his lawyer-narrator’s explanations for Bartleby’s behavior as subject to serial rejection and replacement, it is not only because of the difficulty of explaining actions without minds, but also because the sociocognitive encounter between strangers, often repeated but never the same, demands an equally iterative narrative form. Our stance toward other people’s minds and actions, these narratives suggest, is not a once-and-for-all ontic categorization but a constant epistemic renegotiation. Three Ways of Looking at an Action

Detective fiction is now an umbrella genre, encompassing the hardboiled and the “cozy,” the suspenseful and the analytic, the forensic and the supernatural; the detectives themselves may be called upon to use their wits, their wiles, their physical strength, their political connections, or their intuition. Like the comically different dog breeds that all descend from the same species of wild wolf, these diverse subgenres nonetheless claim descent from a single story: Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Yet despite establishing structural archetypes familiar to aficionados of detective fiction, from the story’s “locked room” premise to its attempt to determine “whodunit,” “Rue Morgue” also offers a model of cognition and a practice of behavioral inference that seem quite distant from Poe’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century offspring—a model and a practice that distinguish themselves precisely by the drastic limitations they place on the detective’s field of inquiry.10 To begin to understand the causal model of behavior offered in the Dupin stories, it may be wisest to begin by cataloging what Poe’s detective does not take into account in his ratiocinations. Most glaringly, Dupin does not care about motive. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” Dupin explicitly refuses to consider the criminal’s potential intentions and desires, not so much for ontological as for practical reasons: motives generate potential causal explanations for the crime without eliminating any. The police investigating Marie Rogêt’s murder, Dupin says, “were able at once to understand how and why such an atrocity might have been committed”; nothing is easier

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than to imagine the mental states—the jealousy, the fear, the lust or greed—that may have precipitated a murder, or indeed any other action.11 (Contemporary philosophers of mind have identified this very flexibility as one of the potential pitfalls of mindreading: “observed behavior is always compatible with mutually inconsistent propositional attitude attributions.”)12 When it comes time to winnow down these inconsistent conjectures, settling upon the only causal narrative that can explain all the material details of the crime, this mentalistic reasoning becomes worse than useless. Simply because they can “picture to their imaginations a mode—many modes—and a motive—many motives,” the investigators into the Rogêt murder assume that they are on the trail of the criminal, when in reality they are more lost than before. “The ease with which these variable fancies were entertained, and the very plausibility which each assumed,” Dupin argues, “should have been understood as indicative rather of the difficulties than of the facilities which must attend elucidation.”13 The “plausiblity” of motive-based explanations—precisely the factor that gives them their value in the context of everyday interpersonal interaction, where the subjective satisfaction of telling an intentional story about an action often outweighs any consideration of that story’s forensic accuracy—constitutes, for Dupin, their treacherousness, since it fills the investigator with confidence: he has seen, he believes, this genre of crime before, and therefore need not attend too closely to the material details. Appropriately, then, the story in which Dupin debuts his method presents a crime so “outré” that it baffles intentionalistic explanations. “The seeming absence of motive” that stymies the police in the Rue Morgue murders frees Dupin to abandon the presuppositions of mentalistic reasoning, which falter when faced with absolute novelty or foreignness.14 Indeed, “the blundering idea of motive,” as Dupin labels it scornfully, appears only in the sailor’s reported speech, when he attributes a desire to avoid punishment to the orangutan that has just murdered the L’Espinayes—an impulse that qualifies more as a conditioned reflex, brought about by the sailor’s repeated abuse of the orangutan, than as an intention, and that in any case is couched in qualifications and suppositions: the beast “no doubt

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still bore in mind the dreaded whip”; “it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds.”15 If Dupin’s alternative system of behavioral interpretation is more deterministic than agentic, however, the determinism is emphatically not social, cultural, or even biological. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” shows no interest in the kind of physiognomic markers of ethnicity and social status that fascinate the narrator of “The Man of  the Crowd,” and neither Dupin’s investigation nor the testimony of the neighbors gives us much information about the identity of the murdered L’Espinaye women: how they make their money, whom they see, or where they come from. Even the profession and personal history of the sailor on whom Dupin’s search eventually lights matter only insofar as they grant him access to an orangutan. This omission, even more than that of motive, seems downright bizarre in the context both of Poe’s other work and of later detective fiction: what else is the method of Dupin’s descendant Holmes but a means of deducing social facts—beliefs, attitudes, professions, bodies of knowledge—from physical traces? For Dupin, however, those traces constitute an end in themselves, contributing at most to the minutely detailed reconstruction of a single event. Indeed, on the only occasion when social categories are evoked, their inconsistency and insufficiency to empirical facts functions as the clue: the conflicting ethnic labels that witnesses apply to the orangutan’s screeches are useful precisely because they signal the presence of something extrasocial and unintentional. Every resident of the curiously pan-European Rue Morgue hears the syllables of a different language in the orangutan’s voice; their assessments have nothing in common except an immediate judgment of foreignness, hinting indirectly at ToM’s implicit reliance on cultural commonality. For the Englishman, the orangutan might well be a German; for the Spaniard, an Englishman; for the Frenchman, an Italian; and for the Italian, a Russian . . . 16  Even more instructive than the equation of foreignness with animality, here, is the persistent error, to which everyone but the detective falls prey, of ascribing propositional (albeit unintelligible) content to wordless shrieks, of using nonverbal clues—the “intonation” from which multiple witnesses claim to have

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recognized the language—to reconstruct the supposed social fact of the assailant’s nationality.17 Such confident deductions are the shared province of Holmes, the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” and countless character-books, but “Rue Morgue” creates a narrative universe in which they are far more error-prone than Dupin’s agnosticism. Least of all does Dupin concern himself with the moral or emotional effects of crime on the victim or on the larger society. W. H. Auden’s famous claim that the whodunit serves to exorcise social deviance and establish “a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled,” though quite persuasive for the civilized crimes of Chesterton and Christie, falls short in a narrative universe where the guilty party is neither guilty nor, in legal terms, a party—at most, capable only of a kind of grotesque parody of guilt (the “agitation” that leads the orangutan to attempt to hide the bodies).18 The animal’s keeper, too, is “innocent” of the L’Espinaye murders: although the sailor may have been legally culpable under strict liability standards even before the rise of negligence-based tort law, Dupin shows no interest in delivering him to the justice system.19 We are left with the peculiar spectacle of a detective story whose dénouement carries no moral judgment—only the amused intellectual condescension toward the Prefect of Police with which Dupin ends the narrative. Indeed, if the dialectic between Dupin’s complacent insight and the narrator’s growing unease—the Unheimlichkeit, as Thangam Ravindranathan labels it, that accompanies Dupin’s slow revelation of his reasoning process—constitutes the story’s affective tone, this asymptotic approach to the truth brings to the narrator not relief but increasing discomfort, an anxiety not fully expelled by the story’s resolution.20 Why should Dupin’s method of ratiocination produce this uncanny sensation, rather than the excitement, satisfaction, or simple befuddlement typically felt by the characters who observe later detectives at work (Holmes’s Watson, say, or Hercule Poirot’s Hastings)? The answer, I think, lies in the series of negations by which Dupin performs his reasoning—first the negation of human features, which, as Ravindranathan has pointed out, constitutes the ape through absence, and then, fundamentally, the negation of alternative causal

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sequences that could have given rise to the crime.21 If motive-based explanations fail by generating too many interpretations of the same events, too many “plausible” narratives, then the detective’s task is one of elimination: Dupin’s agnosticism with respect to intention allows Poe to silence the default voices of mentalistic explanation, replacing the discourse of probability central to the realist novel with one of inevitability.22 It is the quiet generated by this exclusion—the disqualification of mentalistic reasoning without, as yet, anything to take its place—that feels so eerie to the narrator, and that Dupin fills only with physical details and inferred forces: the broken nail on the casement window, the strength it would take to stuff a corpse up a chimney.23 After our detailed inventory of what Dupin does not consider in his investigation, the list of what he does consider boils down to a version of what Daniel Dennett calls the “design stance,” our usual strategy for “making predictions about the behavior of mechanical objects” or animate natural ones: through a kind of reverse-engineering, Dupin constructs the kind of body that would be necessary to account for the “agility astounding, strength superhuman, [and] ferocity brutal” that characterize the crime.24 It is no accident that, presented with the raw materials for this deduction, the narrator’s first thought is of “some raving maniac.”25 If the “attitude we occasionally adopt toward the insane,” Dennett notes, can be characterized as “a species of design stance,” precisely because their actions seem not to be motivated by any inferrable belief or intention, then Dupin’s motive-eschewing method proceeds essentially by treating all humans as insane—not by ascribing deviant mental states to them, but by refusing to grant those mental states any ontological reality or causal primacy.26 It is no wonder that this vision of the Parisian population—what I will call Dupin’s behaviorist model—leaves our narrator disconcerted. I use the word “behaviorist” with full awareness that any analogy to the later psychological methods of Watson and Skinner must be anachronistic. Although Joshua Gang argues that the behaviorist paradigm in psychology encouraged Beckett and other modernists to wonder, “What would the novel look like . . . if it were mindless and had no access to mental states?” Poe and the other writers discussed in this book

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arguably provided an equally important precedent within literature.27 Not all of their fictions, of course, are “mindless” in the way Gang describes: while “Rue Morgue” does do its utmost to ignore mental states altogether, even the other stories in the Dupin trilogy have a more complex relationship to mindreading, and a novelist like Charles Brockden Brown does not so much elide mental states as systematically dismantle our confidence in their privacy and causal efficacy. But it is precisely for this reason that “behaviorism” is an appropriate term for the epistemology of mind I am describing here: like behaviorist psychology—which began, Gang rightly notes, as “a narrow methodological intervention against introspective psychology”28—the texts that interest me have in common the relatively limited assumption that propositional states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, even when a person offers them as reasons for their actions, have no special explanatory authority. It is not so much the “mindlessness” or even opacity of any given subject that matters here, but rather the construction of narrative universes that make mentalistic explanations seem nonsensical or unsatisfying. When attempting to answer, then, the question of why Poe would begin the genre of detective fiction with “a murderer whose nonhuman form challenges the very principle of accountability”—thus removing what would seem to be an essential feature of the criminal justice system—the answer lies only partly in the antebellum white terror of Black insurrection, sublimated onto the racist figure of the ape.29 Insisting, as Christopher Peterson does, on “a one-to-one correspondence” between Poe’s orangutan and an enslaved rebel30—while opening up an important historical access point to “Rue Morgue”— neglects the explicit systematizing gestures by which Dupin extends his nonmentalistic method to human actors, including those who are neither criminal nor exoticized. The famous scene in which Dupin successfully reconstructs an associative chain in the mind of the narrator represents not a sequence of inferred conscious mental states— mindreading in the conventional sense—but rather a materialistic causal system scaffolded by physical details: the “vexed and sulky” look on the narrator’s face after he trips on a loose paving-stone, the

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movement of his lips as he “murmur[s] the word ‘stereotomy,’” his upward glance “to the great nebula in Orion” as he ponders Epicurus’s cosmological system.31 The almost ridiculously on-the-nose embodiment of the narrator’s thoughts, however implausible from a purely mimetic standpoint, serves an epistemological purpose for Poe: by making it unnecessary for Dupin to hazard unsubstantiated guesses, the scene reinforces the notion that mental states are not so much deducible from behavior as rendered superfluous by it. Significantly, when Arthur Conan Doyle stages a version of this scene in “The Resident Patient,” Holmes’s inferences are not only more mentalistic in their content—Holmes recalls Watson’s “passionate indignation” at the fate of Henry Ward Beecher and guesses his melancholy at “the sadness and horror and useless waste of life” in the American Civil War—but also based on much more subtle and ambiguous physical cues. Whereas Dupin’s observations comprehend his companion’s entire body, Holmes focuses on Watson’s facial “features, and specifically [his] eyes,” drawing from the equivocal fact of Watson’s “eyes wander[ing] away from the picture” the surmise that his thoughts “had now turned to the Civil War.”32 The difference is subtle but crucial: when Dupin follows the narrator’s gaze, he assumes— rationally, but quite simply—that the narrator is thinking about the thing he is looking at (for instance, the Orion nebula); in the case of Holmes, the gaze may just as easily provide evidence of daydreaming or distraction, of a mental world that does not correspond point for point to an individual’s physical environment. Indeed, even the privileging of the eyes above other features of the face and body suggests Holmes’s greater investment in ToM: repeated experiments have demonstrated the particular relevance of gaze direction to complex mindreading abilities in humans.33 Even by the end of the nineteenth century, then, detective fiction was moving in Conan Doyle’s hands toward a more mentalistic interpretive framework, terminating ultimately in the determination to “suspect everybody” that Lisa Zunshine identifies as characteristic of detective fiction.34 But whereas speech and behavior form for Zunshine a complicated blind through which the detective must discern the truth, in Poe the mind-as-container metaphor turns

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inside-out, making mental states—such as they are—more obvious to the outside observer than they are to their “possessor.” The narrator of “Rue Morgue” does not even remember having passed the fruiterer who forms such an important link in his associative chain, despite the obviousness of the stimulus: the man “ran up against [him]” in the street, rerouting his train of thought not through verbal communication or directed attention but through physical contact.35 According to this model, humans are no more capable of deceiving than orangutans are, since their mental states are constituted by discrete behaviors and physical constraints rather than by invisible interior propositions. If the materialistic reasoning process by which Dupin solves the L’Espinaye murders is not restricted to apes and other nonhumans, of course, it is still easier to forego the impulse to ascribe mental states to beings, like orangutans, that are a priori supposed not to possess them. How do Dupin’s methods fare when the temptation to ToM is stronger—when, to begin with, one is quite sure that the principals are human? “Marie Rogêt,” the next story in the Dupin trilogy, attempts to address this question, testing Dupin’s process against the noise of alternative interpretations that mentalistic reasoning typically generates. Though it is unclear how deliberate this “attempt” would have been on Poe’s part, the story does, as we have seen, explicitly distance itself from the intentionalistic interpretations of the police, and it is tempting to imagine that “Marie Rogêt” forms one stage in a systematic extension of Dupin’s motive-free method onto more and more difficult ground: from nonhuman agents to humans encountered only through newspaper reports to humans personally known to the detective (in “The Purloined Letter”). The problem, in the case of the ripped-from-the-headlines mystery of “Marie Rogêt,” was that this method failed: Poe’s proposed solution to the crime was convoluted and incorrect, and the actual facts of the case were relatively simple.36 Dupin’s inability to correctly predict the resolution of the Rogêt/Rogers case suggests that the detective’s preference for the outré stems from more than mere sensationalism. Rather, insofar as behaviorism is imagined as a kind of complement to ToM—a heuristic that compensates for the weaknesses of conventional

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mindreading, such as its generation of too many equally plausible intentional explanations—it will gravitate toward the extremely unusual circumstances that ToM is worst at explaining. Intentions are complex, emergent, empirically unobservable entities that can only be inferred, as we saw in the introduction, after explicit and implicit training that helps us differentiate consistent propositional attitudes—desiring, fearing, loving, and so on—from their transient and variable objects. These attitudes operate at a level of abstraction high enough to include most human actions; that, after all, is what gives them their explanatory power. But occasionally, a sequence of events will turn out to be nonsensical when explained in terms of beliefs and desires: the perpetrator stuffs a body up a chimney—because he wants to hide it? No, he has left another body perfectly visible. Because he fears or hates the signs of violence? No, he has made no other attempt to eliminate traces of blood and gore. Eventually, the motive-based explanation falls back on tautology: he stuffed the body up the chimney because he wanted to stuff the body up a chimney. In these causal cul-de-sacs, behaviorism allows one to extend one’s search for explanations beyond the mind of the agent and into the external world—a strategy that we find echoed in Dupin’s determination, while musing on the Rogêt murder, to “discard the interior points of this tragedy, and concentrate our attention upon its outskirts.”37 The Rogêt incident, however, is from the start notable for its mundanity, inspiring little of the uncanny affect that pervaded “Rue Morgue”; indeed, the only extraordinary feature of the fictional case turns out to be its “coincidental” resemblance to “the late murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, at New York,” an extraordinariness derived precisely from familiarity.38 That the story’s narrator takes such pains to stress the “wonderful exactitude” of this (engineered) coincidence, while leaving Dupin an escape route by noting that even “the most trifling variation in the facts of the two cases” could imply an entirely different solution, suggests not only Poe’s own vague embarrassment over the failure of his proposed solution to meet the facts of Mary Rogers’s disappearance, but also a more general mismatch between the methods of the behaviorist detective and the details of a case so close—but

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not quite identical—to home.39 It is instructive, in this respect, to compare “Marie Rogêt” with “The Purloined Letter,” a puzzle that starts from a position of absolute similarity—a kind of mirror image of the orangutan’s absolute otherness in “Rue Morgue.” Not only the identity of the criminal in “The Purloined Letter”—he is “the Minister D––,” a rogue of greater intelligence and higher status than any of Dupin’s previous targets—but also his personality, dispositions, and capacities are known from the start to the detective: as countless critics have pointed out, in investigating the “daring, dashing, and discriminating” D––, Dupin is essentially investigating himself.40 The probabilistic reasoning that led both the police detectives and, ultimately, Dupin astray in the Rogêt case here becomes obsolete, since we are dealing not with a hypothesized generic human—the unknown “individual” whose feelings of “fury,” “guilt,” and “natural awe” Dupin attempted to reconstruct—but with a unique and intimately understood person, intelligible without a mediating layer of generalization.41 If the police fail, as Dupin claims, by “consider[ing] only their own ideas of ingenuity,” it must be admitted that Dupin’s success is equally dependent upon reasoning from his own notions of cunning, which Poe contrives in this case to overlap perfectly with those of D––.42 The point-for-point equality of Dupin and D––, moreover, allows the detective to dispense with the apparatus of motive more confidently and convincingly than he did in “Marie Rogêt”—not because D––’s motive is irrelevant, but because it is already known. D––’s intent, according to the Prefect of Police G., is to blackmail an “illustrious personage” with the sensitive contents of the letter—a crime that our narrator at first dismisses as implausible: “But this ascendancy . . . would depend on the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber.”43 Such third-degree embedding of mental states would indeed be a great deal to ask of most Poe characters, who can barely infer their own knowledge without encountering insurmountable obstacles; the ease with which D–– entertains such complex interpsychic relations marks him as quite unusual in the Dupin universe and suggests that “The Purloined Letter” represents for Poe a kind of experiment in merging the behaviorist methods of detection with the

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intentionalistic interpretations of ToM. Indeed, the schoolboy’s game of “odds and evens” that Dupin presents as the foundation for all diplomatic cunning—for what contemporary psychologists would call “Machiavellian intelligence”—represents the closest approach to ToM that we find in the Dupin stories, although even here the direction of causal inference is outside-in rather than inside-out: in order to guess the mental state of his opponent, the boy “fashion[s] the expression of [his] face . . . in accordance with the expression of his [opponent’s], and then wait[s] to see what thoughts or sentiments arise” in his own mind.44 This curious method betrays some kinship with Dupin’s reasoning during the night walk scene in “Rue Morgue,” but differs crucially in its object: whereas the unconscious states of mind that Dupin inferred in his companion were directly tied to both perceptual input and external behavior, the boy attempts to discern in his playmates a conscious interior state so abstract and binary—“odd” or “even,” nothing more—that its relationship to the visible signs of behavior remains causally opaque. Though the boy notes that mental states follow upon these facial expressions “as if to match or correspond” with them, the intermediate causal chain remains obscure and unexplained, hedged by that “as if.”45 Such, then, is Poe’s representation of ToM: its quasi-magical operation, its tolerance for explanatory leaps, and, most of all, its dependence on an assumption of similarity between actor and reasoner. While relatively circumscribed in the simple game of “odds and evens”—the boy must take for granted that he and his opponent are both people, that people are the kinds of entities that have invisible mental states, that these states have a predictable connection with visible behavior—these assumptions become downright baroque in Dupin’s duel with D––, entailing aspects of the minister’s personality as complex and specific as his intellectual arrogance, his desire to present himself as bored and languid, or his capacity for violent desperation. These assumptions are justified by the perfect intimacy with and knowledge of his object that Poe affords his detective, and, under those extremely rarified conditions, Dupin does indeed successfully deploy ToM. Yet by taking “Rue Morgue” and “Marie Rogêt” and “The Purloined Letter” equally into

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account—rather than, as so often happens, privileging one story at the expense of the others—we find that the Dupin stories constitute a kind of spectrum of behavioral interpretation. At one extreme lies the realm of the utterly different, the orangutan of “Rue Morgue,” where behaviorism is the most effective option; at the other is the domain of the utterly same (the Minister D––), where ToM finds its ideal territory. Through equal and opposite thought experiments—one entirely eliminating interiority, one granting it impossible clarity—“Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” work together to articulate a fully developed behaviorist counterpart to intentional reasoning. Thought experiments, however, they are—not mimetic representations, not probable scenarios; and in between these rarified extremes lies the vast muddled middle of “Marie Rogêt,” where motives are neither absent nor transparent, but rather simultaneously present and obscure. In this gray area, an abundance of plausible motives makes the systematic behaviorism of “Rue Morgue” as ineffective as the quick, intuitive, untestable mentalistic inferences of “The Purloined Letter”: if the former neglects to account for the intentional register at all, the latter risks spinning out an elaborate intentionalistic theory from a few false premises. Poe’s spectrum does, perhaps, hold out the possibility of a truly integrated system of behavioral inference—one that would use the precise information about material causes made available by behaviorism to narrow down the pool of potential motivating mental states generated by ToM. Yet such a symbiosis, using the strengths of each method to compensate for the other’s weaknesses, remains implicit in the iterative form of the Dupin trilogy rather than represented in any of its narratives. Theoretical Interlude: The Pragmatics of Behavior

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I have just sketched a rough spectrum of interpretive strategies based on the relation between interpreted and interpreter, between the actor and the individual observing that action. Most human behavior, I suggested, falls within a kind of temperate zone between two extremes: one of absolute difference from, and one of absolute identity to, the individual attempting to explain the other’s behavior. In the former

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condition, ToM is structurally impossible; in the latter, it is so automatic as to be practically unnecessary; only in between, where actor and interpreter share some but not all of their beliefs and schemas, do intentional explanations actually add something to the mere description of an action. This relatively crude heuristic provided, in the context of Poe’s stories, a useful means of thinking through the effect of perceived social difference on mentalistic reasoning. Its limits, though, stem from its reliance on a taxonomy of character not unlike those I mentioned earlier in this chapter. Although this taxonomy is perspectival—it depends on the relative relationship of the individual doing the interpreting to the individual doing the acting—it still suggests that certain kinds of characters automatically call for certain kinds of explanations. This section will reorient our understanding of interpretive heuristics around actions rather than agents in order to prepare us for the more complex epistemic model we will find in Melville. Poe’s trilogy suggested that mentalistic explanations falter when faced with particularly outré actions—the kind that can be explained only in tautological terms (I did X because I wanted to do X), because they do not seem to fulfill any other plausible human intention. As Elizabeth Anscombe points out in her foundational work Intention, those tautological or purely formal explanations, such as “‘No particular reason,’ I just thought I would,’ and so on,” are not always unsatisfying; it is only when applied to certain behaviors that they become unintelligible. For instance: if someone hunted out all the green books in his house and spread them out carefully on the roof, and gave one of these answers to the question “Why?” his words would be unintelligible unless as joking and mystification. They would be unintelligible, not because one did not known [sic] what they meant, but because one could not make out what the man meant by saying them here.46

Anscombe here imagines an eccentric action—this spreading out of green books “carefully,” “on the roof,” both of which suggest that the agent here has gone to some trouble—accompanied by an explanation that does not seem to acknowledge the action’s unusual

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character. It feels legitimate to say that this answer is wrong; as Anscombe points out, most listeners would not take such an answer seriously, and if the evidence mounted that the agent did in fact mean it sincerely, we might start to question his status as a rational agent in the first place. “We cannot understand such a man,” Anscombe declares—not such a sentence, but such a person. The explanation fails only because the model of human behavior that it implies—that someone might undertake a difficult, hazardous, and socially unacceptable action just because—is, to most of us, unfamiliar; the man’s answer violates a kind of behavioral syntax, a set of tacit rules for what kinds of actions are subject to what kinds of explanations. Indeed, Anscombe makes the analogy to syntax all but explicit: “It would take considerable skill,” she notes in passing, “to use language with frequent unintelligibility of this sort; it would be as difficult as to train oneself in the smooth production of long unrehearsed word-salads.”47 Our sense that the man’s explanation is somehow wrong structurally resembles, but cannot simply be derived from, our recognition of certain sentences as grammatically ill formed—our awareness, for instance, that “They eat when for lunch was” does not constitute an English sentence (even though, based on context clues and semantic content, we might be able to piece together what the speaker is trying to say). Anscombe’s suggestion tiptoes toward the linguistic distinction between syntax or semantics, on the one hand, and pragmatics, on the other: between the denotative content of an utterance and the implications it can carry in a particular conversational context. Pragmatics, too, has its rules, overlapping the baseline expectations of ToM—conversational norms dictating that our answer should be relevant to the question, that we should give sufficient information to answer it, and so on—and “I just felt like it” seems to flout them.48 If Anscombe’s speaker turns out to be answering sincerely, we may have to ascribe to him a different kind of mind than we have seen before: one in which an action seemingly done with such care and effort might happen without any particular conscious motivation, for instance. From here on, I will refer to the body of shared assumptions about the kinds of explanation (arbitrary,

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reasoned, situational  .  .  . ) that are adequate to particular kinds of behavior (effortful, automatic, socially scripted . . . ) in particular situations (friendly, adversarial, pedagogical . . . ) as the pragmatics of behavior, linking the sociocognitive heuristics underlying the pragmatics of language to the practical scenarios that can modify, undermine, or invalidate them. The term is my attempt to capture precisely what is being violated—and what demands to be reimagined—in Anscombe’s thought experiment. It is no accident that, in a book on autism by the cognitive neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen, we find a scenario that almost perfectly mirrors Anscombe’s. Where she posited a banal explanation for an outré action, Baron-Cohen invites us to invent a bizarre explanation for a very ordinary, and indeed very dull, human action: a man named John enters a room, walks around briefly, and then leaves it again. Interpreting such an action feels easy enough until, Baron-Cohen suggests, we put ourselves under a simple constraint: we may not invoke John’s mental states to explain his behavior. Holding ourselves to a “behaviorist” narrative mode (in Gang’s sense)—for instance, we might fall back on “temporal regularities,” positing that John enters this room and then leaves it every day at the same time—makes explanations not only much more difficult to generate but also “very likely to be wrong.” “There just aren’t many simple, readily available, plausible, non-mentalistic explanations,” Baron-Cohen notes.49 Indeed, even describing the man’s action in this behaviorist way feels a little unnatural and stilted: rather than undertaking a conscious secondary process of reasoning to determine what John is doing and why, most of us simply see it. Based on his physical bearing, the direction of his gaze, the pace and sequence of his actions, and so on, we perceive that “John was searching for something, but he couldn’t find it,” or “John went into the wrong room by mistake.” In Anscombe’s terms, we perceive John’s action under a mentalistic description. By the time a person reaches adulthood and has some practice thinking about other people in life and in books, getting them not to see John “searching” or “hoping” or “making a mistake”—to see something utterly other—would be quite difficult, as difficult as producing Anscombe’s “word-salads.”

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Of course, I am arguing that Poe, Melville, and many other nineteenth-century US writers apply themselves to exactly that difficult task. Anscombe’s theory of action can teach us to ask: what kind of pragmatic misalignments can dislocate a reader so profoundly as to make them entertain a nonmentalistic model of behavior? BaronCohen’s example inadvertently but helpfully points to one such misalignment—between repetitive, compulsory, and stereotyped actions, on the one hand, and explanations grounded in propositional mental states, on the other. Context-insensitive behaviors represent a challenge to two essential components of Theory of Mind’s interpretive and predictive heuristics: a mind imagined as a private container for legible and propositionally specifiable beliefs and desires, and a causal connection between inward intentions and exterior actions. Neither motivated by the intention to produce a particular result (since the action is repeated regardless of the effect it may have) nor attached to causally relevant mental states (since the action is repeated regardless of the conditions in which it originates), repetitive behaviors dissociate action from any plausible intention or belief about the state of the world. Put differently, if a machine outputs “a” in response to any question or prompt whatsoever, it is reasonable to infer that a is not the product of a nontautological intention: the only intention that we could ascribe to the machine would be something like “print a,” which provides little in the way of explanatory power. Yet if a completely regular behavior pattern forecloses the explanatory attribution of mental states, suggesting that an individual’s actions are physically caused rather than consciously motivated, completely random behavior stymies ToM just as much by implying, if not the absence of mental states, at least their disconnection—and therefore uninferrability—from the real-world circumstances in which the behavior is carried out. As Daniel Dennett notes, “the presumption of rationality”—which we might describe in ToM shorthand as the principle that if an agent desires Y and believes that doing X will bring about Y without serious negative consequences, they will (barring interference or complications) intend to carry out X—“is so strongly entrenched in our inference habits that when our predictions prove false, we at

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first cast about for adjustments in the information-possession conditions (he must not have heard, he must not know English  .  .  . ) or goal weightings, before questioning the rationality of the system as a whole.”50 While randomness and regularity may temporarily shake our habitual interpretive heuristics, Dennett suggests, we eagerly assimilate them to the norms of intentional behavior by extending a kind of pragmatic grace to the agent, assuming that their motives are hard to detect for momentary and accidental reasons rather than because they fundamentally violate our behavioral syntax. To thoroughly unsettle the presumed causal connection linking beliefs, desires, and intentional actions, then, an individual’s behavior must both persistently and irregularly depart from the norm predicted by Theory of Mind—a frequent deviation, but one that cannot be reduced to any single, easily identifiable form of interference (whether as abstract and “mentalistic” as shyness or as concrete as a physical impairment). In isolation, a single eccentricity would not be sufficient to disable the attribution of mental states and incite the dissolution or evacuation of ToM’s model of the psyche; only when the aberrant behavioral evidence begins to outnumber or otherwise outweigh the actions that conform to one’s interpretive heuristics does a strategic shift take place. This behaviorist reorientation, as I suggested above, need not depend upon the elimination of all mentalistic terminology from the text. Although texts like “Rue Morgue” encourage the complete negation of interiority by constructing characters whose actions can only be explained by the replacement of intentional explanations with mechanistic ones, the psychological model subtending ToM can be rendered equally ineffective by depicting characters whose mental states, though intelligible, simply lack explanatory power. A reflective character registers the insufficiency of mindreading when they experience their own actions as “hyperopaque,” a term coined by Tamar Gendler to describe behaviors that result from “the activation of an associative chain.” This activation “can happen regardless of the attitude that one bears to the content activating the associations”—that is, regardless of whatever propositional mental states one happens to hold.51 Even as the hyperopaque character persists in consciously verbalizing their thoughts and

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attempting to explain their actions in accordance with those thoughts, they are confronted with a disjuncture between the reasons that they offer for their behavior and the materialistic causal chain that seems to actually incite it. Such automatic activation of “behavior-inducing mental representations” seems, based on recent psychological research, to play “a larger role in behavior than many had thought,” suggesting that actions like that of Anscombe’s man on the roof feel aberrant not so much because they are impossible or even improbable (not, in other words, because they are “unnatural” in the sense of Jan Alber and Rudiger Heinze), but because they prompt us to reevaluate the mentalistic rules for generating well-formed explanations that we use every day.52 Priming effects, evolutionarily programmed predispositions, and other forms of nonconscious and nonpropositional brain activity, when pulled from the margins to the center of a narrative, force the reader to confront behaviors that escape the motivational system on which mindreading rests—and, in fictions like Poe’s, to entertain alternative explanatory paradigms. Hyperopacity is especially useful in explicating Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a story that dramatizes the need for hybrid or multifarious methods of behavioral interpretation by centering on a character whose actions do not seem to be explicable by either strict behaviorism or strict ToM. Insofar as Gendler’s concept implies both an internally differentiated mental structure (composed of both conscious and nonconscious subroutines) and an awareness of the limitations of one’s own mindreading capabilities, it represents a complex and reflective synthesis of the behavioristic and mentalistic explanations of action—a synthesis that remained merely implicit in the Dupin stories. By recognizing and naming islands of nonmentalistic behavior in the otherwise agentic landscape of ToM, hyperopacity hints at a diversified toolkit of heuristics for explaining behavior, shifting away from ToM’s ontological claims about the object of interpretation (there exist such things as beliefs, desires, minds, agents, and so on) toward an epistemological interest in the evidential grounds that lead us to choose one heuristic over another. Where Poe constructed story-laboratories in which the assumptions and preferences of a particular interpretive

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heuristic were perfectly gratified, Melville sets up a similarly pure environment only to disrupt it, forcing his comfortably behaviorist narrator into an interpretive struggle that leads him to the brink of ToM. The intervening crisis shifts the story’s focus to the formal qualities of the stimuli that prompt an observer to shift their explanatory paradigm midstream, from bizarre actions to affective states to social anxieties. In addition to representing characters as they navigate hyperopaque actions, then, “Bartleby” also points toward a theory of character that rests not on ontological designations (major and minor, round and flat) but on pragmatic strategies. Bartleby: Beyond the Subject

Critical responses to “Bartleby” over the past century have been eclectic, drawing upon theoretical lineages ranging from continental philosophy to American historicism.53 Behind most of these readings, though, a shared presupposition rests: Bartleby is an alien intruder into the world of Melville’s narrating lawyer, pushing the latter to a moral and epistemological crisis by eluding or outright destroying the basic heuristics by which the narrator has hitherto made sense of the world. Within the continental tradition, such heuristics have typically been presented as linguistic (as in Deleuze’s characterization of Bartleby as a “pure outsider” whose speech refuses any shared syntax) or metaphysical (Agamben’s appropriation of the scrivener as an avatar of “pure potentiality”)—not so much specific and adaptive strategies of interpretation as conditions of sense-making itself, whose contours and limitations Bartleby exposes by existing stubbornly beyond them.54 Yet even recent efforts within cultural studies to define the narrator’s interpretive paradigms as cognitively localized and historically bounded persist in representing Bartleby as a force that profoundly disrupts those paradigms. By reading Melville’s story from the perspective of disability studies, for instance, Rosemarie Garland Thomson shifts the terrain of the scrivener’s exceptionality from the absolute to the contingent, but remains convinced that Bartleby’s disorienting impact on the lawyer results from the former’s “differences from normative expectations,” which “constitute a problem that the narrator

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takes as his mission to solve.”55 By assuming that Melville’s narrator, and Melville himself, had available only one (culturally dominant) set of strategies for explaining behavior, Thomson makes of Bartleby a mere prompt to assimilative activity for the normative subjects that surround him. Because the character is assumed neither to fit within existing societal concepts of agency and humanness nor to inhabit an epistemically viable alternative to such concepts, Bartleby elicits from those around him only an endless and vain series of attempts to reinscribe him within those societal norms—not unlike, perhaps, the hermeneutical effusion that Melville’s troublingly reticent story has incited among literary scholars. Although Thomson, following Melville himself, refuses to specify Bartleby’s ailment, others have not been so hesitant: as Amit Pinchevski notes, schizophrenia, the favored diagnosis of the 1960s and 1970s, has given way in subsequent decades to assertions of Bartleby’s “autism.”56 Such accounts read into the character’s stereotyped actions the symptoms of a real-world disorder clinically characterized not only by perseverative behavior, but also by a delay or deficit in learning and applying ToM heuristics. The subtlest and most sensitive version of this argument is without a doubt Wendy Anne Lee’s, which, rather than following Lisa Zunshine’s lead of declaring autistic people to be inherently resistant to narrative and therefore a convenient foil for the ToM-savvy neurotypical reader, suggests that narrative depends on “the autistic subject”—one who “defies fundamental concepts of agency, interiority, and ontology”—as an incitement to the projection of feeling and an origin point for the causal chains that the novel constructs.57 Among those who read Bartleby as autistic, whether as literal diagnosis or as metaphor, Lee is all but alone in acknowledging Bartleby’s capacity for interpersonal attachment and recognition even in the absence of feeling: “the insensible is not the antisocial.” We will soon see that what Lee calls “the thoroughly disruptive possibility of sociality without sympathy” is in fact a concrete and even ordinary feature of the world of Melville’s story, just as we have already seen that it may be more integral to our own social lives than we understand.58 Before we get there, though, I need to unpack the stakes of misreading (for so I

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intend to argue) Bartleby as autistic, which are also the stakes of misreading a pragmatics of character as an ontology of the subject. In the popular imagination, autism has two prototypical features: rigid behavioral routines, which Bartleby certainly has, and difficulty interpreting social situations or picking up on “social cues.” Both contribute to the contemporary reader’s diagnosis of Bartleby as autistic, but it seems clear that the latter, in particular, plays a pivotal role: if Bartleby is “insensible,” in Lee’s terminology, it is precisely in his incapacity to “intuit others’ feelings and desires.”59 In other words, the inference that Bartleby has no mental states of his own is licensed by his inability to read other people’s mental states, and vice versa: what interiority could exist without access to others’ interiority? Insofar as this reading would seem to suggest that autistic people, too, are “insensible”—that their difficulty participating in mutual mindreading excludes them from thinking and feeling altogether—it participates in a common but, I would suggest, profoundly damaging discourse of the autistic person as robot, alien, or other not-quite-human being whose mental states one is not bound to consider.60 On a fundamental level, though, this link between struggling with ToM and having no mind in one’s own right rests on a questionable premise: does Bartleby have trouble interpreting social cues and inferring mental states? There is little evidence for an answer in the affirmative, and Melville gives us strong evidence that Bartleby is capable of reading others’ intentions, in his last exchange with the lawyer-narrator. Recall his devastating response when the lawyer greets him in the Tombs: “‘I know you,’ he said, without looking round—‘and I want nothing to say to you.’”61 Why is Bartleby angry with the lawyer, if not because he has inferred, albeit incorrectly, that the lawyer decided to have him removed from the office after their last conversation? In other words, because he has interpreted his arrest as the product of an unstated intention formed and executed by the lawyer? This is certainly how the latter understands Bartleby’s demeanor—as evidence of an “implied suspicion” of the lawyer’s betrayal.62 Though it comes tragically late, this moment crowns the story with a definite instance of mutually successful mindreading between Bartleby and his former employer.

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If Bartleby can, under the right circumstances, both infer someone else’s intentions and make his own intentions understood, why do so many readers of the story seem convinced of the contrary? Why, that is, do they project onto Bartleby an incapacity for ToM? Simply because, I think, on reading “Bartleby” and thinking about the character’s actions, they experience the bafflement that they assume autistic people feel during most social interactions. This bafflement itself is perfectly reasonable: Bartleby’s actions and the explanations he gives for them do violate the terms of intelligibility that obtain in most interpersonal interactions (just as spreading out those green books on the roof did in Anscombe’s account), and any sincere attempt to understand them, like the lawyer’s, requires at least entertaining a completely different set of rules about what counts as an explanation. But to read one’s own confusion as an index of something wrong with Bartleby is not simply to be a little tactless; it is to fundamentally misunderstand the conditions that determine the selection of a Dennettian “stance” toward another person’s actions. As my readings of Poe, Anscombe, and Gendler have suggested, and as “Bartleby” itself demonstrates, heuristics for explaining behavior are not necessarily entailed by particular kinds of subjects or even particular kinds of actions; rather, they are the product of pragmatic real-time decisions and causes inflected by factors as grand as ideology or as trivial as whether you had breakfast this morning. In “Bartleby,” Melville presents us not with an anomalous subject, but with anomalous actions and explanations that a community may work together (or not) to bring into intelligibility—and to understand the significance of this epistemic shift, it makes sense to begin with that community. The little society constituted by the story’s narrator and his three employees, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut—vaguely allegorical “nicknames . . . expressive of their respective persons or characters,” suggestive of tools rather than people, that already undermine the illusion of autonomous interiority that the proper names of the realist tradition attempt to construct63—functions not through its members’ inference and manipulation of one another’s mental states, but rather through the calibration of their respective automatic programs. The

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narrator experiences his two clerks as bundles of repetitive and nonvolitional “eccentricities” (Turkey’s alcoholism, Nippers’s indigestion) that conveniently “relieved each other, like guards[:] when Nippers’s was on, Turkey’s was off; and vice versa.”64 In this respect, Turkey and Nippers unite the two functional and formal aspects of the minor character identified by Alex Woloch: each is at once a “worker” and an “eccentric,” a purely instrumental “gear within the narrative machine” and a fragmentary challenge to the textual status quo.65 Yet rather than portraying these distorted and reflexive personalities as peripheral ornaments accentuating the protagonist’s normative interiority, or representing behaviorism itself as a consequence of mental distress or a mere corrective to ToM’s localized failures, Melville situates “Bartleby” in a universe in which behaviorism—or, less anachronistically, the behavior-oriented physiological psychiatry of the midnineteenth century—is the status quo. Although the “red and radiant countenance” of Turkey, the tooth-gnashing of Nippers, and the verbal tic (“with submission, sir”) that accompanies Turkey’s every line conform to the repetition and fragmentation that Woloch identifies as key techniques in the representation of minor characters, these reflexive behaviors appear not as deviations from an intentional norm but as the very stuff of social relations, a nonconscious and nonvolitional fundament that all interpersonal arrangements must respect.66 Indeed, although “Bartleby” suggests that all psychological models—mentalist, behaviorist, and otherwise—are vulnerable to breakdown and replacement in the face of aberrant social stimuli, this pragmatism should not be mistaken for complete indifference on the question of which model has the most explanatory power. Even when the story’s narrator has begun his tentative forays into mindreading, the “hyperopaque” behavioral routines of the workplace persist as a subterranean and non–propositionally representable influence on the very process of attributing mental states. In his first bewildered reaction to Bartleby’s constantly reiterated preference “not to,” the narrator appeals to Turkey and Nippers for interpretive guidance, with inconsistent results: whereas the former rages at Bartleby’s insubordination and repeatedly offers to “go and black his eyes,” the latter

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mildly excuses the new clerk’s conduct on the grounds that it “may only be a passing whim.” This difference of opinion, however, results not from any primary discrepancy in the propositional mental states attributed to Bartleby himself, but rather from the divergent physiological states of his interpreters: because the narrator makes his inquiry in the afternoon, he arouses “Turkey’s [alcohol-fueled] combativeness,” while meeting with a “very gentl[e]” answer from the satisfied stomach of Nippers.67 Automatism, in other words, does not simply elicit a particular (behaviorist) model of cognition and action from observers, but shapes the act of interpretation (whether mentalist or behaviorist) itself. This influence is tellingly visible in the narrator’s attitude toward Bartleby’s actions in the paragraph preceding the exchange with Turkey and Nippers, where he alternately (at his most complacent) attempts to assimilate Bartleby’s “involuntary” “eccentricities” to those of his other employees by approaching them as circumventable quirks and, in moments of irritation, feels tempted “to elicit some angry spark from him comparable to my own.”68 It is not only the case, then, that priming effects can activate social routines that would otherwise be interpreted as motivated by the agent’s ToM-informed projection of his interlocutor’s mental states. “Bartleby” further and perhaps more radically suggests that the nonconscious behavioral scripts of the clerks, and of the narrator himself, influence their assessment of the motives behind others’ conduct in ways that no propositional representation would reflect. What the psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues identify as the “automaticity of social behavior” extends to our own interpersonal conduct and also to our interpretation of others’ actions and intentions—even when the triggers involved stem not from the other’s unconsciously perceived behaviors but from nonconsciously installed associative chains in the interpreter himself.69 Yet if the default mode of understanding others’ actions in “Bartleby” is already behaviorist, why do the repetitive conduct and implied psychological emptiness of the title character—whose actions are after all scarcely more rigidly conditioned than those of Turkey, Nippers, or the narrator himself—provoke a crisis of interpretation for the story’s lawyer protagonist, filling him with unaccustomed empathy (“pure

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melancholy and sincerest pity”) and inspiring the novel conviction that Bartleby possesses a “suffer[ing]” “soul” that the narrator “could not reach”?70 A simple comparison of Bartleby’s verbal tic with Turkey’s offers a hint: whereas the latter’s incessantly repeated “With submission, sir” functions as a sort of gauge and continual reminder of his willing subordination, the former’s “I prefer not to” signals a sudden hitch in the clockwork regularity of the narrator’s office, serving approximately the function of a blinking warning light on a car dashboard or a printer screen—that is, indicating the disruption of one automated subsystem by another.71 That the simple introduction of a new element into an already calibrated character system can unsettle the prevailing strategy of explaining others’ actions in that system—even if both the narrator’s actions and the intruder’s seem from an external perspective to be equally conducive to behaviorism—indicates Melville’s awareness that any shift in interpretive paradigm is always reactive and relative: because no set of actions intrinsically mandates mindreading or behaviorism, an unexpected behavior pattern will prompt the observer to reach for any untried interpretive strategy, regardless of its objective appropriateness to the situation. The contagious spread of Bartleby’s preferred word through the office—where the narrator finds himself and his employees “involuntarily using the word ‘prefer’ upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions”—alerts the narrator both to the hyperopacity of his everyday actions and to the peculiar vulnerabilities that this automatism entails.72 At the same time, it inspires compensatory efforts both to influence Bartleby’s conduct by mentalistic means and to insulate the narrator’s own thoughts and actions from behaviorist conditioning. The most novel—and the most embarrassingly failed—of the narrator’s attempts to evict Bartleby is his “application of the doctrine of assumptions”: rather than simply ordering Bartleby to leave, the narrator decides to “assum[e] the ground that depart he must; and upon that assumption buil[d] all I had to say.”73 Insofar as this plan implies both a conscious but unspoken intention on the part of the narrator and a capacity on the part of Bartleby to infer that intention from the statements and actions that it is presumed to motivate, it accords

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precisely with the psychological model and heuristics associated with ToM. Yet even before the narrator finds himself “thunderstruck” by the failure of his new tactic—Bartleby remains in the office, having ignored altogether the “slight hint” that the narrator thought would be sufficient—he doubts its efficacy: “It was truly a beautiful thought to have assumed Bartleby’s departure; but, after all, that assumption was simply my own, and none of Bartleby’s. The great point was, not whether I had assumed that he would quit me, but whether he would prefer so to do. He was more a man of preferences than assumptions.”74 Having failed to transform his own intentional state—the propositional belief that Bartleby will depart—from a desire in his mind to a motivating reason in Bartleby’s, the narrator locates his plan’s undoing in Bartleby’s insensitivity to “assumptions” and confinement to “preferences.” The inflexibility of Bartleby’s behavior nudges an interlocutor to approach him on the ground not of imaginatively projected, virtually manipulable mental states (“assumptions”) but of empirically established behavioral tendencies (“preferences”) that, whether externally conditioned or determined by some feature of Bartleby himself, remain equally invulnerable to propositional persuasion. Interestingly, then, the narrator’s next impulse, after the failure of this initial attempt, is to apply a nonverbal version of his “doctrine of assumptions,” indicating through behavioral rather than linguistic cues—“pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk[ing] straight against him as if he were air”—that he believes Bartleby to be as good as gone. Like Dennett’s frustrated interpreter who invokes accidental interference—a verbal misunderstanding, a lapse in hearing—to explain apparently irrational behavior, the lawyer hopes to avoid yet another total overhaul to his heuristics of social inference by simply shifting the medium of his communication. “Upon second thoughts,” however, our narrator rightly deems the strategy to be “rather dubious.”75 Defeated in his attempt to interpellate Bartleby into mutual mindreading, the narrator next entertains a subtler compromise: to accept Bartleby’s seeming emptiness as a means of confirming his own psychic depth and complexity. Having “looked a little into ‘Edwards on the Will,’ and ‘Priestly on Necessity,’” the lawyer begins to explain

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Bartleby’s aberrant actions not in terms of the latter’s own apparently unenlightening mental states, but by appealing to a postulated divine intention, “some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence” that, however inscrutable, at least establishes a comforting link between the clockwork world of repetitive actions in which the narrator moves and someone’s motivating mind.76 This reinstallation of intention on the spiritual plane, in addition to offering a last-ditch explanation for the bizarre behavior patterns that the narrator finds himself unable to manage either by familiar behavioristic means or by presuming Bartleby’s interiority, allows the narrator to complacently regard himself as the privileged locus of private, propositional consciousness within his otherwise mechanistically conditioned workplace. By assimilating Bartleby’s automaticity to inanimacy—“you are as harmless and noiseless as any of those old chairs”—the narrator is able to use Bartleby’s emptiness to confirm his own unassailable subjectivity: “I never feel so private as when I know you are here.”77 This coping strategy conforms to the relation between “round” and “flat” characters (that is, those with exhaustively represented interiority and those reduced to a few behavioral quirks) posited in many accounts of novelistic characterization, which ascribe narrative utility only to those flat characters who, in Blakey Vermeule’s terms, inspire “a fit of reflection in a round or major character,” thus reinforcing the text’s reigning mentalistic paradigm and encouraging readers to ratchet up their ToM skills. Yet Melville notably refuses to join the narrator in relegating Bartleby to this purely instrumental role.78 Not only does the inscrutable scrivener become an increasingly central focus of narrative attention, inspiring pity at his death in the narrator and, plausibly, in the reader; the narrator himself is forced to abandon his scheme to magnify his own interiority via Bartleby (and so, it might be surmised, propel himself to the status of protagonist) when his colleagues begin to “whisper” censoriously about “the strange creature [he] kept at [his] office.”79 The narrator’s project proves unsuccessful, then, because it depends on the fiction that Bartleby’s lack of interiority is an alien intrusion rather than an integral feature of the workplace and, thus, the story’s character system itself. To these external

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observers, unaware of the interpretive contortions that Bartleby has awakened in the narrator, the “strange creature” appears not as some indifferent piece of furniture, dissociable from the narrator’s consciousness, but as a figure with whom the narrator chooses to associate and who therefore reflects on him. By placing the most “minor” of all characters at the center of “Bartleby”—and by emphasizing the continuity between the scrivener’s eccentricities and the comfortable automatism of his employer— Melville disconnects behaviorist representational strategies from the peripherality with which they are usually associated in the character systems of the mainstream realist novel.80 What is more, the story reframes such representational techniques as indices not of “flatness” but of emptiness—a phenomenon at once more compelling and more disconcerting. The mental states of the typical “minor” character, after all, are not negated but merely oversimplified—trite, repetitive, and exhaustively expressed (rather than incompletely and ambiguously signaled) in behavior. It is not that Austen’s Mr. Collins or Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby are assumed to have no interiority, but rather that their interiority is presumed to hold no surprises for the reader. In the context of a novel where ToM is the dominant method of interpreting characters’ words and actions, then, the author encourages us not to waste that mindreading energy on peripheral figures through a battery of representational tricks (verbal and physical tics, exaggeration and fragmentation of physical traits, and the like) calculated to convince us that we already know all that there is to know about their mental states—not, as in the case of Bartleby, that there is nothing more to know. If Turkey and Nippers, then, could be mistaken at the beginning of “Bartleby” for “flat” characters, one of the most startling side effects of the advent of Bartleby is to recategorize them as empty characters. The same formal devices that within the conventional realist novel indicate psychic shallowness, without disrupting the attribution of mental states itself, elicit a qualitatively distinct interpretive paradigm—one founded not on propositional interiority but on nonconscious automaticity—when brought to the center of a narrative.

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For Woloch, of course, the “asymmetric structure” of the realist novel is generated by that genre’s insistence that “any character can be a protagonist, but only one character is”—making the minor character a distinctly melancholy figure whose consciousness is both theoretically acknowledged and structurally stifled.81 The peculiar pathos of “Bartleby,” by contrast, stems from Melville’s refusal to present Bartleby either as a purely functional narrative engine whose interiority is sacrificed for the sake of a protagonist’s psychological depth or as an intentional agent possessing causally efficacious mental states. Using behaviorism neither “aggressively” nor “ironically”82—neither as dehumanizing weapon nor as satirical barb—Melville defies assumptions that a character apparently empty of mental states must always be the target of the reader’s scorn, hatred, or apathy. He depicts instead a being that positively demands our pity and care even as his behavior flouts the psychological strategies by which we would usually attempt to offer it. If “Bartleby” places the reader not in a community of confident mindreaders but amid a multitude of beings whose actions are opaque both to others and to themselves, then, it also insists that the reader learn to extend their sense of moral obligation even to those who lack the legible beliefs and intentions that the reader finds in members of their own social sphere—precisely because that legibility has been revealed as a partial illusion, subtended by hyperopaque behavioral programs over which one has no control. The ethical force of this recognition is exactly proportionate to the feelings of helplessness and displacement that it inspires. Our mourning at the text’s close is, like the narrator’s, not only for Bartleby—understood now as a human and as a kind of displaced cog or obsolete habit—but also for the illusion of explanatory mental states that Bartleby’s dislocation both tempted us to pursue and, ultimately, forced us to abandon. The Possibility of Conversation

With “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man, “Bartleby” rounds out a tightly clustered series of narratives exploring the metamorphoses undergone by psychological models under duress. Although these

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works lack the shared character system of Poe’s Dupin trilogy, they share temporal proximity as well as a forensic narrative structure, focusing less on dramatic incident than on the interpretive confusion of an observer torn between incompatible methods of explaining the equivocal behavior of a strangely resistant individual—methods that not only propose incompatible origins for that individual’s actions, but also imply contradictory constructions of the mind itself. If I have devoted my attention to “Bartleby” in this chapter, it is partly because of the aforementioned lineage of criticism that takes “Bartleby” as a proof-text for investigations into the limits of interpretation. Equally important for my purposes, though, is the story’s representation of the choice of one psychological model over another as the improvisatory amendment of a paradigm rather than the definitive correction of an error. “Benito Cereno” turns on an observer’s (never unconflicted, but narratively decisive) abandonment of one method of behavioral interpretation—a crude, racist behaviorism—for another: paranoid mindreading.83 Unlike the lawyer of “Bartleby,” Captain Delano is able to settle on an interpretive paradigm that enjoys social and legal sanction, putting at least a temporary end to the hesitation and backsliding that characterize the bulk of both narratives. More similar to “Bartleby” is The Confidence-Man, which offers an inconclusive panoply of sociocognitive heuristics that is in many ways more complex and self-conscious than that of “Bartleby”—but that lacks the latter story’s moral intensity by virtue of its very diffusion. For the lawyer-narrator of “Bartleby,” the forensic questions that motivate his fascination and vexation with the scrivener—Where does he come from? What makes him behave this way? Why won’t he leave me?—are not so much resolved or left open as, eventually, set aside for forward-looking questions: What will become of Bartleby? What could he and I do together, and what can I do for him? When the narrator and Bartleby have their moment of entente shortly before the latter’s death, the lawyer does not suddenly understand what Bartleby has been up to this whole time; rather, he adjusts his model of what Bartleby notices and knows— quickly, functionally, and without conscious thought—when faced with evidence of his emotional pain.

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Melville, like Poe, recurs to the forensic plot because it offers a rich setting for modeling the dependencies between explanatory paradigms and interpersonal contexts—that is, because it allows a writer of fiction to simulate the way that the perceived features of an action, its description and stated rationale, the social relationship between the acting agent and the interpreting observer, and a host of other, subtler features can inflect the model(s) of mind we work from in any given interpersonal scenario. In reading “Bartleby” through the philosophy of mind and action, I have tried to shift the critical focus from the kinds of persons that the story represents to the space of sociocognitive strategies that it offers. Instead of positing subjects, whether default (“the liberal subject”) or pathologized, that call for particular kinds of interpretation and interaction, my account suggests that heuristics for explaining and understanding behavior don’t travel together in consistent, person-shaped bundles. Rather, the heuristics we use in any given social situation are usually multiple and dictated not by inherent features of the other person, but by contingent factors: multiple information streams coming from the other person, including facial expression, speech, tone of voice, posture, and gesture; multiple information streams within the interpreter, including affect, physiological state, episodic memory, and semantic memory; and at least one schema that places the two people in some social relation to each other—as boss and subordinate, teacher and student, friend and friend, anonymous passersby . . . Not to mention other wild cards like the material objects that the individuals have at their disposal as instruments or metaphors, or the third parties that they can invoke as comparisons or comrades. There is no nonsituated explainer of human actions, the “Bartleby” model suggests. When it comes to scientific and macrosocial phenomena, we are familiar with the idea that there is no nonsituated knowledge: from the postpositivist realism of Linda Martín Alcoff and Paula Moya to the agential realism of Karen Barad, scholars of marginalized identities have emphasized the imbrication of an individual’s social positioning with their epistemic resources and choices.84 By insisting in this chapter’s readings on the equally crucial role of microsocial effects, my aim is not to erase the political stakes of this tradition, but

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rather to insist that we ground theoretical debates about the ethics of behavioral interpretation in pragmatic realities. Indeed, I have aimed in this chapter to quietly merge pragmatics in the linguistic sense with pragmatism in the philosophical sense: like Dewey and Wittgenstein, under Richard Rorty’s reading, I suggest that we should judge claims about how minds work not by their reference to some extrasubjective reality but by their validity in whatever “language-game” we are currently playing when it comes to explaining actions—the ToM game, the behaviorist game, or other, more local games.85 If what determines the improvisatory shift from one language-game to another is as complex and multimodal as I suggested above, then our preference for particular games over others—for instance, our preference for a game that satisfies the ethical goals of respecting individual agency and experience, that creates what Rorty calls “a sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation”—should lead us to ask: what material and social circumstances are conducive to producing “the imagined possibility of conversation,” and what circumstances work to do the opposite?86 In the following two chapters, I focus on fictions that represent circumstances under which the “possibility of conversation” cannot or will not be imagined. In particular, chapter 3 suggests that anchoring our readings of both actual and fictional social worlds in questions like these—in what I have called the pragmatics of behavior—will help to cut through the semantic circularity that has structured conversations among historians on the fate of personhood under slavery. Following Saidiya Hartman, recent work by Jeannine DeLombard and Nicholas Rinehart has pushed back on “dehumanization” as a trope in the study of US slavery: as DeLombard notes, framing enslavers’ actions as “an unchristian denial of black humanity” rather than as “conscious economic exploitation of the human capacities of those targeted for enslavement” was a “rhetorical tactic” of the abolitionist movement that, despite its exceptional impact on two centuries of thinkers about enslavement, may not have accurately characterized slaveholders’ stance toward Black subjects.87 While scholars like DeLombard and Colin Dayan have provided indispensable evidence of how proslavery whites mobilized

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legal personhood to sustain the system of chattel slavery, the nagging persistence of historical debate about whether or not enslaved people were persons for their captors suggests that its foundation may bear closer examination. In the next chapter, my readings of represented interactions between enslavers and enslaved people in works by Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt move beyond the attempt to define an ontology of personhood and focus instead on interpellation as such—that is, on the means by which the macrosocial and microsocial structures of slavery foreclosed certain kinds of explanations for human actions while rendering others more likely. The resulting readings underscore that personhood, from the perspective of a pragmatics of behavior, is a two-way street: because enslaved people wanted and needed things from slaveholders as much as enslavers wanted and needed things from their captives, both parties had to engage in everyday attempts to explain and predict behavior, during which they marshaled a variety of paradigms and strategies—some widespread and familiar, some more particular to the perverse system in which they lived. To join in the project of adjudicating the real or imagined personhood of enslaved people is, however inadvertently, to play into the self-image of enslavers by reading enslaved persons’ behavior as a forensic puzzle to be solved and enslavers’ behavior as transparent. In chapter 3, I examine enslaved people and characters in the act of explaining and predicting enslavers’ actions in an attempt to balance the scale.

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Melville was far from the only author wondering about the ethical stakes and practical viability of mindreading in the United States of the 1850s. As white abolitionist rhetoric increasingly grounded its appeals in what we would now call empathy, while nonetheless maintaining a “romantic racialist” commitment to basic differences in mental organization between people of European and those of African origin, writers committed to ending slavery found it necessary to consider whether cognitive difference is an obstacle to fellow-feeling.1 Insofar as white enslavers frequently dealt with human beings as though they were chattel or movable property, the institution of slavery, for many abolitionist thinkers, came to represent a wholesale rejection of enslaved people’s interiority—one that, arguably, bears uncomfortable affinities to the behaviorist representational techniques that I identified in chapter 2. If my reading of “Bartleby” was in part intended to demonstrate that such representational techniques do not always work to dehumanize or violently simplify their objects, it is undeniable that they could serve this function in the hands of slavery’s defenders, where skepticism about the propositional content of other minds, far from offering a salutary dislocation of ToM’s habitual heuristics,

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worked to confirm a familiar racist taxonomy of personhood. That slavery was a ToM problem, then, was tacitly presumed by much abolitionist discourse—but what kind of a problem, and for whom, remained sources of equally unstated but profound disagreement. To identify the fault lines in this discourse, and to propose a critical reorientation toward abolitionist projects of reparative mindreading, I begin this chapter with a discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own reorientation between Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dred (1856). By (incompletely) transforming Black characters from sociocognitive problems for whites to solve to sociocognitive theorists in their own right, Stowe enacts a shift from the ontology to the pragmatic epistemology of persons that my own argument will attempt to continue and refine. As scholars like Jeannine DeLombard and Paul C. Jones have documented, abolitionists took for granted that enslavers had a keen interest in eliding the mental states of their human “property.” It was this denial of enslaved people’s interiority, this uncertainty over whether they do indeed, in the words of Stowe’s slave trader Haley, “got souls” and human feelings, on which abolitionist rhetoric began to focus starting about the 1830s, culminating in the extended plea for African American personhood that is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.2 Stowe’s theory of subjectivity in that text rests on a kind of dialectic of privacy and parallelism, whereby humans’ shared perceptual and affective apparatus works to underline the diversity of their responses to the same sensory information: “Now, the reflections of two men sitting side by side,” Stowe’s narrator muses, “are a curious thing,—seated on the same seat, having the same eyes, ears, hands and organs of all sorts, and having pass before their eyes the same objects,—it is wonderful what a variety we shall find in these same reflections!”3 Even as this passage belabors the fundamental presumption of homogeneity that underwrites successful ToM, it also suggests that mental states are or ought to be inalienably private and not wholly knowable from external circumstances or physiological cues. Much like Stowe’s frequent use of free indirect discourse, the narrator’s reflection on the diversity of consciousness positions social cognition on a fine line between transparency and opacity, striving to assimilate the other’s body and

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mind to the reader’s experience while reserving for the characters a region of private interiority that would make them, according to ToM’s understanding of consciousness, fully human. If Stowe’s task, as she conceives it, is partly to grant legibility to enslaved people’s beliefs and emotions by representing them according to the logic of sentimental subjectivity, this legibility must be seen to stem from a mind that could choose to withhold its intentional content at will, since it is precisely the enslaved person’s ownership of and authority over the contents of their own consciousness that the ideology of slavery would deny. When Stowe’s oppressed characters burst into spontaneous, involuntary emotional displays, then, their tears, blushes, and tremors elicit readerly acts of mindreading—but only because Stowe’s narrator helps us interpret them as indexes of an internal self whose desires, fears, and affections take familiar propositional form. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents the representation of enslaved persons’ consciousness as an automatically abolitionist enterprise that would render the continuing objectification of human beings untenable, Stowe’s romantic racialism nonetheless leads her to speculate that people of African descent have a special gift for certain kinds of sentimental subjectivity, especially in the context of spirituality and kinship. Like many white abolitionists and religious leaders, George Fredrickson explains, Stowe found in people of African descent “a symbol of something that seemed tragically lacking in white American civilization”—a spirituality and peacefulness to set against the supposed “gross materialism” and “crude national expansionism” of Anglo-American culture.4 What both religious worship and familial closeness would seem to have in common, and what the Final Report of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission named explicitly in its assessment of the postbellum conditions of African Americans, are the “social instincts”: supposedly subordinated to the “intellectual powers” in “the Anglo-Saxon race,” these interpersonal dispositions were said to “maintain the ascendant” in individuals of African descent.5 Even the antebellum plantation itself was sometimes construed—not only by nostalgic southerners but by northerners disillusioned with their contracted servants—as a kind of idyll of interracial sociality and “friendliness”; this idealized

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plantation constituted an autonomous and self-contained community all the more “knowable” because its enslaved members literally could not leave.6 Unlike the North, then, which supposedly replaced lasting social ties with one-time market transactions, the antebellum southern plantation offered a kind of grotesque parody of familial intimacy. It is no accident that white supremacist ideology represented Black people as “inferior to whites in much the same way that women were inferior to men—less intelligent and rational, more childlike and emotional,” nor that the attempt to reframe these supposedly innate qualities as virtues, in which Stowe herself was highly invested, took similar forms for both white women and people of African descent.7 A sentimental fascination with African American interiority could be used to reinforce racial hierarchies as easily as to destabilize them.8 Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents its implied white readers with two choices: to deny the inner lives of African-descended people in the interest of manipulating them as objects (a choice that Stowe of course fiercely rejects); or to posit a universal repertoire of emotional experience overlaid by race-specific dispositions to certain kinds of social behavior. That these two approaches are both invested in racializing human difference is clear enough, although only the latter arguably recognizes those differences as human to begin with—a foundation that perhaps constituted Stowe’s primary moral intervention in that novel. But the romantic racialist and the simply racist paradigms share another, more basic, and more practical assumption: that white observers validate Black consciousness—or, put differently, that ToM’s political relevance rests on white people’s recognition of or failure to recognize the reality of Black subjectivity. Insofar as Stowe is making an argument about ontology in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, only the ontology of Black minds is supposed to be in doubt. Every time the novel’s narrator sets up an analogy that takes white minds as the vehicle and Black minds as the tenor—Tom sheds “just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son . . . For, sir, he was a man,—and you are but another man”—this structural asymmetry becomes evident.9 When, partly in response to criticism from Black activists, Stowe took up the issue of Black radicalism in Dred, it was this asymmetry that

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changed, reflecting a meaningful shift in Stowe’s novelistic practice as a result of her evolving political position. Even as the explicit racial ideology of Dred remains troublingly essentialist—invoking phrenological determinism, for instance, to explain both Dred’s visionary leadership and the moral education of Anne Clayton’s servants—Stowe’s form reflects a more profound balancing of the scales.10 Rather than simply waiting to receive white readers’ acknowledgment of their interiority, Black characters appear in Dred as active reasoners about white characters’ interiority—or lack thereof. No Stranger

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The less sympathetic white characters in Dred have a habit of referring to Black characters, or Black people en masse, as “deep.” “[N]obody knows, or ever will know,” a plantation owner and state representative declares of Demark Vesey’s co-conspirators, “how many were [involved], for those fellows were deep as the grave, and you could not get a word out of them.” “[Y]ou can never get anything out of them,” the lawyer trying to reenslave the emancipated Cora Gordon complains of the enslaved people at the Canema plantation: “O, they are deep!” And the politically cowardly Frank Russel advises his friend Edward Clayton to keep quiet about his antislavery sympathies lest he stir up “that old fear of insurrection”: “These negroes are a black well; you never know what’s at the bottom.”11 Such claims are especially striking in contrast to the trope of the emptied container that we saw in chapter 1: inaccessible though its contents might be, the “black well” of Black consciousness as conceived by Stowe’s white characters undoubtedly has them.12 Coming from proslavery whites, these metaphors reflect the paradox of white paranoia about Black revolt, recognizing Black subjects as such only in light of criminality or violence.13 But they also reflect a reality that the readers of Dred, much more than those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, have been made to feel: the possibility of depth without easy sympathy. The word “deep,” tellingly, appears in the earlier novel mostly in reference to Eva’s “deep blue eyes” or simply “deep eyes,” which emphasize the white child’s spirituality and soulfulness; indeed, in one of the text’s more egregious moments of racist imagery, Stowe explicitly

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contrasts Eva’s “golden head,” “deep eyes,” and “spiritual, noble brow” with Topsy’s “subtle, cringing, yet acute” demeanor.14 Whereas Stowe attempted to convince us of, for instance, George and Eliza’s personhood by making their mental processes transparent, readable in “a natural language” of facial expressions “that could not be repressed,” we feel Harry and Dred’s depth precisely when they are most opaque.15 Nowhere is this more obvious than in the extraordinarily delayed first appearance of the novel’s title character. It is not simply that the reader knew nothing of Dred’s existence until nearly two hundred pages into the narrative; it is the immediate confirmation that Harry, and the rest of the enslaved characters in the vicinity, did. Harry’s “familiar recognition” of Dred—“O, it is you then, Dred!”16—makes formally perceptible the “depth” that Stowe goes on to thematically underline: even more radically than excluding the implied white reader from the knowledge of Dred’s life in the swamp, Stowe has simulated forgetting that reader, discounting them as an epistemic agent to be reckoned with. Dred’s existence has not been a mystery, but simply a fact that was, until now, none of our business. The promise of truly private Black interiority, which remained vague and virtual in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, here becomes reality. And lest we surmise that the partial opacity of Dred’s Black characters stems from an essential feature of their racial makeup, Stowe asserts quite unambiguously that adeptness in “the means of secrecy” is common to all “oppressed part[ies]” in “despotic countries.”17 The idea is worth underscoring: Stowe suggests here that a particular social location—or, more precisely, a particular position of social, legal, and political vulnerability—can give rise to a particular set of cognitive and communicative heuristics. Minds are not all alike, and their differences are structured into human groups—but structured less by biological race than by the day-to-day interpersonal demands associated with a given social status. If Dred acknowledges that distinct experiences of oppression (or, for that matter, of oppressing) can give rise to distinct interpretive communities, as Gail K. Smith has argued in her reading of the novel, I am arguing that these socially situated hermeneutics—ways of reading “‘as a woman’ or ‘with the oppressed’”—apply not only to the

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Bible and other “sacred texts” but to minds.18 In other words, while interpretive communities are perhaps most visible when disputing a shared literary text, their foundations lie in the implicit theories of mind that develop under specific interpersonal pressures. Smith is correct to note that, especially in matters of scripture and US law, Dred’s hermeneutic pluralism is noticeably “unbalanced,” “advocat[ing] a more forcible ‘influence’ from white readers on black readers than from black on white.”19 Stowe’s true innovation in Dred, though, is not simply to expose white readers to an enslaved Black hermeneutics, but to explode the myth of white hermeneutic supremacy—a feat she accomplishes not though scenes of textual interpretation, but by manipulating the relative transparency or opacity of her Black and white characters’ minds. It is no accident that Stowe stages the revelation of a truly private Black interiority by means of a Black character who acts as an unobserved observer. “I didn’t know that you were hearing me!” Harry exclaims to Dred when the latter reveals himself: even as the scene confirms that Harry has possessed a key piece of knowledge to which the implied white reader had no access, it reveals that Dred himself is adept at accessing others’ mental states even against their will.20 Nor is Dred alone in this: Harry himself, in an intimate conversation with Lisette, explains how closely he watches Nina for signs of attachment to one suitor over another, and how closely he watches the suitors themselves for clues as to how they might treat the enslaved people at Canema. “‘[W]e who live on other people’s looks and words,’” Harry exclaims, “we watch and think a great deal! Ah! we come to be very sharp, I can tell you.”21 Precisely because of his subordinated and structurally vulnerable position, Harry develops the stealthy observational skills that allow the novel’s character system to become, so to speak, self-aware. Indeed, in previous scenes showing Harry being surveilled unawares, Stowe sets up a complex arrangement of nested observers to underscore Harry’s subtle discernment even as she mimics it. While Harry watches through a window as a man accosts his wife, for instance, Nina, who is facing away from the window, “wonder[s] at the expression of his countenance” until he draws her attention to the scene; and as

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Nina joins Clayton for a ride on horseback, with Harry tending to the horses, Stowe speculates that “[a] third party” would have been able to recognize in Harry’s “keen, rapid glance” at Clayton an attempt to gauge “the future probability which might make him the arbiter of his own destiny.”22 This perceptive third party evidently is not Nina—and while we might be encouraged to collapse the hypothetical observer with the narrative voice, which Stowe elsewhere in the novel figures as a kind of eavesdropper, the lacuna around Dred’s existence reveals the limits of the narrator’s knowledge as well.23 If any “third party” has privileged access to Harry’s interiority in Dred, it is Dred himself. As Robert Levine has noted, Stowe’s choice to belatedly reveal her enslaved characters’ longstanding familiarity with Dred “works . . . to implicate readers with the ignorant white masters of the Carolinas,” forcing the implied white reader to reckon with their affective investment in a sentimental vision of slavery that leaves little room for armed resistance.24 But it also, more radically, violates a fundamental expectation of the novel form as articulated by Catherine Gallagher: “the mutual implication of [characters’] unreal knowability and their apparent depth.”25 For Gallagher, novelistic character offers us “something with the layers of a person but without the usual epistemological constraints on our knowledge”26—a key asset in arguments for the ethical value of the novel in producing empathy across disparate social locations, and a key component of Stowe’s craft in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Precisely because that novel showed Stowe adeptly navigating the twin demands of transparency and “roundness,” we can read her narrator’s belatedness in Dred as a fully intentional challenge to the reader’s epistemic mastery. Crucially, though, Stowe does not attribute this challenge to a uniquely resistant kind of subject: Harry and Tiff, the two characters whose knowledge of Dred is most dramatically revealed, have been cognitively accessible on other topics and in other circumstances. Rather than constructing characters whose ontology demands a reevaluation of our modes of accessing other minds, Stowe constructs situations in which the novel reader’s expectation of access breaks down, encouraging that reader to reflect on the real-world power relationships sustaining the understanding that once appeared so seamless. In the process,

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Stowe both frames Black characters as potential narrators—with all the powers of cognitive penetration and unobserved observation that that implies—and undercuts the epistemic authority of whiteness. The remainder of this chapter will demonstrate what critics stand to gain from a similar transition. What if enslavement was indeed a ToM problem, but in ways that northern white abolitionists, focused on debating the ontology of Black personhood rather than learning from Black social epistemologies, failed to recognize? How does our historical understanding of the day-to-day interpersonal dynamics of enslavement shift when we position enslaved people as mindreaders rather than as minds to be read (or not)? In other words, how can we—especially, but not exclusively, white scholars of the antebellum United States— refuse the oft-extended invitation to take the perspective of a white unobserved observer? In an instructive conjunction, it is immediately after the enslaver Tom Gordon reveals that he has been eavesdropping on Harry—“you didn’t know that your master was hearing you, did you?” he gloats, in an echo of Dred’s first appearance—that Harry strikes him and flees into the swamp.27 This act of liberating violence, which Stowe surely wrote with Frederick Douglass’s resistance to the “slave-breaker” Covey in mind, works in part to defend a zone of private consciousness that, Stowe has come to realize, enslaved people cannot secure without force. No wonder that Dred recognizes Harry and Lisette’s flight as a climactic moment for his own project: “‘Even so,’ he said . . . ‘the vision is fulfilled!’”28 Alarming Apprehensions

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Eavesdropping is an equally ubiquitous narrative device in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba (serialized 1859–62)—a novel that, like Robert Levine, I view as part of a decade-long conversation among Delany, Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. Levine exaggerates, it seems to me, the extent of Blake’s “homage” to Stowe, whose mistrust of Black political leadership Delany critiqued in Frederick Douglass’s Paper after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; one could just as easily, for

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instance, read Delany’s choice of an epigraph from Stowe’s poem “Caste and Christ” as a form of signifying, rather than as the gesture of “forgiveness” that Levine wishfully detects.29 Yet rejecting this narrative of a white woman’s redemption need not mean ignoring or flattening the extended conversation about Black self-determination and citizenship in which Delany, Douglass, and Stowe were engaged, publicly and privately, for the better part of the 1850s. My decision to read Dred, Blake, and Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom together is licensed in part by Levine’s example, which “challenge[s] essentialist notions of discrete black and white expressive traditions” by recognizing Stowe’s role as both participant and object lesson in the Delany-Douglass debates.30 Rather than emphasizing the issue of colonization, however, I read these three thinkers as engaged in a productive investigation of the role that theories of mind might play both in sustaining the system of slavery and in overturning it. Narrative form and the prose structures of represented thought were crucial tools in this project, and Delany’s novel—which is admittedly, as Jerome McGann notes, more a “rhetorical” than a “mimetic” production31—shares Dred’s interest in using narrative devices like eavesdropping to probe the limits of the cognitive models presumed by both white abolitionists and enslavers. In the same paragraph in which McGann names Delany’s polemical purpose, he declares that “none of Blake’s characters, nor even its hero, have any psychological depth.”32 By now, we are accustomed to hearing such claims made about American novels; indeed, we may be primed to accept them without further investigation after having explored Charles Brockden Brown’s empty minds, Poe’s mechanistic thought experiments, and Melville’s hyperopaque sociality. It might come as a surprise, then, that I am calling McGann’s assertion into question—but my demurral should make more sense in the context of Stowe’s experiments with opaque interiority in Dred. For, like Stowe, but even more pervasively and with a clearer political purpose, Delany positions his Black characters primarily as readers of other minds rather than as objects of readerly empathy and interpretation. If Henry Blake and his fellow conspirators lack what British and French novels have trained us to read as “psychological depth”—that is, if the novel’s

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narrator does not periodically pause the action to narrate their mental states or render their thought processes in free indirect discourse—it is because Delany represents his characters as constantly engaged in the mentalistic work of observation and inference. Structurally speaking, this did not need to be the case: plenty of nineteenth-century novels feature a protagonist who both vigorously reasons about other minds and possesses an observable mind in their own right. That Delany both insists on the vital importance of mindreading in his characters’ lives and refuses to use conventional novelistic techniques of rendering consciousness, then, suggests that he is deliberately constructing a continuity between the roles of observer and concealer—having a mind that reads other minds, and having a mind that hides itself. Both of these processes, Delany suggests early in the novel, are essential to survival under conditions of enslavement: The slaves from their condition, are suspicious, any evasion or seeming design at suppressing the information sought by them, frequently arouses their greatest apprehensions. Not unfrequently the mere countenance, a look, a word, or laugh of the master, is an unerring foreboding of misfortune to the slave. Ever on the watch for these things, they learn to read them with astonishing precision.33

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For enslaved people, Delany makes clear, observing and interpreting behavioral signs is a matter of life and death—but precisely because enslavers are unlikely to volunteer the information they need, that observation must be covert. Practically speaking, then, the interpersonal attentiveness of enslaved people is inseparable from their ability to conceal their own intentions and mental states. This connection should already suggest that the absence of “psychological depth” in Delany’s novel may be tactical rather than accidental—but whereas Stowe, in Dred, selectively withheld key pieces of information to emphasize her characters’ partial and deliberate opacity, Blake rejects the narration of interiority almost entirely in favor of gestural representation.34 The first few chapters of the novel, indeed, are thick with meaningful gestures and glances, from the relatively trivial—the enslaved child Tony

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“cast[s] a comic look” upon a houseguest so persistently that his enslaver “twice . . . admonish[es] him with a nod of the head”—to the narratively consequential.35 Take the chapter just before the narrator’s excursus on suspicion, in which Colonel Franks pressures his wife to sell her maid Maggie to Arabella Ballard. Hoping to warn Maggie’s mother, Judy, of the danger, Tony, who has been privy to the conversation, repeatedly steps from the parlor “into the hall, looking toward the kitchen, then meaningly into the parlor as if something unusual were going on”; Maggie’s mother takes the hint and leaves the kitchen to eavesdrop “beside the parlor door.”36 Delany’s description of this sequence is by no means a behaviorist one: Tony looks “meaningly . . . as if something unusual were going on,” leading Judy to “becom[e] suspicious”—an elegant episode of what Lisa Zunshine would call a “triangulation of minds” in the absence of direct communication.37 But rather than connecting Tony’s looks and gestures with his communicative purpose through an agential construction—as I did just above when I began a sentence with “Hoping to warn Maggie’s mother”— Delany leaves the reader to infer the personal interests that underlie the scene. By the time Blake’s narrator explains the need to scrutinize an enslaver’s “countenance,” “look,” “word, or laugh,” then, the reader has already been subjected to exactly this challenge: thrown into a highstakes scene with access only to speech and gesture, they must assess the relationships among the personnel and infer the interests that each character is trying to advance. The absence of character “depth” and “development,” Delany’s novel demonstrates, does not necessarily imply the absence of social cognition. On the contrary, Blake demands more rigorous mindreading than a typical nineteenth-century American novel—precisely because so much of it, including nearly all of part 1, takes place at the site of an intense interpretive arms race: the plantation. The novel’s white characters, after all, also engage in constant surveillance, sometimes for information—Mrs. Franks, for instance, gauges Blake’s distress at his wife’s sale by witnessing his conversation with Maggie’s parents as a “concealed spectator”—and sometimes seemingly just for entertainment: one of the slave patrols

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that harasses Blake on his travels is “composed of the better class of persons, principally business men,” looking for a “‘frolic among the negroes.’”38 If Blake’s characterization of both enslaved and enslaving characters relies on gesture and dialogue far more than represented thought, it is precisely because these clues—significant glances, overheard remarks—are the minimal materials of mindreading in a hostile environment. Delany limits the reader’s access to social information so strictly, in fact, that the narrative sometimes reveals potentially meaningful actions only when another character observes them and describes them in dialogue. Until Colonel Franks declares that Ailcey hates the enslaver Crow, we have not seen any of “the side looks she gives him when he comes into the house” that he cites as evidence for this belief; until, in conversation with a “bright mulatto young man” in chains on the deck of a steamer, Blake mentions “the person who placed a glass to your lips which you refused, just as I came aboard,” the reader has received no hint of either this person or this interaction.39 Rather than being invited into a social system of mutually disclosing minds, the reader of Blake is placed between two communities bent on concealing their own mental states while deducing the other’s, privy only to the interpersonal information that might plausibly make it through both filters. One of Henry Blake’s strokes of genius, the novel hints, is to exploit this mentalistic mise-en-abyme—to seize on white structures of surveillance and outbreaks of paranoia as an opportunity rather than an obstacle in his efforts to dismantle the slave state, waging what the abolitionist James W. C. Pennington called “A WAR OF MINDS.”40 It is not simply that Blake himself proves to be expert at reading and manipulating what one might describe as the collective white mind, although that certainly plays a large role in his ability to navigate the American South. Blake’s ability to collect and synthesize information from different individuals on different plantations means that he is privy to the local anxieties of the territory through which he moves—for instance, “a desperate slave” recently escaped from a plantation near the Little River, who so terrifies the whites in the area that they “go continually armed” and prepare themselves to shoot on sight—and knows how to

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avoid activating these specific suspicions, in this case by “stand[ing] like a freeman” rather than fleeing into the woods.41 More significant than his ability to anticipate and manipulate white strangers’ beliefs, however, is Blake’s conception of mindreading as a front in the ongoing war for Black autonomy. After reuniting with his wife in Cuba, Blake affirms his commitment to revolution by vowing revenge on white enslavers: “They shall only live while I live under the most alarming apprehensions.” In context, this statement expresses Blake’s intention to fill the white population with fear and dread—to manipulate their beliefs and emotions—as a prologue, or perhaps even a causal precursor, to their violent overthrow.42 The formation of a collective Black consciousness is a crucial step in this process, since, as Rebecca Skidmore Biggio observes, Delany believed that “the threat of black community was more frightening to whites than the threat of black violence.”43 If Blake’s travels in the United States serve to construct a community of esoteric knowledge (both scientific and political), his revolutionary work in part 2 demands, and begins to produce, an even more completely integrated collective mind, as in the perfect affective coherence of the Black crew on the slave ship Vulture: In this [shout] the blacks did not participate, being governed entirely by the apparent feelings of their head on board, upon whom they invariably cast a look at every incident. Did he but smile or give a look of approbation, the bland grin was seen to light up the dark gloom of their sombre faces; but did he look grave or ignore by notice passing events, then they too appeared as sad as pallbearers in a funeral train. All this to the whites was significant and foreboding; but whence the beginning and whither the end, was incomprehensible to them.44

Strikingly, whereas the propositional knowledge that Blake communicates in part 1 must remain hidden both from the reader and from the white plantation owners—we learn only that “Henry imparted . . . the secrets of his organization,” leaving us to infer the content of those secrets45—the shared knowledge of the Blacks on board the Vulture

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is deliberately visible precisely in its nonpropositional features. Since Blake is so skilled at concealment and so attentive to nuances of expression, we can assume that he would not have allowed these obvious signs of “understanding” unless he intended to sow anxiety among the whites, who are confronted in this moment with an almost paradigmatic instantiation of the problem of other minds: the same event provoking two different reactions. (Recall, again, the narrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin commenting on the “variety” of “reflections” in the minds of two men experiencing the same sensory stimuli.) If anything, the affective unity of the Black crew amplifies Blake’s subtle and ambiguous expressions, allowing him to weaponize the very vocabulary of gestures by which the white enslavers of part 1 hoped to read and control enslaved people’s intentions. This coordination, of course, proves insufficient to carry off a mutiny: Blake’s plan is deferred, and the loss of the novel’s last chapters leaves the climax of his armed revolution unclear. It would be too much to suggest that the psychological warfare in which Blake engages on the Vulture constitutes an end in itself, although the timing suggests that it may play a role in precipitating Captain Paul’s personal decision to renounce the trade in enslaved people.46 But the scene provides evidence that Blake’s revolutionary enterprise hinges on the construction of a shared sociocognitive front—on the transformation of the Black communities through which Blake moves into a kind of vast networked brain that can covertly gather information on white people’s behavior, infer white people’s beliefs and intentions from that information, and produce an expressive response to manipulate those beliefs and intentions. Brit Rusert has insightfully identified the “head work” of astronomy as crucial to Delany’s articulation of a “science of fugitivity”; my reading suggests that “head work” is a matter not only of science but of interpersonal cognition.47 Indeed, the scene on the Vulture suggests that freedom work may even, at times, be face work. If enslavement is a ToM problem, Delany defines that problem not in terms of the ontology of personhood—in contrast to a comparatively individualistic narrative like Douglass’s autobiography, which identifies his moment of one-on-one resistance as a “turning point” that restored

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to him “a sense of [his] own manhood”48—but in terms of enslaved people’s epistemic relationship to social information. Positioning the Black collective mind as not only a knower and interpreter but also a concealer and deceiver, Blake eschews novelistic techniques of representing psychological depth precisely because that mind is strongest when it is least known. Are Enslavers Crazy?

Douglass recounts his physical resistance to the “slave-breaker” Covey in both the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), suggesting in each telling that he came to full maturity and full personhood when he shifted from being a recipient of violence to being an agent of it: “I was nothing before [this incident],” he writes; “I WAS A MAN NOW.”49 We might, with Maurice O. Wallace, read this moment as an assertion of Douglass’s “phallic will” that has the corollary of transforming Covey, “by the designs of a historic fiction of binary exclusivity in matters of race and sex,” into “a slave/woman”—echoing the conflation of enslavement and femininity that Stowe activates in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and retains, although more subtly and conflictedly, in Dred.50 Indeed, whereas the pathos on which Stowe relies so heavily starts from the assumption that our shared humanness is most evident at moments of failed agency—the white mother is as powerless to save her child from disease as the Black mother is to save hers from being sold—Douglass’s account of how he became “a man” forcefully rejects this logic, suggesting that personhood is underwritten by the capacity of our will to act as a cause on the matter, including the human matter, of the world.51 If “interdependence” and the prosocial behaviors that it implies are conventionally gendered feminine, and if African-descended people as a group and women as a group ostensibly share a sociality that marks them out for submissiveness, then Douglass’s rejection of his enslaved status entails his reinvention as an independent, “self-made man.” This is a chain reaction of assumptions so powerful, even when the underlying biological essentialism is disavowed, that Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro approaches her goal of “rethinking the existence of black men as

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interdependent beings” through a systematic rereading of the Covey scene.52 Like Hancock Alfaro, I intend to read the Covey episode and its surrounding chapters against the grain, questioning accounts that frame the capacity to wield arbitrary power as the endpoint—whether desirable or sinister—of Douglass’s awakening. I continue to read Douglass’s life-narratives as invested in theorizing arbitrary power, however: rather than accepting the Covey incident as an irreversible transition en route to a successfully realized liberal subjectivity, a sociocognitive reading of My Bondage and My Freedom emphasizes the structures of impunity that both constitute the cruelty of enslavement and produce moments of violent resistance like Douglass’s own. In his willingness to examine the effect of arbitrary power on the basic coherence and interpersonal legibility of the self, Douglass quietly undermines familiar narratives of the “master” as prototypical liberal subject, suggesting instead that enslaving entails a systematic self-dehumanization that is effective precisely because of its corrosive effects on mindreading. In the chapter that immediately follows Covey’s defeat, Douglass reflects sardonically on the special brutality of enslavers with religious pretensions, who combine the worst of Foucauldian discipline with the most “extreme . . . malice and violence.”53 In the process of calling out the “REV. RIGBY HOPKINS” as one of the cruelest plantation-owners in Talbot County, Douglass delivers this astonishing litany: The man, unaccustomed to slaveholding, would be astonished to observe how many floggable offenses there are in the slaveholder’s catalogue of crimes, and how easy it is to commit any one of them, even when the slave least intends it . . . A mere look, word, or motion, a mistake, accident, or want of power, are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied with his condition? It is said, that he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he answer loudly, when spoken to by his master, with an air of self-consciousness? Then, must he be taken down a button-hole lower, by the lash, well laid on. Does he forget, and omit to pull off his hat, when approaching a white person?

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Then, he must, or may be, whipped for his bad manners. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when harshly and unjustly

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accused? Then, he is guilty of impudence, one of the greatest crimes in the social catalogue of southern society. To allow a slave to escape punishment, who has impudently attempted to exculpate himself from unjust charges, preferred against him by some white person, is to be guilty of great dereliction of duty. Does a slave ever venture to suggest a better way of doing a thing, no matter what? He is, altogether, too officious—wise above what is written—and he deserves, even if he does not get, a flogging for his presumption. Does he, while plowing, break a plow, or while hoeing, break a hoe, or while chopping, break an ax? No matter what were the imperfections of the implement broken, or the natural liabilities for breaking, the slave can be whipped for carelessness. The reverend slaveholder could always find something of this sort, to justify him in using the lash several times during the week.54

I quote this passage in full because its potential endlessness is part of the point: the inevitability with which these diverse and unrelated actions elicit the same response from the slaveholder should remind us more and more powerfully, over the course of the passage, of the repetitive and context-insensitive behaviors that we encountered in chapter 2 as limit cases to ToM. The enslaver’s whipping is as invariant as “I prefer not to,” though the gesture’s violent impact on the enslaved victim makes that continuity more difficult to see. After all, Bartleby’s refrain has the effect of removing him from the causal and decision-making circuits of the office, while the causal power of an enslaver’s will over his human property was guaranteed not only by law and convention but by the very violence that Douglass’s passage describes. Yet insofar as both of these repetitive actions serve to insulate the agent from the causal power of other minds—by neutralizing the influence of other beings’ mental states on the agent’s own behavior, and by producing behaviors that resist mentalistic interpretation and prediction—they occupy a similar structural position in the space of interpersonal cognition. The disruptive effects of enslavers’ impunity on ToM, as Douglass sketches them in this passage, can be broken down into two categories: failures of social cognition on the part of enslavers, and obstacles

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to enslaved people’s attempts to read enslavers’ minds. The first category may at first seem to hearken back to the abolitionist decision to frame the enslaver’s refusal to acknowledge the subjectivity of African-descended people as the cardinal sin of the institution. As Douglass ventriloquizes it here through a kind of free indirect discourse, however, the enslaver’s social reasoning fails in precisely the opposite direction: by overattributing intention to the enslaved. Although Black consciousness was indeed conveniently absent from antebellum “scientific” discourse, Douglass recognizes, it became boundless and ubiquitous in the paranoid imagination of the enslaver—a phenomenon we have already encountered in Dred, where it prompted proslavery whites to characterize the enslaved population as “deep,” and in Blake, where the title character used this tendency to his advantage by encouraging and misdirecting whites’ anxieties about Black secrecy. Whereas both of those texts explored enslavers’ paranoia in the context of a (real or imagined) organized rebellion, however, Douglass reveals in this passage that the overattribution of intention is part of the enslaver’s day-to-day practice—and particularly, the context suggests, the devoutly Christian enslaver’s practice. While Douglass frames the list of “floggable offenses” in deliberately general terms, moving from the specific “system” practiced by “the saintly Hopkins” to the generic character of “a slaveholder, bent on finding fault,” it should perhaps come as no surprise that religiosity would intensify this general tendency. More than most, Douglass’s account hints, the pious enslaver will feel the need to explain the logic behind his actions in mentalistic terms: he believes that the enslaved person whose labor he claims wants or intends or plans unrest, and therefore must be whipped even, as Hopkins avows, “in advance of deserving it.”55 Because this belief is inaccessible to evidence or experience, however—alterable neither by persuasion nor by counterexamples of obedience on the enslaved person’s part—it has much the same status as the beliefs of Turkey and Nippers that Bartleby is impertinent or well-meaning, respectively: in both cases, an individual rationalizes a “hyperopaque” mental process through recourse to the shared social vocabulary of intentional reasoning.

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Like the similarly religious and similarly violent Rev. Daniel Weeden, who reasons that “[t]he good slave must be whipped, to be kept good, and the bad slave must be whipped, to be made good,” Hopkins feels the need to align his practices with some version of Christian virtue: it is desirable for enslaved people to be “good” (even if the “good” is a thinly veiled proxy for total compliance with the enslaver’s demands), so whipping is simply a means of achieving this end.56 Precisely because these men claim that their punishments have a causal impact on their captives’ behavior, they present Douglass with an opportunity to expose the disordered social cognition of the enslaver, which projects an amorphously malignant intention—some amalgam of “impudence,” insubordination, and rebellion—onto actions that range from obviously accidental to obviously motivated by more immediate considerations (for instance, an enslaved person’s efforts “to vindicate his conduct” when unjustly accused). Flogging, although the enslaver explains it to himself and to other whites as a form of mentalistic communication between himself and his captive—the enslaved individual must be “taken down a button-hole lower,” or made to change his mental image of himself; the slave is too “officious” and must be taught to stifle his opinions—clearly serves no such purpose, since it results not in a diminution of the supposed “impudence” but, as Douglass demonstrates, in the ever broader extension of the category of insubordination to include accidents, fleeting expressions, tones of voice, and the like. It is telling that, in Douglass’s account, violent punishment is often precipitated by evidence that an enslaved person is not a mere extension of the enslaver’s will: not only explicit refusal but also inadvertent inability to execute the enslaver’s intention; not only direct denial but also amplification, diminution, or misconstrual of the enslaver’s command. With repetitive violence, the enslaver manifests his frustration at this friction, which demands that he engage mentalistically with the offending person—whether by persuading him of something, explaining something to him, or simply acknowledging the human gap between the enslaved person’s intentions and his actions, his conscious awareness and his physical behavior. The eruption of paranoid projections that follows such an

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innocuous action as “break[ing] a plow” is not only a false explanation of the enslaved person’s behavior, but, in its reflexiveness, a symptom of the enslaver’s more general failure to construct an adequate model of the enslaved person’s mind. Significantly, this failure does not simply take the form of denying the existence of the enslaved person’s mind, but involves positing inaccurate, implausible, or even impossible motives for some kinds of actions while selectively ignoring the behavioral evidence provided by others. In addition to clarifying the weakness of the enslaver-as-mindreader, though, the example of Weeden illustrates the other (and in many ways more important) sense in which slavery baffles ToM: by rendering the enslaver’s behavior extremely difficult for enslaved people to explain and predict in terms of beliefs, desires, and intentions. As Poe’s Dupin stories demonstrated, much of the interpersonal reliability of ToM—our relative confidence that, in most everyday situations, a similarly situated observer would come to the same interpretation of an individual’s behavior that we do—rests on social constraints, whether legal, ethical, or purely conventional, that reduce the number of possible interior states and behavioral outcomes. Although the number of intentional explanations that can be generated for any given action is theoretically infinite, the field of possible explanations is drastically narrowed by our awareness that certain behaviors are dictated by the community, even as certain motivations are actively proscribed: we do not need to wonder why a stranger to whom we have just been introduced extends his hand, nor do we usually consider the possibility that a driver will attempt to run us over in the street—not because we know anything in particular about that person’s beliefs or reasons, but because we can attribute their behavior to the shared demands of law or manners rather than to unconstrained individual choice. As a result, mentalistic reasoning undergoes considerable strain when the observer and the actor do not belong, or cannot be sure they belong, to the same community: the same actions that might have been comfortably exempt from explanation in terms of beliefs and intentions require more and more interpretation as they become less governed by shared norms. The enslaver arguably existed on the extreme margins

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of this continuum, since in a real sense his conduct toward enslaved people was not answerable to any community. Enslavers often interacted with their captives outside of the public eye; other whites were unlikely to credit the testimony of the enslaved, while the enslaver was not socially obligated to volunteer a reasons-based account of his actions; and the law explicitly protected enslavers’ right to do whatever they pleased with their “property,” creating a zone of absolute impunity within the legal system.57 This lack of oversight obviously enabled horrific enormities; it also made predicting the behavior of an enslaver significantly more difficult, since his intentions would not be constrained by even the most basic social norms when they took form in action. Douglass’s litany of reasons for whipping—that is, his juxtaposition of the domain of violence and the domain of reasons, which are supposed to remain distinct in a liberal society—reveals that these two consequences of impunity are interdependent.58 Enslavement, of course, entailed torture of all kinds, including physical abuse, sexual assault, and the forcible separation of families. The particular variety of torture that Douglass’s passage on “floggable offenses” describes, however, is not only physically painful but specifically calculated to produce a state of what Martin Seligman has called “learned helplessness”: a pervasive disbelief in the power of one’s own actions to change one’s situation, and a corresponding disinclination to even entertain plans of escape or resistance. In the most basic terms, learned helplessness is produced by destroying an organism’s sense of cause and effect. In the experiment that initially established the phenomenon, which has since been abundantly documented in human beings, dogs were placed in an environment where they were able to avoid electric shocks by tapping a panel. Ordinary dogs quickly learn this specific behavior and other behaviors that serve the same purpose—for instance, jumping a fence. But dogs that were subjected to the same electric shocks with a panel that did nothing developed a passivity that extended even to new situations: when placed in a setting that makes it easy to escape the shocks, “experimentally naïve” dogs or dogs that have been exposed to controllable shocks readily avoid the unpleasant stimulus, while most of the

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dogs that have experienced uncontrollable shocks simply lie down and wait for the shocks to subside. Even the subset of dogs in the “uncontrollable” condition that did manage to escape the new shocks on the first trial, moreover, did not repeat this behavior on subsequent trials: the earlier experience of powerlessness seemed to have impaired the animals’ learning. Seligman offered a cognitive explanation for the deficit: “learning that responding and shock are independent,” he hypothesized, “makes it more difficult to learn that responding does produce relief . . . In general, if one has acquired a ‘cognitive set’ in which A’s are irrelevant to B’s, it will be harder for one to learn that A’s produce B’s when they do.”59 “Helplessness” is “learned,” in other words, not from the painful shocks per se, but from their random relationship to the subject’s behavior. I dilate on Seligman’s research here because the concept of learned helplessness, which seems to be robust across species, offers a framework for understanding the cognitive impact of torture.60 (That, after all, is what those dogs were experiencing; that is why summaries of these experiments are often quite upsetting to read; that is why, I hope, it would be much more difficult to obtain approval for such research now than it was in the 1960s.) Seligman generalized his findings to humans in the hopes of developing behavioral therapies that could treat and even prevent depression, so he was aghast when his research was appropriated by the Central Intelligence Agency during the War on Terror as a script for torture.61 In a sense, though, enslavers like Hopkins and Weeden were working from the same playbook, whether consciously or no. The capriciousness and unpredictability of enslavers, particularly when doling out “punishment,” was not merely a symptom of their legally and socially sanctioned impunity over the lives of enslaved people; it helped sustain and enhance that impunity by creating a deliberately and abnormally unpredictable and uncontrollable environment that in itself constituted a kind of cruelty. This does not mean that all or even most enslaved people experienced learned helplessness; nor, certainly, would I suggest that the power of positive psychology or the affirmation of agency could have somehow mitigated the stress and depression that enslaved people did feel.62

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What I find useful about learned helplessness is not the implication that profound powerlessness can be solved by a change of mindset but, on the contrary, the acknowledgment that the causal relationships we infer from our environment are not simply inherent in the world, but can be produced, manipulated, or excluded by other individuals. This holds, moreover, even when those causal relationships connect one’s own interior states to transformations in the world. Recognizing one’s intentions as effective causes and one’s actions as agential, Douglass’s account reveals and Seligman’s experiments help to document, is not a universal human given, but rather an acquired capacity—one that can be nurtured by legal protection and material security or diminished by subjection to arbitrary power. For participants in experiments on learned helplessness, uncontrollable stimuli look like randomness: an unpatterned sequence of electric shocks is the kind of phenomenon humans would be apt to interpret using Dennett’s “physical stance,” perhaps positing a malfunctioning appliance or a lightning storm. But when uncontrollable stimuli appear in the domain of social cognition—that is, when someone encounters a person whose actions are uncorrelated with their own—they look like madness. Recall from chapter 2 that a basic level of social cooperation, or at least the appearance of it, is one of the strongest signals that we are in the presence of a legible mind that we can access and influence through the intentional stance. When enslavers like Hopkins remove themselves from this process, they are attempting to render themselves not simply inhumane but inhuman: not motivated by bad reasons but beyond the world of reasons altogether. Structurally speaking, in Dennettian terms, the enslaver is insane: his repetitively irrational actions cannot be coherently understood in terms of causally effective mental states. Structurally speaking, I hasten to emphasize: that enslavers often behaved in ways that violated the basic premises of mindreading does not mean that they experienced anything like the subjective distress that can accompany true mental illness, nor that they were less responsible for their actions. (Least of all does it imply that mental illness is morally compromised the way racism is.) As Therí A. Pickens has argued, framing racial violence as a

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symptom of “white madness” not only “dismisses the quotidian nature of racism and its structural quality,” suggesting that white supremacy is an individual aberration rather than a condition of existence in the United States; it also, in assuming that racial violence could have no “rationale” other than madness, sweeps under the rug the very real benefits that white people reap from the subjugation of Black people.63 As Douglass makes clear, there were obvious and brutally self-serving motivations behind the totality of an enslaver’s behavior toward his slaves: the overall regime of a plantation like Hopkins’s or Weeden’s was designed to extract as much labor as possible from the enslaved population and to squelch any individual resistance or collective consciousness—or, better yet, to keep either from taking root in the first place—among the enslaved. But the psychological frame of learned helplessness allows us to see the strategic role that specific instances of irrationality could play in this general goal: thwarting the process by which an enslaved person could learn about their causal power over other minds. I have spent so much time reading this Douglass passage because it strikes me as a relatively rare glimpse into the ad hoc theories of mind that enslaved people developed to understand their captors’ behavior, as well as into the features of that behavior that were so difficult to model in intentionalistic terms. As Mia Bay notes, it is difficult to document the everyday theories about white people—and, I would add, the everyday sociocognitive practices with respect to white people— that enslaved Black people constructed in the nineteenth century.64 In part, this is true for the same reasons (lack of access to reading and writing materials, for instance) that make it difficult to reconstruct the thought of enslaved people in any systematic way; in part, perhaps, this particular gap is related to the threats and dangers that discouraged vulnerable Black people from passing explicit judgment on white character (especially in direct conversation with white people), leading to what Bay describes as “silences, ruptures, and contradictions” in even the richest historical record we have, the interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.65 While remaining aware of the unique features of this archive, I

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will end this section with a close analysis of one particular phrase that recurs across the testimony of formerly enslaved speakers. Though my object is a single trope used by many speakers rather than a single paragraph crafted by one writer, as in the Douglass passage I close-read above, my purpose in both cases is to illuminate the sociocognitive situation—the vantage points, the obstacles, and the heuristics—within and against which enslaved people worked to explain and predict the behavior of the people who held them captive. In several of the interviews that Bay quotes, the WPA workers seem to have asked their formerly enslaved informants about the reasons for whites’ behavior, although the failure to record interviewer questions in most of the WPA reports makes it hard to know exactly how the researchers framed the conversation. In the few cases in which they are recorded, the questions come off as obtuse to the point of being offensive: when Charlotte Foster remembers hearing slaves being whipped on neighboring plantations in the early hours of the morning, for instance, F. S. DuPre follows up by asking “why the slaves were being beaten.”66 The question is set up to prompt a “reason” like those listed by Douglass: bad manners, impudence, carelessness, or some other “floggable offense.” But Foster evidently catches the implication and is having none of it, responding “rather vehemently”: “Just because they wanted to beat ’em; they could do it, and they did.”67 The answer is striking not only for its total rejection of the terms of the question, but also because it is not Foster’s alone. Bay quotes no fewer than five formerly enslaved people, spread across different states, who offer the same explanation that deliberately explains nothing: “They jus’ whipped me cause they could—’cause they had the privilege”; “the reason they do us like they do is because they can”; enslaved people “wuz whipped mostly cause de Marsters could whip ’em.”68 Bay’s interest in this section lies primarily in demonstrating that enslaved people attributed “white meanness” not to racial disposition but to “power and privilege,” so she does not pause to reflect on the strangeness of “because they could” as an answer to a “why” question; her one comment on this pattern implies that “because they could” is less damning than other reasons that might have been offered, or

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is even somehow exonerating.69 Reading Charlotte Foster’s answer in context, though, reveals that “because they could” in fact indicts not only the enslavers who whipped but the interviewers who asked—who attempted to make sense of enslavers’ behavior by means of the intentional stance. After all, there are plenty of answers to the question “Why did they whip you?” that would reject rationalizations grounded in enslaved people’s intentions, but would still preserve the fiction that enslavers’ character and intentions played a causal role: “because they were evil,” for instance, or “because they hated us,” or “because they were power-crazed.” One man that Bay quotes, in fact, does invoke power and greed in an attempt to explain “why his white grandfather sold his mother.”70 It is the act of whipping, in particular, that seems to prompt a retreat from reasons, an insistence that reason-giving is simply the wrong kind of language-game for this situation. It is telling, then, that the testimony of these enslaved people collectively settles upon not the first explanation that Charlotte Foster offers—“just because they wanted to beat ’em”—but upon the second: “they could do it, and they did.” The near-tautological “because they wanted to” does point to enslavers’ impunity and attendant impulsiveness; it recalls Anscombe’s “I just thought I would,” discussed in chapter 2. But even as it reduces the mental states motivating the torturer to the most minimal form, “because they wanted to” still preserves the language and logic of intentional reasoning. “Because they could,” by contrast, enacts a subtle but powerful conversational shift from individual motivation to structural affordances, from “why did they do this?” to “what permitted them to do this?” From a psychological frame to a structural frame: this transition might seem like the end of a familiar antiracist journey, correcting a misleading individualism and orienting us toward the political. But this is a book about social minds, and the story, I think, is not so simple. Recall that Douglass’s loathing of pious enslavers stems partly from their insistence on rationalizing their cruelty, as in Hopkins’s “system” of preemptive punishment. The abundance and inconsistency of “floggable offenses,” in Douglass’s telling, helps to reveal the reasons offered

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as post hoc and pretextual. Offered in isolation to another white person, any one of those reasons might help Hopkins to preserve his religious façade. In their totality, however, we have seen that the message those reasons send to the enslaved population is very different: the message is “I have no reasons.” Enslavers had an interest in presenting themselves to their captives as without reason or even without will—as compelled to use their power to the fullest extent, simply because it existed. In other words, enslavers were motivated to reject their status as liberal subject in their dealings with enslaved people, precisely because it would have opened up the possibility of persuasion or discretion rather than unstoppable brutality. This phenomenon bears much more investigation than I am able to give it here, but it should at least serve as a check on the understandable inclination to imagine a kind of behaviorist utopia that resists normative models of cognitive ownership. When formerly enslaved people declared that their captors behaved violently “because they could,” they were rebuking the attempt to explain enslavers’ mental states not necessarily out of epistemic principle, but in recognition of the fact that the cultivation of irrationality and nonintentionality was one strategy that enslavers used to oppress and terrorize their captives. White supremacy is nothing if not opportunistic, and antebellum whites in the South are not the only individuals with an incentive to diminish their own agency in order to present themselves as impossible to “reason with.” Planting one’s feet firmly in the pragmatics of behavior enables unexpected historical connections. On Cash and Conjure

In diagnosing the process by which enslavement disrupts relations of cause and effect between minds and worlds, Delany and Douglass both suggest that only revolution or abolition, respectively, could bring about intentional agency as a phenomenological reality rather than a cruel fiction. If consciousness is not universal and undeniable but constantly renegotiated within unequal and exploitative social systems, then imagining others as people will not necessarily lead to a change

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in material and political circumstances; rather, changing others’ material and political circumstances will make it possible to imagine them as people. One might wonder, however, after reflecting on the psychological insights of the formerly enslaved subjects of the WPA interviews, what means of resistance were accessible within the asymmetrical power systems that created a similarly asymmetrical distribution of both self-perceived agency and cognitive labor. Surprisingly, a return to Uncle Tom’s Cabin sheds light on one such mode of resistance—what one might call the supernatural strategy—that works precisely by exploiting and indeed exaggerating the imbalance in cognitive power between enslaver and captive, giving ghostly form to the conspiratorial intentions that the slaveholder is so primed to see. When scholars analyze literary representations of ghosts in the context of New World slavery and the African diaspora, it is typically as an echo of past violence and injustice, the lingering trace of a history that refuses to be either erased or directly faced.71 Taking as a premise what Terry Castle has called the “supernaturalization of the mind” in gothic fiction, such readings explicitly or implicitly identify spectral beings with externalized mental states, partaking as they do in the transparency and immateriality of psychic entities as ToM conceptualizes them.72 Without denying the melancholic or reparative functions that such psychic visitations can serve, I want to suggest that ghosts’ very capacity to make mental states sensible, to give form (if not body) to an otherwise invisible interior, can also be powerfully weaponized by a population whose interiority is alternately denied and envisioned as opaque and bottomless. If nineteenth-century ideologies of race typically tried to place African-descended people in the neighborhood of apes and automata, ghosts derive their eerie power from their place on the opposite end of the spectrum of interpretive strategies discussed in chapter 2: as uncanny representations of an internal state—albeit often one that the observer has repressed—ghosts are too familiar, too close, often literally, to home. When wielded by African Americans in the South, narratives or representations of ghosts can serve as an unsettling reminder of the psychological reality of enslaved people, forcing white enslavers to acknowledge as visible

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and agential the mental states they had attempted to reconstruct as fictitious or powerless. Such is the result of Cassy and Emmeline’s simulated haunting in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Stowe in one of her chapter headings calls “An Authentic Ghost Story”: “authentic” not only because it constitutes an example of the explained supernatural (Cassy and Emmeline manipulate Legree into believing in the existence of a specter, but the text itself never suggests that the ghost is real), but also insofar as it indirectly confirms the existence of a consciousness separable from the body, the “immortal soul” that Stowe’s whites are constantly debating whether Africans have. Southern slaveholders were bent on exorcising this spirit, not only from their captives but, as Stowe hints, sometimes from themselves: “let a man take what pains he may to hush it down,” her narrator comments during Legree’s spectral torment, “a human soul is an awful ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have.”73 Stowe’s logic here seems to suggest that, since a belief in the immaterial existence of consciousness makes it possible for abolitionists to appeal to the conscience of enslavers, the latter would naturally desire to “hush it down”; having examined historical examples in which enslavers attempted to de-intentionalize their actions in order to (among other things) produce fear and despair in their captives, we may understand Legree’s uneasiness in slightly different terms. What is most striking about Cassy and Emmeline’s stratagem in the context of Stowe’s sentimentalism, however, is that it seems to offer a non empathetic way out of the sociocognitive traps of enslavement: rather than waiting for whites to recognize and mirror their emotions and mental states, enslaved people can metaphorize their own evacuated interiors as spectral presences, using the very emptiness expected of them as an occasion to throw their wills (as one might “throw one’s voice”) into territories and situations forbidden to their marked bodies. By staging the vengeful return of an enslaved woman’s expelled consciousness— that of the “negro woman” whom Legree had imprisoned in the garret of his house—Cassy and Emmeline’s ghostly plot also liberates that consciousness from the very body whose features were supposed, under the regime of scientific racism, to justify its enslavement.

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Spectral apparitions, though particularly accessible to nineteenthcentury anglophone novelists given their gothic pedigree, are far from the only entities into which mental states can be projected: grapevines, sawmills, and mockingbirds, to name a few, are all subject to possession by human consciousness. This is the implication, at least, of the metaphysics of Charles Chesnutt’s conjure tales. Published in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as were most of the texts I will discuss in chapter 4, Chesnutt’s tales not only theorize the phenomenology of enslavement and resistance, but also reflect on the incomplete project of constructing liberal subjects in the postbellum South. I close this chapter by placing Chesnutt’s fictions of conjure in conversation with a key concept from Billy Budd, the novella on which Melville was laboring in the late 1880s just as Chesnutt was publishing his first conjure tales in the Atlantic Monthly. The texts may seem unconnected except for temporal coincidence, but both reflect skeptically on the assumption—put forward by Douglass, but certainly not unique to him—that the “contractarian ideology” of “Northern liberal capitalist culture,” when successfully established in the South, would “allow individuals (and groups) to explore and develop as fully as possible their sense of what it means to be human.”74 “Unobstructed free agency on equal terms,” as Melville labels it75—the accountability to others’ desires and intentions that prevents impunity of the kind enjoyed by enslavers—turns out, in Chesnutt’s short fiction, to require more than the simple removal of “obstructions.” The phrase quoted above appears as Melville’s narrator explains the hierarchical power relations, halfway between enslavement and employment, that structure life on the Bellipotent. This hierarchy, the passage suggests, helps to explain the average sailor’s gullibility, his faith in manifest appearances, and his disinclination to probe the invisible depths that underlie an action or a statement. “Every sailor . . . ,” the narrator explains, is accustomed to obey orders without debating them; his life afloat is externally ruled for him; he is not brought into that promiscu-

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terms—equal superficially, at least—soon teaches one that unless upon occasion he exercise a distrust keen in proportion to the fairness of the appearance, some foul turn may be served him.76

The relation that Melville describes here, although presented in terms more congenial to liberal ideals of personal autonomy, is not so different from the “mutual dependence” that, in Derrick Spires’s account, many Black community leaders of the 1850s saw as foundational to “economic citizenship.”77 Only when both parties stand to gain or lose about equally by any financial, moral, or emotional transaction, Melville suggests, are we able to conceive of their beliefs as independent (and manipulable) entities. Put differently, you can be exploited by anyone who forcibly or coercively extracts your labor, but you can only be lied to by a peer. The ramifications of this distinction, which hearkens back to the role of contracts in establishing the boundaries of typical social cognition, will become much clearer in chapter 4; for the moment, however, it matters primarily in the context of the conjure tales’ frame narrative. Ostensibly, the Black storyteller Julius is as much an “unobstructed free agent” as the transplanted white northerner, John, to whom the tales are narrated: after all, the plantation system has supposedly been supplanted in the South by a system in which Julius is free to sell his labor to the highest bidder. Yet the extreme poverty of the North Carolina region where John and his wife make their home—a region where “labor was cheap,” “land could be bought for a mere song,” and the “sallowness” of “both the colored people and the poor whites” can be traced to their desperate ingestion of clay78—means that neither Julius nor his neighbors can lay claim to much financial autonomy: far from being an equal exchange of money for services, any transaction between John and Julius must take place against a backdrop of unmitigated material and legal inequality. Julius’s representation of a world populated by embodied mental states, then, reflects a canny recognition of the fact that his own mental states continue to have no practical significance as such to the likes of John. Because the free African Americans of Patesville and environs lack the financial, social, and legal resources to act on their will, their conscious

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intentions and desires are in a sense less real, more figurative or fantastical, than those of a white landowner like John, whose will is scaffolded by the entire edifice of American law and custom. Read in the context of this baseline asymmetry, which does not so much deny the existence of Julius’s mental states as dampen their causal power, the metamorphoses of conjure become not simply a figure for the ontological confusions of enslavement, but a metaphorical and pragmatic intervention in the postbellum distribution of cognitive and epistemic authority.79 Although, as both Richard Brodhead and Eric Sundquist point out, the enslaved people whose stories Julius narrates are rarely saved by the metamorphic effects of conjure—which usually displaces the physical and psychic pain of enslavement onto an inanimate object like the tree inhabited by “Po’ Sandy”—Julius himself is often able to leverage the lingering spectral presence of these enslaved people to his own ends: the continuing use of an old schoolhouse in “Po’ Sandy,” the revenue generated by “The Goophered Grapevine,” the retention of a troublesome servant in “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare.”80 Julius’s success suggests that when invisible attitudes like desires and fears are given material embodiment, they become less human—but also, and consequently, more powerful, more capable of commanding obedience from powerful whites. In Julius’s narratives, desire, instead of being treated as one mental state among others— one that can be modified or diverted through appeals to rational selfinterest—becomes a condition of the physical world, as impossible to ignore as heat or gravity. Of course, desires can take on concrete form during interactions between “unobstructed free agents” in a market economy—but this concrete form is supposed to be money. Both at the 1848 Convention of Colored Freemen and in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, as Spires has documented, many Black authors and activists advocated for economic advancement as a means toward social equality for African Americans: by enmeshing Black and white citizens in a network of exchange, laboring in the trades and acquiring property had the potential to “make others as dependent on you as you are on them.”81 This plan, Spires notes, “reverses the trajectory laid out in the black state conventions

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in the previous decade—that political equality leads to material equality—suggesting that black citizens can create a more equitable society by force of interest,” again affirming what Melville called “promiscuous commerce” as the foundation of individual agency.82 Even Martin Delany, although skeptical of the market economy’s capacity to transmute the irrational excesses of the slave power into rational self-interest, shows his protagonist advising his followers to “take all the money they can get from their masters” as a “passport through the white gap.”83 Money seemed for some abolitionists like the key to equality in part, I suspect, because of its capacity to materialize the will: by externalizing mental states, albeit in the foreshortened and simplified form of a quantitative equation, money sutures mental causes to interpersonal and material effects more reliably than any individual experience could. Its ability to do so, however, depends on institutional guarantees: if money, as we will see in chapter 4, acts as a kind of mindreading shortcut, its power is underwritten by a collective act of mindshaping that produces desires themselves as fungible across persons and situations.84 One can only use money to effectively materialize one’s own desires, in other words, when those desires look something like the propositions that ToM posits: abstractable from a given individual and communicable in a symbolic system. This status must be reestablished in any given monetary transaction, and Julius has little or no institutional backing to help him do so. The trick of the conjure tales, one might say, is to narrativize the process by which desires come to have material reality rather than taking that reality for granted as the precondition of interpersonal exchange. Julius’s stories not only metaphorically represent that process, but enact it in real time between an individual agent and an individual listener. By using his conjure tales to gain from John and Annie the concessions that he would be unable to attain by negotiation, then, Julius recoups some agency through the circuitous means of dehumanizing and misidentifying that agency, ascribing intention to physical events and inanimate objects much as the antebellum enslaver of Douglass’s description sees malignant intention in even the accidents that befall

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his captives. In the act of representing this fiction as necessary, though, Chesnutt implicitly rejects the notion that an impoverished Black American in the Reconstruction-era South and a white capitalist from the rapidly industrializing North can unproblematically meet on the “equal terms” that would enable each to perceive the other as an agent with privileged knowledge of and control over their own interior states. The continuity between the hauntings contrived by Stowe’s Cassy and Emmeline and the fictions of object-agency that Julius spins to his employer implies that the unequal realities of race in America cannot be erased—can, in fact, only be dissimulated—through the simple “assumption,” as Melville’s lawyer would have it, of legible and causally efficacious interiority, the empathic projection of one’s own consciousness onto the still-abject bodies of others. Insofar as it attempts to solidify the actually porous boundary between objects, on the one hand, and consciously intending humans, on the other, Chesnutt suggests, ToM can best be understood as a kind of vast collective humbug.

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4

Responsibility

On Humbug

It is arguably the word that best represents the Gilded Age. A quick Google Ngrams search of the “American English” corpus shows that use of the word “humbug” peaks around 1869, but, on a broader scale, remains relatively elevated from the 1840s to the 1890s, after which it begins a decline almost as steep as its rise.1 As with so many quantitative results, this one seems trustworthy because it jibes with our preexisting notions of literary and cultural history: the popularity of “humbug” indexes late nineteenth-century America’s thematic obsession with sham, fraud, and charlatanism—objects of fascination in the United States since at least the antebellum explosion of print culture, as Lara Langer Cohen points out, but accentuated by the proliferation of advertising discourse toward the end of the century.2 Indeed, the most notorious practitioner of commercial humbug was also its foremost theorist: P. T. Barnum’s The Humbugs of the World, an 1865 taxonomy that quickly veers into anecdote and memoir, offers an unsurprisingly self-exculpatory definition of “humbug” that nonetheless captures the term’s unique capacity to define deceptive acts by their formal, procedural qualities rather than by their semantic reference. Briefly unpacking Barnum’s explication of humbug will lay the groundwork for this

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chapter’s true subject: the possibility of deception without recourse to propositional mental states. Barnum takes great pains to differentiate humbug from mere deception. The latter, which he calls variously “swindling,” “counterfeit,” or “forgery,” depends on transmitting false information, whether through direct “assertion,” fraudulent documentation, or misleading social cues: “the appearance of a gentleman in dress and manners,” or the genteel conversation of “a man of intelligence and reading.”3 It is worth emphasizing the strength of this counterintuitive claim, since it diverges dramatically both from the dictionary definition that Barnum quotes (which defines “to humbug” as “to deceive; to impose on”) and our contemporary understanding of the word; deception, for Barnum, is not simply unnecessary for humbug, but is actually excluded by the concept. In order to drive home the distinction, Barnum goes so far as to offer a series of thought experiments that contrast two professionals of identical skill, experience, and credentials but dramatically different styles of self-promotion. In each example—whether our subjects are two “equally talented, equally pleasing” actors or two physicians “equally skilled in the healing art”—one of the pair advertises himself modestly, “under his proper name,” “without noise or clamor,” while the other stops at nothing to attract public attention, whether it be ubiquitous “handbills and placards,” “a band of music,” or, in the case of the actor, billing himself as “the ‘King of the Cannibal Islands.’” To refer to the latter type of businessman as a “humbug,” Barnum insists, is not to cast aspersions on his authenticity, but to acknowledge his use of “novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.”4 At the beginning, then, of a book that will go on to debunk dozens of actual frauds, from spirit-rappers to patent medicine peddlers, Barnum seems curiously insistent on removing the untruth requirement from the definition of “humbug”—and, as a result, shifting its psychological foundation from an interiorizing model of cognition to a more performative one. If humbug describes a style of marketing that can be used to promote authentically useful or valuable goods—if, in fact, the term (as Barnum often seems to suggest) is more appropriately applied

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to honest commerce than to swindling—then the “glittering appearances” of humbug cannot serve as concealment or misdirection, bearing no obvious relationship, whether positive or negative, to the truth.5 Rather than constituting an opaque but interpretable sign—an index of malicious or simply self-protective intent on the part of a quack— humbug resists interpretation in terms of surface and depth, forcing us to understand Barnum’s project as one not so much of exposing cheaters as of explicating more and less successful manipulations of attention. When Barnum refers to humbug’s outré displays, then, the echo of Poe’s Dupin, who finds the outré cases easiest to solve (see chapter 2), is more than accidental: in both cases, the adjective signals a departure from the realm of interiority and mindreading, marking an action or an utterance so out of the ordinary that it escapes the gravitational pull of propositional communication.6 What humbug alters is not the content of the victim’s (or beneficiary’s) beliefs, about which Barnum remains as agnostic as any behaviorist; rather, humbug manages to direct the flow of the spectator’s attention, steering them toward a particular object while suspending that object outside of any propositional mental states. Take the masterful dynamic of expectation and fulfillment created by one “Monsieur Mangin,” whose methods Barnum describes with open admiration: Then the great charlatan stood upon his feet . . . His sharp, intelligent eye scrutinized the throng which was pressing around his carriage, until it rested apparently upon some particular individual, when he gave a start; then, with a dark, angry expression, as if the sight was repulsive, he abruptly dropped the visor of his helmet and thus covered his face from the gaze of the anxious crowd. This bit of coquetry produced the desired effect in whetting the appetite of the multitude, who were impatiently waiting to hear him speak.7

Monsieur Mangin’s actions are not only so psychologically opaque as to render him utterly intriguing to his observers; they are, more significantly, psychologically empty. Whatever interpretation one might be tempted to assign to Mangin’s reaction to the “particular individual”— has he met this bystander before? is the bystander’s appearance or

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manner viscerally disgusting to him? is he simply resentful at being startled out of a reverie?—evaporates immediately when Mangin begins his sales pitch for, as it turns out, a particular brand of pencil.8 Rather than conveying any idea about the pencil or its representative, the series of actions served simply to focus and amplify the ambient attention of the crowd. In narrating Mangin’s behavior from the perspective, not of the “great charlatan” himself, but of an uninformed bystander, Barnum simultaneously allows the reader to speculate about that behavior’s reasons and reveals that such speculation is precisely the desired outcome of Mangin’s charade, the red herring that allows his performance to manipulate his audience’s attention at a preconscious level. The human propensity to mindread becomes, in the world of humbug, a kind of predictable mistake that can be exploited for profit. Humbug, in Barnum’s account, thus emerges as a kind of mental jujitsu, using the victim’s own cognitive biases and heuristics against them in a practice similar to what contemporary neuroscientists have called “cognitive deception” or “sleights of mind.”9 This framework, which suggests that successful deception often involves not simply asserting a falsehood but encouraging the victim to infer or assume a falsehood, usefully draws attention to the patchwork, cobbled-together quality of human cognition, to our propensity to lean on shortcuts and good-enough estimates in all but the most carefully controlled conditions: cognition as bricolage. Since the formal and narrative structures of nineteenth-century American fiction frequently turn on the weaknesses or failures of the sociocognitive heuristics associated with Theory of Mind, it should come as no surprise that humbug and its cognates—most notably, in the corpus of Mark Twain, a practice that I will call “fooling”—frame such failures as an occasion for personal gain, encouraging social mobility through the expert manipulation of behavior without recourse to propositional deception. The readings that follow will serve, in part, to activate and interweave the foregoing chapters’ theoretical challenges to ToM in the context of pragmatically navigating the interpersonal scene of the nineteenth-century United States.

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Within that scene, “fooling” or “humbug” proves especially useful in conditions of extreme social inequality, whether that inequality is founded on race, legal status, or economic power. In these contexts, humbug’s value derives not only from its ability to guide others’ actions without recourse to propositional interiority, but also from the fundamental innocence—or, at the very least, the indifference to truth value—that Barnum insisted upon. When one individual is socially, cognitively, or dispositionally disinclined to view another as an epistemic actor, lying, which involves deliberately misrepresenting what one knows, becomes difficult for the subjugated individual to execute. How can one—and why would one—falsify beliefs that are presumed not to exist? Fooling circumvents this problem by inducing individuals to act on false information that seems to come, not from another human being, but from their own sensory experience, using the very epistemic confidence that comes from social dominance to induce a misreading of the physical environment. If fooling, “humbug,” and their cognate concepts were especially prominent during the Gilded Age, it is perhaps because the United States in the late nineteenth century provided a veritable playground for experiments in cognitive asymmetry, rife with what Miranda Fricker, in other contexts, has termed “epistemic injustice”: steep discrepancies between the legal authority, truth value, and evidential integrity attributed to (and available to) the mental states of members of different social groups, and particularly different racial groups.10 By labeling the practice of fooling and recognizing the specific interpersonal contexts in which it appears, then, we not only enrich our literary-critical vocabulary for the narrative landscape of cognition itself; we also recover a mode of deception adapted to the cognitive asymmetry created (and presumed) by social inequality. Fooling Up and Fooling Down

In chapter 7 of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (henceforth Huck Finn), Huck has formulated a plan to escape from his abusive father: he will stage a murder, complete with props and forensic evidence, to direct his relatives’ energies toward mourning rather than

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searching—or, at least, toward searching for a dead body rather than a living boy. Here is his method: I took the axe and smashed in the door—I beat it and hacked it considerable, a-doing it. I fetched the pig in and took him back nearly to the table and hacked his throat in with the ax, and laid him down on the ground to bleed . . . Well, next I took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks in it,—all I could drag—and I started it from the pig and dragged it to the door and through the woods down to the river and dumped it in, and down it sunk, out of sight . . . I did wish Tom Sawyer was there, I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in some fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that.11

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As the winking intertextual reference at the end of the quoted passage suggests, the type of deception represented here is in a sense one of Twain’s trademarks, and examples pile up as the novel progresses: Huck disappearing from the raft, to Jim’s great alarm, and then pretending to have been there all along when Jim wakes up; Huck hinting that he has been exposed to smallpox to steer a few strangers away from the raft; Huck dressing as a girl during his reconnaissance; and, of course, Huck and Tom engaging in an elaborate, multistage pretense to help Jim “escape” from unnecessary and illegal captivity. These scenes have in common a deceptive strategy structurally similar to humbug, although not quite identical to it: in lieu of overt lies— that is, intentionally false propositional statements—Huck and Tom trick their victims’ automatic inference systems by means of misleading material clues. Misleading, but not exactly “fake,” for one of the peculiarities of Huck’s ploy is that the events that these clues suggest did in fact happen: a creature has been slaughtered (albeit a pig rather than a human), a heavy object has been dragged to the river (albeit a sack of stones rather than a corpse). The falsehood lies not so much in the information communicated by the clues as in the intense affective response that they elicit from their spectators, which launches the latter on an ultimately false interpretive track.

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Rather than manipulating the victim’s intangible beliefs, then, this form of deception alters the physical environment, trusting that the victim’s existing assumptions, fears, hopes, and superstitions will be activated by relatively sparse evidence. In this sense, Huck’s stratagem more closely resembles deception in the animal kingdom—a moth’s camouflage, for instance, or the broken-wing display by which killdeer birds lure predators away from the nest—than human lying. Rather than inducing the victim to trust an unreliable source, as a confidence man might, Twainian deception involves skewing sensory evidence, a source in which most humans place a priori, relatively unexamined trust.12 Whereas Peter Hancock and others have differentiated cognitive deception from merely “deluding the senses,” Twain’s representations of deception suggest that the two capacities are not so cleanly separable. Precisely because sensory input is, under normal conditions, taken as a firm foundation for rational inference and deduction—a “common ground” on which subsequent beliefs and decisions will be based—it follows that to create a misleading or irrelevant sensory stimulus is to distort cognitive processes without having to directly modify them or even acknowledge that they exist.13 Much like the “hyperopaque” behaviors that, as we saw in chapter 2, provoke an unsatisfiable desire for mentalistic explanation precisely because they derive from unconscious, nonpropositional conditioning, Twainian deception capitalizes on the imperfect communication between automated brain processes and the explicit, usually verbal explanations that we generate for the results of those processes, manipulating the former while allowing the latter to continue apparently unimpeded. Unlike Barnum’s humbug, Twain’s characteristic mode of deception does not exclude overt miscommunication: Huck’s attempt to pose as a girl, for instance, is accompanied by false statements, although it is ultimately by material clues (his manner of threading a needle and of catching an object dropped into his lap) that his fraud is discovered.14 But Huck and Tom’s typical method is uniquely successful precisely because it does not require direct interaction between deceiver and deceived; in a fictional world as rife with actual confidence men as

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the backwoods Missouri of Huck Finn—not to mention a real world in which forensic evidence was increasingly privileged over bare assertion as a source of legal and scientific authority, a development enacted in Twain’s own Pudd’nhead Wilson a few years later—Twainian deception has the advantage of bypassing the issue of interpersonal credibility, introducing a falsehood not as the statement of a potentially unreliable witness, but as a condition of the physical universe (albeit a fraudulently generated one).15 If lying, like a kind of mirror image of Godwinian honesty, depends upon a preexisting foundation of trust— since the liar “intends to get [his audience] to believe what is told, and intends that they form this belief because they recognize that this is what one intends,” a result that can only be obtained if the audience believes the speaker to be well-meaning and reliable16—then Huck’s deception does not constitute lying, but is all the more effective for its transfer of trust from speaker to inert matter. I could have chosen a different word to designate this distinctive method of deceit (including “humbug” itself), but settled on “fooling” because its connotations capture a few features of Huck’s deception practices that seem particularly salient. First among these, as I hinted above, is innocence, perhaps best indicated by the frequency with which “fooling” serves as an intransitive verb in Huck Finn: the novel, in fact, is most likely to invoke the word as part of the idioms “fooling around” or “fooling away”—idling without any particular purpose. This convergence of fooling, foolishness, and fooling around—that is, deceiving someone else, being easily deceived or misled, and being unoccupied or useless—flattens the otherwise threatening prospect of universal dishonesty into something playful and inconsequential, an end in itself rather than a means of self-advancement. Just as Barnum decoupled the practice of humbug from the potentially false content it serves to promote, so Twain suggests that, even when Huck intends to convince someone of an untruth, the methods by which he does so are blameless insofar as they do not involve the misrepresentation of his own mental states in an attempt to influence another’s. When Huck creates a scene full of clues that falsely point to his own murder, he is not presenting misinformation but rather activating an (as

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it turns out) inappropriate schema, inducing his father to actively fill in the misinformation on his own part: rather than installing a false belief through assertion or persuasion, Huck simply allows his father to continue using an unexamined heuristic. If lying is socially and ethically problematic, Twain’s model of deception oddly suggests, it is not so much because it leads others to believe falsehoods as because it addresses itself to beliefs in the first place, implying a cynical understanding of interpersonal interaction in which mental states and outward behaviors need not correspond. Fooling, by contrast, removes the threat of a deviant inner life, suggesting instead that deception arises when one’s behavior and beliefs do not correspond to the world. Of course, the latter description could apply just as easily to being mistaken as to being deceived, but this elision is a functional feature of Twain’s logic of fooling. To fool someone, in idiomatic American English, is to “make a fool of” someone—a construction suggesting that the blame for the deception rests at least as much on the deceived, who has been a fool, as on the deceiver, who has exploited an existing foolishness. Just as, in a successful cognitive deception, “the deceived individual plays a very active, albeit unwitting, role in the whole process”—whether by rejecting counterevidence to the false claim out of confidence or laziness, neglecting to check the source of the false information, or simply “wishing” the false belief to be true17—so Twainian fooling requires the object of deception not simply to passively accept a deceiver’s testimony, but to participate in the construction of a counterfactual world, albeit under the indirect guidance of the deceiver. In this sense, fooling involves a collaboration between the deceiver and the unconscious perceptual and cognitive heuristics of the deceived—whether those heuristics constitute a habit of thinking specific to the deceived individual or a paradigm shared by most of the species. Indeed, much of Twain’s work suggests that foolishness or foolability is an inevitable component of human cognition, narrow and biased as the latter inevitably is: take, for instance, “Puddn’head Wilson’s Calendar,” which lists April 1 as “the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.”18 When situated within a theory of mind that places more weight on

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reflexive reactions, unexamined assumptions, and predictable perceptual glitches than on consciously held beliefs, fooling itself comes to seem nonagential—or, at least, to involve the complicity of the deceived in their own deception. After all, our automatic inference systems can be fooled as easily by an optical illusion or an ambiguous noise as by a deliberate deceptive program, cases in which we would be all the more willing to relocate responsibility onto the deceived person rather than the “deceiving” object. Twain’s fascination with fooling as a primary method of deception means that this displacement occurs even when both parties are human. Precisely because fooling exploits the fooled individual’s cognitive biases, its epistemological consequences are far more dramatic than those of mere lying. Deceptive assertions do not in themselves cast doubt on one’s tools for understanding the world; although the deceived may experience epistemic doubt upon discovering that they have been lied to, the liar has an interest in encouraging the deceived to trust in their own, and the liar’s, ability to perceive the world accurately, since any uncertainty might lead the victim to doubt the liar’s word. By contrast, fooling, when it does not directly alter the victim’s sensory experience, instead works to make that experience seem unreliable—a subtype of fooling that overlaps with what we now know as “gaslighting”: the process by which one individual dismisses and mislabels another individual’s experience, usually by suggesting that the victim is mentally ill or otherwise delusional. As befits its origins in George Cukor’s 1943 film Gaslight, in which a husband subtly convinces his wife that she is losing her mind, gaslighting is typically practiced by the powerful upon the less powerful—for instance, by men upon women or by parents upon children. Indeed, twenty-first-century philosophers and activists have pointed to gaslighting as a form of epistemic injustice that perpetuates systemic inequality, identifying, for instance, cases in which white/ cis/hetero “allies” deny or minimize the experiences of queer people, trans people, and people of color.19 The practice is particularly damaging, we might add, because it attacks not simply the trustworthiness of the victim’s statements but, fundamentally, the evidential validity of their phenomenological experience. If an epistemically privileged person

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insinuates that an epistemically marginalized person is lying, they damage the person’s credibility, but preserve the implication that they both have access to a shared truth; gaslighting, by contrast, suggests that the victim’s perceptual apparatus or cognitive equipment makes them constitutionally incapable of experiencing the world accurately. Thus, when the enslaved Nat begins to suspect that the supposed fugitive Jim might have a personal connection with Huck and Tom, the boys do not bother to hide their involvement; instead, after Jim “sings out” his recognition of the pair, Tom and Huck flatly deny having heard any such voice: “‘Well, that’s mighty curious. Who sung out? when did he sing out? what did he sing out? . . . Did you sing out?’”20 Confronted with what seems to be a hallucination, Nat, “wild and distressed,” concludes that the sound he heard was the work of “de dadblame’ witches”; indeed, Huck and Tom’s expedient is so effective that when Nat next stumbles upon evidence of their shenanigans—a pack of dogs that enter Jim’s hut through a trapdoor—he spontaneously reverts to the supernatural explanation, “holler[ing] ‘Witches’ once, and keel[ing] over on the floor.”21 Like other instances of fooling, this one succeeds by playing to its victim’s favored explanations for opaque actions and experiences: on Nat’s first introduction, we learn that “the witches were pestering him awful these nights, and making him see all sorts of strange things, and hear all sorts of strange words and noises”—also, presumably, caused by Huck and Tom’s elaborate plotting with Jim.22 More than simply constituting a handy excuse that does not implicate the boys, however, invoking “witches” also allows Tom and Huck to head off future discovery by suggesting that any unexpected sights or sounds should be interpreted as a third party’s intrusion on Nat’s perceptual apparatus. Reducing sensory experience  to a malignant fiction, Huck and Tom’s fooling encourages their victim to question the authority of his own perceptions, inducing a general attitude of skepticism (even of the truth) without needing to install a specific false belief—once again obviating the need for the deceiver to implicate himself or even communicate directly with the deceived. It is no accident that this particular method of fooling is, in Huck Finn, almost always practiced on Black people by white people: not

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only on Nat, but, constantly, on Jim, from the mild early prank in which Tom Sawyer hangs the sleeping Jim’s hat on a tree branch over his head to Huck’s much higher-stakes disappearance from the raft and insistence, upon returning, that he never left.23 This repeated stratagem might be attributed to the superstitiousness that Twain’s text, in a familiar racist equation, represents as equally characteristic of African-descended people and of children in general; Jim himself has recourse to witches to explain the missing hat incident, and also appeals to a “hair-ball” in an attempt to predict the future, while an early scene shows Huck “t[ying] up a little lock of [his] hair with a thread to keep the witches away” just as Nat will later tie “his wool . . . up in little bunches with thread” for the same purpose.24 Yet if white children like Huck and Tom and enslaved Black adults like Jim and Nat all believe that their lives are determined by malignant, often invisible forces that respond not to propositional persuasion but to elaborate behavioral performances, it is because, in a certain sense, that is indeed the case. The capricious and unpredictable behavior of enslavers, as we saw in chapter 3, and of abusive parents, as in Huck’s case, creates a genuine epistemological conundrum from which a regime of religious or quasi-religious rules offers some relief.25 Indeed, it is significant that Huck appeals through Jim to the “hair-ball” precisely in order to foresee his father’s actions: “What I wanted to know was, what was he going to do, and was he going to stay?”26 Twain’s representation of these “superstitious” habits, insofar as it crosses color lines, suggests that such traditions emerge more from the need of the subjugated to find nonmentalistic means of explaining and influencing the interpersonal world—not a “superstition,” in the crude sense, but a system, what Glenda Carpio calls “a potent form of knowing and being.”27 If practices like consulting hair-balls to predict a person’s behavior or invoking witches to explain it participate in a coordinated metaphor system, the framework of psychological anthropology suggests, they can both structure the epistemology of social interactions and reshape the actual minds that use them. Still, given this shared framework of folk remedies, prophylactics, and rituals, why are African American people in Huck Finn always

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represented as the victims of fooling—in particular, the subtype of fooling known as gaslighting—rather than the perpetrators? The answer lies in the fact that fooling, although capable of operating across lines of social status and power, does not operate identically in all directions. As we have seen, unlike lying, which only works when the deceived is willing to trust the deceiver’s word, fooling does not depend on direct and equitable (mis)communication; in the terms set out in chapter 3, it does not require the “unobstructed free agency on equal terms” that turns out to be essential for both successful mindreading and conventional deception based on concealed mental states. For this reason, fooling becomes especially useful when deceiver and deceived are not on equal terms—when even the baseline “cooperative” equality of conversation, grounded in “a common purpose or set of purposes,” is not only absent but impossible to achieve for reasons of social and legal disenfranchisement.28 Inequality here implies that one participant occupies a lower position in some sort of hierarchy than another, which means that there are at least two important subspecies of fooling: what one might call “fooling up,” when the deceiver is of lower status than the deceived, and “fooling down,” when the opposite is true. Although we find instances of both types in Huck Finn (fooling up when Huck tricks his physically and legally more powerful father; fooling down when Huck and Tom trick Jim), and although both varieties deceive by modifying perceptual input rather than changing an individual’s beliefs, the two assume qualitatively different forms. Fooling down, as we have seen, typically involves causing a victim to doubt the validity of their own sensory experience, whether by invoking supposed supernatural influences (Nat’s “witches”) or simply by chipping away at evidence of the victim’s sanity—a tactic only possible if the deceiver possesses enough clout that their perception of the world (real or reported) simply is the world in the eyes of society, the law, and even the victim themselves. When this deceiver becomes the deceived, as in cases of upward fooling, it is precisely that perception that must be tampered with; by manipulating the material world, the deceiver, now of lower status than the deceived, has a much more direct impact on the beliefs of the powerful than they would by speaking in their

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own person. If our protagonist Huck is capable of both fooling up and fooling down, it is his position as a white child—privileged with respect to his race, disempowered with respect to his age—that allows him to do so. The magnetic fascination and curious cultural power of white children in nineteenth-century American discourse has been exhaustively discussed by critics from Leslie Fiedler to Robin Bernstein, but almost always in the context of this imagined child’s vulnerability, innocence, and purity—all feminine qualities, even when the child is not female.29 For Twain, however, the innocence of childhood is of a piece with its propensity to fooling, its access to a uniquely nonpropositional form of deception that allows the child to manipulate others without being directly implicated. Indeed, it is perhaps only in a novel centered on a child protagonist that fooling’s implications could be thoroughly mapped: fooling, as we have seen in the case of Huck and Tom’s more benign antics, exists on a continuum with one of the best documented features of children’s cognition, pretend play.30 Pretend play “works,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik explains, “by establishing imaginary premises  .  .  . and then working out the consequences of those premises quite strictly,” and that is what Huck and Tom do: the duo is constantly engaged in more or less formalized games of pretend— or, as they tend to call it, “letting on”—that require total fidelity to a made-up world.31 The structure of children’s pretense may seem to have more in common with fiction than with deception: in a typical pretend interaction, neither party holds a false belief, but both behave as if they do, right down to the “real emotional reactions” that the avowedly imagined scenario may inspire.32 Pretense, in other words, is not usually intended to misrepresent the world for another’s benefit (or harm), but rather offers a pleasurable means of testing children’s theories about causality, allowing them to simulate a counterfactual scenario and observe the consequences.33 What is unexpected about Huck Finn’s representation of pretense, however, is that Twain models pretend play as one species of a more general form of deception: the manipulation of the object world as an indirect means of manipulating others’ behavior.

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Huck and Tom are able to translate the techniques of their games into tools of deception by exploiting one of the basic structural features of pretense: a practice that one might call material misreading. Small children, after all, show an irrepressible inclination “to turn common objects—food, pebbles, grass, you, themselves—into something else,” from shoes that become trucks by being pushed along the floor to bananas that turn into telephones when held to the ear.34 This form of transubstantiation immediately recalls the elaborate system of objectequivalences with which Huck and Tom engineer Jim’s “escape.” Take, for instance, Tom’s insistence that, though they are digging Jim out with shovels and pickaxes, they “‘let on it’s case-knives,’” since the latter would be the appropriate instruments for a true escaping prisoner. Though Huck is slow to comply, he soon understands the pretense, to which Tom hews on what Huck describes as “principle”; having asked Huck for a case-knife and been handed one, Tom repeats significantly, “‘Gimme a case-knife’”—at which point Huck, enlightened, gives him “a pick-ax . . . and he took it and went to work, and never said a word.” 35 In pretend play, of course, these material misreadings are shared and consensual, but Huck’s repurposing of pretense as fooling in some of the novel’s episodes is deliberately one-sided, an asymmetry that constitutes the key difference between fooling and pretending. In Huck Finn, this asymmetry remains, if not actually innocent— Huck and Tom’s insistence on helping Jim “escape” an imprisonment they could easily end reads as a kind of torture—at least socially sheltered by what Bernstein has identified as the presumptive “racial innocence” of white children. Fooling plots have the potential, however, to problematize white innocence itself by revealing its dependence on and production of racial terror—a potential that the end of Huck Finn realizes obliquely and Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition achieves more directly. One suspects that the white wastrel Tom Delamere’s disguise as the respectable Black servant Sandy is visually unconvincing, but Tom succeeds in fooling the town’s white inhabitants because of the profound ignorance and apathy they bring to the task of reading Black minds. Confronted with someone in Sandy’s clothes who is behaving in a way completely inconsistent with Sandy’s character,

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Lee Ellis, rather than questioning the man’s identity or simply trying to understand why Sandy might behave that way, quickly succumbs to a kind of sociocognitive laziness: “He [Ellis] would not have believed that a white man could possess two so widely varying phases of character; but as to negroes, they were as yet a crude and undeveloped race, and it was not safe to make predictions concerning them.”36 The unconscious heuristic that Tom’s fooling exploits is, in this case, the familiar racist failure to ask basic questions about intention and belief when attempting to explain a Black person’s behavior—a failure that allows him to rely solely on the material miscues of stolen clothes and blackface, rather than lying or even behavioral imitation, when posing as Sandy. Tom’s imposture, of course, comes very close to getting Sandy lynched, an act of violence that, although averted at the last minute, lays the groundwork for the devastating coup of the novel’s climax. Yet even after Ellis discovers Tom’s deception, his desire to save Sandy remains weaker than his need to preserve white innocence, leading him to entertain ways “to save this innocent negro without, for the time being, involving Delamere.”37 When a handful of white elites decide to save face and disperse the mob by reframing the crime of which Sandy has been accused as an accident rather than a murder, they apotheosize the exculpatory logic of fooling. Thanks to the complicity of Tom’s deception with the cognitive shortcuts of the deceived, a woman has been murdered, a man kidnapped and nearly executed, and a fraud perpetrated—by no one.38 When The Marrow of Tradition was published in 1901, Twain was at work on a strange parodic novella that would appear in print the following year.39 “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” whether wittingly or no, follows Chesnutt’s lead: the story’s tangled plot not only links fooling itself to a lingering racial sin, but suggests that fooling’s dispersal or displacement of agency in the name of white innocence produces a specious “poetic justice” that is in fact neither narratively satisfying nor just. In an attempt to imagine a fooling-proof epistemology, Twain ends by suggesting that the only alternative to deception—the only ground on which unequal epistemic agents can openly meet—is violence.

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Fooling, Detected

If, as suggested above, fooling emerged in part as a response to the increasing priority placed on forensic evidence in both legal and extralegal contexts, then the fooling anecdote and the late nineteenthcentury detective story constitute near mirror-images of one another. Where the former relies on the propensity of ordinary humans to make rapid inferences from even misleading or forged material clues, the latter suggests that training and talent can create in the detective a kind of super-perceiver, an impartial register of data who is no longer swayed by cognitive biases.40 When Arthur Conan Doyle makes Sherlock Holmes critique the propensity to theorize before one has all the facts in hand, or chastise Watson for “seeing” but not “observing,” he is anticipating the epistemology of twenty-first-century popular neuroscience: rationality requires the override of rapid, sloppy, adaptive but imperfect systems of perceptual filtering.41 Precisely because our brains habitually distort the environment in the interest of our survival and well-being, the capacity to construct an accurate representation of the world is a secondary development, bolstered by conscious evidencegathering rather than immanent sensory experience. Conventional deception, then, would seem useless against the Holmesian detective, for whom physical indices speak louder than words—sometimes, as in the following passage from Twain’s “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” almost literally. The scene is a silver-mining camp, recently shaken up by the death by dynamite of a much despised miner named Flint Buckner. Into this plot, so dependent on the circumstances of the American West in the late nineteenth century, Twain introduces Sherlock Holmes himself, who turns out to be the uncle of one of the members of the camp (named, naturally, “Fetlock Jones”). To the awe and delight of the assembled miners, the Englishman takes it upon himself to solve the crime, setting Twain up for a virtuosic parody of Holmesian ratiocination: Here we have an empty linen shot-bag. What is its message? This:

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that robbery was the motive, not revenge. What is its further

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message? This: that the assassin was of inferior intelligence—shall we say light-witted, or perhaps approaching that? How do we know this? Because a person of sound intelligence would not have proposed to rob the man Buckner, who never had much money with him. But the assassin might have been a stranger? Let the bag speak again. I take from it this article. It is a bit of silver-bearing quartz. It is peculiar. Examine it, please—you—and you—and you. Now pass it back, please. There is but one lode on this coast which produces just that character and color of quartz; and that is a lode which crops out for nearly two miles on a stretch  .  .  . Name that lode, please.42

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At this point the miners sing out as one, pulled into Holmes’s interactive reasoning process and convinced that the conclusion is obvious: “The Consolidated Christian Science and Mary Ann!”43 Holmes concludes that Flint Buckner was murdered by Sammy Hillyer, a slowwitted member of the camp; the scene seems to be a triumph of detection, albeit a rather stagy and caricatural one. In context, though, Holmes’s performance is comedic not just because its rhetoric is exaggerated, but because its conclusion is wrong: the reader of the story has already seen Fetlock Jones, Buckner’s (justly) disgruntled servant, plot Buckner’s murder with the specific goal of fooling his “Uncle Sherlock.” Unlike the starstruck miners, then, Twain’s readers recognize the scene as a triumph of deception—and, specifically, of fooling. How does Fetlock’s misdirection succeed in fooling Holmes? Twain gives us an implicit answer in the detective’s interrogation of the material objects on the scene. In repeatedly asking for the “message” of the linen shot-bag and soliciting its “speech,” Twain’s version of Holmes does not so much escape the logic of mentalistic inference as temporarily relocate it to the physical realm. Indeed, while the objects of Holmes’s investigation are themselves without mind, his reasoning process takes them as clues to mental states no less reliable than a blush or a gesture: the empty linen shot-bag declares not merely a chain of physical events but a motive (robbery) and a false belief (that Buckner had money). Though framed as an attitude of universal

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suspicion, Holmes’s method never questions the fundamental premise that the physical world constitutes a mesh of communicative symbol systems—and that its traces provide us with evidence, not merely of what happened, but of what it meant. Trusting his own hermeneutic abilities, the great detective is fooled by the same error that led the much less distinguished intellect of Pap Finn to gather, from the evidence that a creature had been slaughtered (what happened), that his son had been killed by intruders (what it meant). It is only fitting, then, that Holmes’s detection ends up being foiled by Fetlock’s fooling: the two systems, like the two characters, are close relatives, locked in a loop where every improvement in the detective’s observational powers can be matched by an improvement in the subtlety of the fooler’s creation. If one’s relation to the physical world is one of reading, then material misreading will always be a possible stumbling block. In order to construct an accurate picture of what happened at the Hope Canyon mining camp, Twain’s story needs someone, and some method, outside of this family altogether. That someone is Archy Stillman, whose story provides a kind of frame narrative for the Flint Buckner incident, and whose method is as absurd as it is effective: a preternaturally acute sense of smell. Before Buckner is murdered, Archy has already acquired a reputation for “A 1 right-down solid mysteriousness” in the camp, having solved a number of puzzles with his gift: managing to locate the missing daughter of “the camp’s one white woman,” for instance, by scenting her trail.44 Yet Archy keeps the nature of his talent secret through what is itself a kind of habitual behavioral fooling, “pretending to examine the ground closely” and “trac[ing] upon the ground a form with his finger” that is meant to stand in for the invisible track he actually follows. Archy’s deception succeeds precisely because it assumes the form of detection, a performance of ultra-sharp perception that inures the average folk in the camp to a kind of trusting bafflement: when Archy claims to find a footprint on the “hard earth floor” of a hut, the rest of the search party “[does] their best to see,” and “one or two” claim to “discern . . . something like a track.”45 Because Archy’s evidence exists on a bandwidth to which none of his neighbors has

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access, the results appear as a kind of magic, distinguished from the “magic” of the detective’s expertise only by being actually inexplicable.46 Indeed, this fanciful ability may seem as out of place as Sherlock Holmes in the comic-realist atmosphere of the Western mining camp—but the origin story of Archy’s supersense inserts yet another genre and setting into the short length of “A Double-Barreled Detective Story”: a kind of gothic romance of the Old South. Although my analysis began with the climactic scene of detection, Twain’s story itself begins nowhere near Hope Canyon, but sets itself with surprising explicitness in the mid-Atlantic: “The first scene is in the country, in Virginia; the time, 1880.”47 We are introduced to a young woman from a wealthy and respectable lineage (perhaps one of the “FFVs” [First Families of Virginia] on which Twain elsewhere heaps such scorn),48 marrying a poor young man whose “old but unconsidered family” is rumored to have “by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor, and for King James’s purse’s profit”—an ignominious background that draws the antipathy of the young woman’s father.49 Shortly after the couple’s marriage, the husband, Jacob Fuller, informs his new wife that he has married her for the sole purpose of mistreating her in order to break her father’s heart in revenge; the spirited young woman, however, defies and mocks him until, in a final fit of rage, Fuller drags her out of bed at night, “lash[es] her to a tree by the side of the public road,” and sets a pack of “bloodhounds” on her before abandoning her forever.50 It is through the traumatic influence of these bloodhounds, the woman believes, that the son born of this marriage—whom we know as Archy Stillman—acquires his spectacular sense of smell. In its bare bones, this summary may well increase rather than dispel the reader’s confusion. Yes, Archy’s revenge on his father, orchestrated by his mother, motivates the plot of “Double-Barreled,” but only for a few chapters; our attention has already shifted to the Flint Buckner affair by about a quarter of the way through the story. The Stillmans’ bizarre and miserable family history only becomes intelligible in the light of its coded racial reference. The inciting incident happens in 1880, after Reconstruction, and all of the characters involved are

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implicitly white; indeed, the only nonwhite character labeled as such in the entirety of “Double-Barreled” is “Injun Billy,” who lives on the periphery of the Hope Canyon camp. From the story’s second paragraph, however, the entire interaction between Jacob Fuller and the family we later come to know as the Stillmans evokes the forced migration, sexualized violence, and public punishment that, in the Virginia context, cannot help but recall the regime of racial enslavement. In alluding to the Fuller family’s compulsory deportation from Sedgemoor, Twain is hinting that Fuller’s ancestors took part in the Monmouth Rebellion, which was finally put down at Sedgemoor in 1685, resulting in the execution of a number of the rebels and the penal transportation of the rest to the West Indies.51 Twain’s invocation of this history serves to tie Fuller not only to the forced labor of both white convicts and enslaved Black people in the Americas, but also to a popular uprising bearing some resemblance to the rebellions of enslaved people that so terrified antebellum white southerners. When Fuller’s wife describes herself as “the lawful slave of a scion of slaves,” then, her remark draws attention to a kind of crypto-miscegenation underlying this tale of a wealthy white woman married to a poor white man.52 It is grimly appropriate that the humiliated Fuller, in turn, exacts on his wife a punishment strongly reminiscent of those visited upon enslaved people who attempted escape: not only tying her to a tree and “str[iking] her across the face with his cowhide” but, crucially, attacking her with bloodhounds, the favorite breed of dog used by enslavers seeking to track and apprehend runaways.53 Archy’s “gift of the bloodhound,” as his mother terms it,54 is thus a gift bought by experiencing the violence of slavery in the Americas. The fooling-proof epistemology to which Archy has privileged access, and which makes him a better detective than Sherlock Holmes himself, stems not from special training but from surviving racially tinged brutality. If Archy is not susceptible to deceit by means of fooling, it is because his physiological source of knowledge cannot be consciously manipulated either by others or by himself. Though his tracking is susceptible to error, as when an initial mistaken identification leads him to pursue the wrong man for thousands of miles,

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it errs precisely by being insensitive to the kind of meaning-bearing information—does this seem like the kind of man who would commit such a crime?—that Holmes is all too eager to pursue. The nonintentional nature of Archy’s methods, then, gives them the imperviousness to cognitive bias that Holmesian forensics can only aspire to. Archy’s talents, and indeed Archy himself, originate in a context of extreme and compounding power imbalances; as a result, Archy experiences the social world on a kind of subterranean level, neither giving nor asking for mentalistic engagement, as insulated from the heuristics by which others perceive the world as he is expert at manipulating them. When Archy “darken[s]” his “complexion” to disguise himself as a “muddy day-laborer” while pursuing his quarry,55 he is merely aligning his outward appearance with the subject position he already occupies: someone rendered at once invisible and all-perceiving by the legacy of enslavement. The foregoing interpretation would suggest that the capacity to both practice fooling and detect it is a kind of superpower conferred by the survival of racialized terror, allowing the bearer to achieve justice where law and forensics fail. Such a reading might link Twain’s narrative to Chesnutt’s conjure tales, to which Archy’s quasi-metamorphosis bears an unmistakable resemblance: here, too, a character brutalized by the system of slavery acquires a tool for partially redressing those wrongs from the very torture itself.56 In typical Twainian fashion, however, most of the characters in “Double-Barreled” are far too compromised and complicit to sustain this explanation. As the promiscuous dispersal of slavery’s tropes in the story’s first chapter suggests, Twain links foolproof epistemology less to any particular experience of slavery’s abuses than to the taint that, like a lingering scent, clings to all those who participated in it. If Archy sets out to avenge a crime that echoes slaveholders’ enormities, after all, the man who committed that crime was himself resisting a form of slavery-like (in Twain’s representation) indignity; the plot of “Double-Barreled,” to mimic the formulation of Archy’s mother, follows a slave’s vengeance upon another slave for an act of vengeance against a preceding, but by no means originary, wrong. Nor does the solution to Buckner’s murder

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restore equilibrium: Fetlock Jones, we are repeatedly reminded, was being held captive, and killed Buckner in an attempt to escape what the narrator labels “slavery.” Indeed, Buckner is shown calling Fetlock a “mangy son of a n[——]” in the only explicit reference to Blackness in the story.57 Though not explicitly remarked upon at the time, the phrase sticks with Fetlock, for whom it constitutes a literally unspeakable insult, if not a justification for murder in itself: as he watches Buckner go to his death, Fetlock murmurs to himself, “good-by for good, Flint Buckner; you called my mother a—well, never mind what.”58 In providing the evidence to convict Fetlock, then, Archy consigns to prison someone who, like himself, carries the aura of racial abjection and enslavement through a maligned mother. Where, both formally and politically speaking, does this leave us? Arguably, in a narratological place familiar to any reader of late Twain. When Peter Messent compares “Double-Barreled” to Pudd’nhead Wilson in one of the few critical works to address the story at any length, he is responding not only to the narratives’ similar thematic interest in “doubles and doubling,” but also to the literal structural bifurcation that the texts share.59 Just as Pudd’nhead Wilson’s primary identity-swapping plot is shadowed by the partially excised story of the “extraordinary [conjoined] twins,” so “Double-Barreled” lives up to its name by embedding the stylistically and narratologically distinct story of the events at Hope Canyon within the Stillmans’ revenge plot. In the world of the Victorian multiplot novel, discrete narratives like these would ultimately lead to a unified climax, and the seemingly separate plot lines would turn out to share a resolution. For Twain, however, the pressure of containing several narrative threads in a single text leads either to dissolution (as in the case of Pudd’nhead Wilson) or, in “Double-Barreled,” to a peculiar fizzling effect. The story’s short last chapter reveals what the reader trained on novelistic coincidence has suspected all along: Flint Buckner was in reality the pseudonym of Jacob Fuller, the target of Archy’s revenge. Yet instead of providing a satisfying conclusion, the dénouement reveals that the two plots have canceled each other out: if Archy foiled Fetlock’s plan to get away with murder, Fetlock also, without realizing it, foiled Archy’s plan by

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allowing Buckner/Fuller to die quickly and without repenting for his wrongdoing. The “comeuppance” that William Flesch argues is a key driver of fictional narrative—the “altruistic punishment” of those who transgress social norms60—only works if punisher and punished are mutually aware of the wrong and the retribution, but in “DoubleBarreled,” improbably, neither is aware: although Fuller dies, neither he nor his killer makes any connection between his death and the “ancient crime” he committed.61 Originating in the cognitive gulf between different social strata, fooling structurally encourages a similar gulf between character agency and narrative closure, ensuring that no figure within the narrative universe has access to epistemic or ethical authority. If fooling is an adaptive response, then, to a universe in which epistemes are both local and unequal, it operates not by building a shared epistemological community but by allowing individuals to selectively adopt distinct registers of evidence and extrapolation for their own immediate ends. In yet another inversion of the conventions of detective fiction, “Double-Barreled” models a world in which different sources and regimes of knowledge (Archy’s sensory experience, Holmes’s forensic evidence, the miners’ gossip, the implied author’s narration) do not reinforce or complement but rather disable each other, making it more difficult to achieve consensus about even the physical facts of the world—let alone about more abstract questions like culpability. The result is morally undecided not by accident but by design: when the same individual may occupy a disenfranchised position in one social or narrative system and an oppressor’s position in another, as Jacob Fuller does, establishing that individual’s identity becomes not a trivial forensic task but an epistemic challenge for which there is no authoritative solution. If detective fiction fantasizes that establishing the facts will also dissolve any moral uncertainty about the crime, Twain’s iteration of the genre reveals that the impossibility of epistemic certainty derives from an ongoing ethical scandal: the vast discrepancies in civil status between supposedly equal American citizens create cognitive discrepancies just as vast, granting phenomenal experience world-making authority or dismissing it as delusory

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according to the social location of the individual who experiences it. There exists no epistemic common ground on which the fooling and counterfooling characters I have discussed can meet. None, that is, except violence, and the knowledge born from violence. If Holmes’s intellect is inadequate to the American West, Twain’s parody implies, this is because it has never truly reckoned with violence that is simultaneously abrupt, gratuitous, cruel—and pervasive: violence that is not an anomaly within an otherwise well-ordered social system, but that, even in its non–state-sponsored instantiations, constitutes the engine by which that system is powered. Fooling is necessitated by this systemic violence, even as it offers a means of escaping it—but only temporarily, and not without compromise. Fooling works to perpetuate subjugation and to resist it with equal ease; its only unqualified ethical virtue is the capacity to defer the appeal to violence a little longer, to turn imminent threat into a Scheherazadean game of pretend. A virtue that may be more powerful than it first appears. For Roberto Bolaño, writing on Huck Finn, it really was magic: “Survival. That’s one of the kinds of magic to be found here. The ability to survive.”62 The Fooling Cure

The dueling foolers in “Double-Barreled” seek their revenge out of self-interest alone. When a member of a marginalized group uses fooling to carve out a space for personal autonomy, however, the act carries the indirect potential to help dismantle the conditions that created the need for fooling in the first place. In this section, I examine the possibility of treating systems of inequality as pretenses that can be battled with counterpretenses: acts of fooling that contribute not only to a particular individual’s interests and ends but also to the project of shifting the balance of wealth and power. What we might call “restorative fooling,” like the other cognitive forms we have encountered in this book, crosses geographic, historical, and even ontological borders. Indeed, its two most illuminating instantiations, for my purposes, occur at a real-world French mental institution and a fictional slave auction in the antebellum United States.

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While working as a specialist in mental illness at the Salpetrière Hospital in France in the 1810s, Jean-Étienne Esquirol encountered “M. de B.,” a patient who, after repeated spells of physical exhaustion and melancholia, began to go days without eating. When questioned, Monsieur de B. explains that “his reason for refusing food is, that by eating, he compromises the character of his family and friends: honor forbids that he should eat”—a motive doubtless especially significant to this strong-willed man who had refused to serve in the army “not in consequence of cowardice, but of his opposition to the revolution.”63 Esquirol and his colleagues attempt to break this resolve by a variety of means, some more violent than others: having tried unsuccessfully to tempt the patient with “such food as he preferred when well” and to feed him through a nasal tube, the doctors resort to “producing acute pains with a flexible red hot iron, lightly applied to the skin”—a form of torture to which Monsieur de B., disappointingly, responds with “stoical indifference.” Nor does persuasion succeed: the reasoning and entreaties of family, friends, physicians, and “an ecclesiastic, in whom he has much confidence” do nothing to shake Monsieur de B.’s determination, which seems to strengthen even as his body becomes increasingly frail. At last, Esquirol hits upon a winning stratagem: the doctors “present to [Monsieur de B.] a declaration, legalized by the seal of the state, and in all appearance official, authorizing him to eat, and discharging him from all responsibility with respect to it.” The patient hesitates, seeming to reconsider his fast for the first time, but it is not until the patient’s friend appeals to the document’s legitimacy—“Think you that I deceive you; that I would counterfeit the stamp of the state?”—that, “as if waking from a dream,” Monsieur de B. finds himself willing to eat again, “devouring the first half of a fowl contained in a pie” before anyone can slow him down.64 What to make of this peculiar anecdote? Though Monsieur de B.’s story constitutes just one of scores of case histories recounted in Esquirol’s 1838 Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal—translated into English by the American physician Ebenezer K. Hunt as Mental Maladies (1845)—the episode stands out for the mechanism of the patient’s cure, which departs from the physiological methods (bloodletting, cold baths, and the like) to

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which Esquirol typically has recourse, and with which he begins Monsieur de B.’s treatment. It is only after Monsieur de B. shows himself resistant both to persuasive reasoning and to physical coercion—both, we might say, to the interpersonal norms and nudges of mindshaping (the patient’s friends and family “eat in his apartment, in order to incite him, by their example,” with no success)65 and to literal brute force that might otherwise have produced learned helplessness—that Esquirol hits upon this middle ground: to create a material correlative to the patient’s delusions, allowing them to be acted out and transformed in the real world rather than in fantasy. The patient cannot be reasoned out of his belief, nor can he be distracted from it, made to replace it, or even led to abandon it out of self-interest; in response, the canny physician can only abandon the realm of belief altogether and redirect his interventions to the realm of behavior. Monsieur de B.’s cure has classical precedents that Esquirol cites—from “Alexander of Tralles,” who “cure[d] a woman who [thought] she ha[d] swallowed a serpent, by throwing one into a vessel in which she was vomiting,” to one Zacutus’s tale of “a young man who believed that he was damned” but was cured by a visitation from “a man so disguised as to represent an angel, who announced to him the pardon of his sins.”66 And like those precedents, Esquirol’s approach aims above all to produce positive behaviors, even if they stem from false beliefs. Indeed, these “more or less ingenious” methods67 require not only that the psychiatrist humor his patient’s delusions, but that he participate in performing them, in modifying the shared physical universe to more closely match the fictive world of the patient’s disordered cognition. Esquirol neutralizes the frighteningly unpersuadable opacity of the delusional belief by externalizing it, turning it into a common ground from which patient and doctor can reason together—and, in doing so, he offers as a curative protocol the very form of nonmentalistic deception that Twain would later represent as fooling. Esquirol was not the first to hint at the healing powers of “surprises, subterfuges, and oppositions”: his supervisor at the Salpetrière, Philippe Pinel, was known to stage similarly elaborate scenes, including a mock trial that “acquitted” a tailor who was terrified of being condemned to the guillotine for a reported lack of patriotism.68 For

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Pinel, such “ruses” were at times a necessary part of the “moral treatment” for which he was so renowned, the attempt to exercise “gentleness [douceur]” in the treatment of the insane while avoiding harsh physical punishments or dehumanizing measures—although his followers, like the American asylum superintendent Thomas Story Kirkbride, often preferred to rely on incentives rather than tricks.69 What is unique about Esquirol’s own performative cures is not the method itself, but rather the psychiatric justification, which in Mental Maladies is bound up with the new concept of monomania. Monomania can be diagnosed not only by its etiology—which involves “a partial lesion of the intelligence, affections or will” that leaves most cognitive processes unaffected—but also by its particularly charismatic presentation: the monomaniac is “gay, petulant, rash, audacious”; he “lives without himself, and diffuses among others the excess of his emotions”; his “physiognomy is animated, changeful, pleasant”; his entire demeanor, in short, seems unimpaired or even improved by his affliction.70 Monomania presents a special problem for the psychiatrist precisely because one of its symptoms is the skillful concealment of one’s symptoms, usually beneath a veneer of exaggerated sociality: Esquirol repeatedly notes that monomaniacs tend to appear perfectly normal, indeed almost aggressively sane, in public—offering, as in the case of one patient, “the most minute account of [their] actions, without mistaking with respect to dates”—but revert to “absurd” behavior the moment they are left alone.71 Patients like this one, or like the woman who obsessively avoids touching certain objects “with so much address, that she is not at first observed” to be doing anything unusual,72 are transformed by their illness into unintentional confidence men. For them, social life is a constant deception without any obvious self-interested purpose, since the delusions they work so hard to conceal or pass off are typically maladaptive and burdensome even to themselves. When reading Esquirol’s description of the “partial delirium” that can make individuals act against their own preferences, it is hard not to think of the pantheon of nineteenth-century American protagonists, from Clara Wieland to John Marcher, who insist that their actions are

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not their own—who “perform acts, and hold odd, strange and absurd conversations, which they regard as such, and for which they censure themselves”; who “commit ridiculous and blame-worthy acts, contrary to their former affections and true interests”; who “find themselves uneasy everywhere, and are constantly changing their place.”73 If American psychiatrists of the early nineteenth century frequently blamed high rates of insanity on the young nation’s social mobility, frenetic commerce, and lack of social and religious hierarchies, then Esquirol’s description of his patients’ symptoms offers a kind of mirror image to this causal narrative, describing a type of organic insanity that has the same effects as the geographical diffusion and interpersonal instability of the nineteenth-century United States. It is perhaps no accident that Pinel and Esquirol were so widely respected in antebellum America:74 in addition to providing a model of compassionate psychiatry, the two inadvertently offered a diagnostic vocabulary and a treatment method for a disorder of the will that must have seemed disconcertingly common to asylum directors—even though that prevalence may have signaled that “monomania” or “moral insanity” was more an adaptation than an affliction. Fittingly, then, the very method of deception that Barnum and Twain hit upon in the mid-nineteenth-century United States—a method that allowed one person to manipulate another individual’s behavior while remaining agnostic or indifferent as to their beliefs— had already been charted in a scenario where those beliefs were equally inaccessible, not because of social obstacles to mindreading, but because of mental illness. The behavior that Esquirol aimed to elicit from his patients, of course, was more or less congruent with normative conduct for nineteenth-century bourgeois individuals in both France and the United States: to eat, to sleep, to hold down a job (for men), to tend to the home and children (for women), to refrain from violent or obsessive acts. In acknowledging the Foucauldian disciplinary content of these institutional goals, though, it would be a mistake to miss the polyvalence of curative fooling itself, which can be and has been adapted to a variety of political ends. Indeed, it is worth noting, when one feels the temptation to dismiss the asylum physician’s

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deceptions as cruelly infantilizing, that Esquirol’s theatrics bear the unmistakable signs of fooling up rather than fooling down: rather than using bare assertions to challenge the patient’s faith in their own perceptual and cognitive competence—a move that, one might imagine, would come more naturally to the psychiatrist—Esquirol insists upon using performances and material misreadings to affirm that faith, allowing the patient to make false but expedient deductions on the basis of misleading physical evidence. Structurally, in other words, Esquirol behaves like the less powerful participant in this exchange, Huck to the patient’s Pap. In part, no doubt, this surprising impression may stem from the fact that many of the patients described in Mental Maladies were of relatively high social status—but even those who were not had a kind of advantage over Esquirol in their opacity and inaccessibility to persuasive techniques, which gave their actions the kind of capricious authority that one might otherwise associate with a parent or even an enslaver. Fooling thus reveals a kind of helplessness even on the part of the culturally and practically authoritative physician because of its basis in involuntary and hyperopaque behaviors: aspects of cognition over which none of us has full control, and which thus offer a means of manipulation independent of the victim’s (or the deceiver’s) social status. For Esquirol, the goal of fooling was ultimately to restore the victim to their prior position, to return them to a functional social role after their time in the institution. But what if the “restoration” in restorative fooling took on a broader meaning—one that allowed the subjugated to reclaim the rights that had been denied them based on race or socioeconomic status? This more politically radical brand of restorative fooling has a robust presence in US fiction and fact throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in representations of slavery and its aftermath. It is no accident that “sham,” “humbug,” and “bogus” are such key concepts in William Wells Brown’s Clotelle (1867),75 nor that they tend to emerge in situations of racial performance or exhibition, from the slave auction to Jerome’s escape from prison in Clotelle’s clothes; these deceptions not only reveal the fungibility of the supposedly innate characteristics of race and gender, but also point to the ability of canny individuals to exploit the externalizing logic of racial legibility for personal gain. As Kevin Young notes in his cultural

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history of hoaxes, Bunk, “the hoax regularly steps in when race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real”;76 not only a fake thing, I would add, but a fake thing that purports to demonstrate its own reality via a transparent system of clues, independent of personal agency or desire. It is the very obviousness of race, in other words—its supposed precognitive visibility, its purported dependence on a system of perceptible differences—that makes it especially foolable: racism arguably works best when white people are encouraged to take their “gut” reactions as authoritative, but antiracist fooling can sometimes turn that lack of interrogation to its own advantage. Clotelle and her fellow enslaved people—but also, significantly, slave traders and others attempting to profit from the institutions of white supremacy—manage to manipulate the material indices of race in order to modify others’ beliefs indirectly, without presuming on the deceived party’s willingness to trust the word of a Black woman. That such an enterprise can succeed suggests that to see “a Black person” or “a slave” in Twain’s Jim or Brown’s Clotelle is, on the level of cognitive form, not unlike seeing a telephone in a banana: a pretense that can nonetheless become the “common ground” for an elaborate system of exchange, sociality, and fantasy. Clotelle represents the slave market—a site that William Wells Brown, who had been hired out to a Mississippi slave trader before his escape to freedom, knew intimately 77—as a node at which several layers of fooling, lying, and pretense intersect, offering a fertile field for humbug both exploitative and restorative. In his own business dealings after his escape from enslavement, perhaps as a result of his experience at slave auctions, Brown expertly walked the line between humbug and outright fraud—advertising himself, for instance, as a “Fashionable Hair-dresser from New York” when setting up a barbershop.78 Jennings’s salesmanship, as Brown describes it here, is not so dissimilar, with the important pragmatic difference (in addition to the obvious moral one) that Jennings does not make these false claims in his own person; rather, he uses the bodies and voices of enslaved people to ventriloquize and corroborate his own lies. The deception begins before the “merchandise” is even brought to market, when Jennings, the “slave-speculator,” instructs his own captive Pompey to

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prepare his human chattel for sale much as a director would prepare his actors for a performance: schooling them in their “lines” (for instance, in the false age that they are meant to give to prospective buyers) and even occasionally “tak[ing] the blacking and brush” to color the gray hairs of the older people.79 As we soon see, buyers are wise to this deceit, and ask “circuitious questions—doubtless to find out the slave’s real age,” aiming to expose not the answerer’s true beliefs but the trader’s.80 When these enslaved people are exhibited at the market, however, it is not only the white traders and purchasers who are engaged in deception and covert investigation; although enslaved people themselves were excluded from this ToM-driven transaction, they were still, as Walter Johnson notes, examining potential buyers with “careful scrutiny,” drawing upon clues ranging from facial features to clothing to stray remarks and loaded questions, and at times manipulating their own performance and appearance “to subvert the traders’ elaborate presentations by bending buyers’ perceptions around their own purposes.”81 Bending perceptions”: the phrase is a perfect characterization of fooling, which can sometimes take place, as here, on the margins of a scene of mutual mindreading—taking advantage of the purchaser’s wariness of being exploited by the trader to lay false clues and thereby exploit him in turn. Deceptions like those described by Johnson and depicted by Brown are possible because the slave market works by representing individuals as bundles of detachable, commoditized character traits, whether physical or moral. At “a Virginia slave-auction,” Brown tells us, the bones, sinews, and nerves of a young girl of eighteen were sold for $500; her moral character for $200; her superior intellect for $100; the benefits supposed to accrue from her having been sprinkled and immersed, together with a warranty of her devoted Christianity, for $300; her ability to make a good prayer for $200; and her chastity for $700 more.82

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Brown’s purpose here is obviously scathingly satirical, which makes it all the more striking when the narrator of Clotelle draws upon a similarly ritualized regime of description that likewise collapses

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physiological and moral qualities. Take two characters whom we meet in that first scene at the slave sale: Pompey, mentioned earlier, who significantly boasts that he is “no counterfeit” and “no bogus” but “de ginuine artikle,” and Lizzie, a tragic mulatta figure described as a “white slave-mother” whose “expressive and intellectual forehead” and “dark golden locks” make a brief appearance before she is sold.83 Pompey’s and Lizzie’s physiognomies and demeanors are completely opposed according to the logic of both scientific racism and romantic racial narratives: on the one hand, a man who prides himself on “real negro blood,” whose speech is rendered in dialect, who serves as a kind of grimly comic Pandarus figure; on the other, a woman who despite her enslaved status is phenotypically and, it’s to be assumed, ancestrally white, ennobled by motherhood and by tragedy. But within the logic of the slave market, which Brown’s novel strategically mimics in this scene, both characters are graspable in an instant before they disappear into a cloud of adjectives—“snow-white” and “alabaster” in Lizzie’s case, “thick” and “wooly” in Pompey’s.84 For slave-traders, these stock phrases and generic prototypes help inspire confidence in their customers, allowing the latter to see through the individual in front of them to the profits and pleasures that can be expected from them. But the very superficiality of the slave market’s descriptive vocabulary opens up an alternative use, hinted at by Brown’s own appropriation of physiognomy in his narration. The same terms that advertise an enslaved person’s health and ability to work can also serve as a kind of camouflage, allowing one person to pass as another, swap genders, or use the “Anglo-Saxon blood” that made them a desirable purchase as a means of garnering sympathy and help from strangers. Clotelle’s textual identity, which amounts to a formulaic description of her physical appearance—“large, dark eyes, black, silk-like hair, [and] tall, graceful figure”—must be constantly reiterated because these features determine her fate in their interchangeability: as resemblances to other individuals, as stereotypes that can be played into, as valuable but alienable commodities.85 In the last guise, Clotelle’s features dictate her desirability on the “’Change”; in the first, they constitute her resemblance to Jane Morton, the white neighbor

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and close friend of Clotelle’s new owners. (Struck with admiration and familiarity, Clotelle’s mistress muses aloud to her husband: “I am almost sorry you bought her.”)86 And as the caricatural components of a stereotype, they enable Clotelle to save her beloved from prison. The simultaneous potency and susceptibility to counterfeit of the distinctions of skin color, physical form, and demeanor that constitute the language of the slave market become especially visible when the light-skinned Clotelle and the dark-skinned Jerome trade clothes in order to aid in Jerome’s escape from prison. Having taken Jerome’s place in the jail cell, Clotelle is initially mistaken for the male prisoner by the jailer, who assumes that “the change of complexion had taken place during the night, through fear of death.”87 Like the slave traders and buyers who, as Johnson documents, frequently perceived a given individual’s skin color differently under different circumstances—darker when they were seeking a field hand, lighter when they believed the person to be ill, lighter when they expected intelligence, darker when they hoped for ignorance88—the jailer perceives Clotelle’s skin as an index of generic character traits. Only the cumulative effect of Clotelle’s stereotyped and therefore legible features— “the dark, glowing eyes, the sable curls upon the lofty brow, and the mild, sweet voice”—alerts the jailer that “the prisoner before him was another being,” bringing Clotelle into visibility as an individual (if not necessarily as a human being) precisely by the incongruous juxtaposition of two schemas: the dark-skinned, criminal, agential male and the light-skinned, vulnerable, passive female.89 In other words, rather than viewing African-descended people according to ToM’s cognitive form of a consistent interior identity expressed or falsified through outward appearances and performances, white enslavers perceive a constellation of physical traits that, collectively, imply particular behavioral capacities or dispositions—but that can be marshaled by enslaved people to create contradictory or misleading messages. It is no accident that the first act of Miss Wilson, the daughter of Clotelle’s owner, upon discovering Clotelle’s deception is to send her a change of clothes so that she can return to her female form; coming from the sympathetic Miss  Wilson, this move carries both disciplinary and empowering

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potential, tacitly acknowledging that Clotelle will not really be Clotelle until she is able to bring the various elements of her physical identity into alignment—and that such an alignment, when it exists, is an effect of Clotelle’s own agency. The disguises and identity swaps that appear again and again in Clotelle as forms of restorative fooling, enabling enslaved people to escape to actual freedom by temporarily assuming the appearance of freedom—that is, whiteness, wealth, and, in the case of Isabella’s attempted escape, masculinity90—recall the baby-changing plot of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, where the similar appearance of her enslaver’s son and her own prompts Roxy to switch the two infants. As in Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic, which imagined a similar infant swap nearly three decades earlier, the very fact that the two children are indistinguishable until their environments mold them into the characters of “master” and “slave” threatens to dissolve the racial categories on which those characters are supposedly founded. Whereas Child’s novel envisions an assimilationist future in which intermarriage smooths away the presumed biological foundation of racial difference, however, that foundation emerges in Twain’s plot as a potent hallucination capable of devastating real-world effects. Like so many of Esquirol’s patients, destroying themselves, their families, and their estates in the name of a fixed delusion, southern whites as represented in Clotelle and Pudd’nhead Wilson can only be “cured”—that is, made to act in accordance with morality—through material misreadings that put those delusions to prosocial use.91 While Brown turns to fooling in order to diagnose and undermine the ideology of slavery, Twain finds in slavery a salient recent example of massive institutional pretense battled by small-scale, guerrilla counterpretense‚ the same dynamic that drives a novel like The Prince and the Pauper, which does not engage explicitly with American slavery.92 There, too, we find an identity swap that permits a member of an underclass to wield power and experience material well-being; there, too, clothes and bodily signs become constitutive of identity rather than merely indicative of it; there, too, the alteration of appearances is terrifying and liberating precisely because it changes the reality of character.

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Still, it is important to remember that, for Twain, such personality changes are entirely compatible with a basic pessimism about the ability of human beliefs and institutions to evolve in any meaningful way. As “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” demonstrated, the only way to mitigate inequality in the Twainian universe is to play along with the pretense on which it rests: the notion that certain people are more valuable than others, and that human value is constituted by the material features of objects and bodies. Rather than deploying what one might call the Dickensian strategy—admitting to one’s poverty, but insisting that one’s character remains virtuous nonetheless—Twain’s disenfranchised characters use a simpler but riskier tactic, declaring, behaviorally if not verbally, that they are not poor. Such elaborate frauds may seem to have little chance of success in the real world, but both novelists’ theories and psychologists’ data about the effects of affluence on social cognition suggest that they may be more plausible than they seem. In closing this chapter by briefly examining representations of the very rich in Henry James, we will find that wealth alters an individual’s interpersonal behavior not by modifying their motives and mental states—greed rather than generosity, arrogance rather than humility—but by diminishing their incentive to reason about mental states in the first place. By linking both wealth and national identity to a form of functional behaviorism, James hints at a few mechanisms— international travel, personal loss or failure—that can help to insert his wealthy American protagonists into circuits of mutual mindreading. In his most sustained reflections on the social conditions necessary for psychological interiority, however, the Jamesian narrator seems increasingly unsure whether participation in those ToM circuits, crucial to the form of his novels, is a humanly desirable outcome. American Imagination

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Wealth and ToM are, for James as for the Gilded Age at large, inversely correlated: the richer one gets, the less likely one is to bother to speculate about others’ mental states. One might suspect a paradox here, or at least an implausibility, since the rich may seem more motivated to mindread than the poor or middle-class: how else could they secure

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their enormous wealth? But while Gilded Age fiction recognizes the pursuit of money and status as motives for mindreading, the possession of money and status almost immediately renders ToM superfluous, encouraging the wealthy to let their interpersonal inference systems atrophy—and opening the door for a new generation of social climbers to exploit the naïveté of the rich. Money thus paves the way for its own recirculation through a kind of life-cycle of sociocognitive competence, one in which aging, insofar as it implies increasing stores of wealth, renders one more childish and more innocent: when the almost unrepresentably rich Adam Verver proposes to perpetually hardup (but socially impeccable) Charlotte Stant, he tries to anticipate her resistance by acknowledging, “I’m not young”—to which she paradoxically responds: “Oh, that isn’t so. It’s I that am old. You are young.”93 Charlotte’s remark makes sense only if one accepts that possessing wealth can turn a grown man into a child, innocent of intention and incapable of perceiving the web of self-interested mentalistic reasoning in which he is entrapped. But how does this process take place— what is it about wealth that inspires this regression? The mechanism that James articulates, first in his late novels and then in The American Scene, suggests that avoiding the labor of mindreading can be a kind of privilege—both for American aspirants making their way in the European social scene, and for American authors looking to launch their work in a world literary system then dominated by the European novel. If anyone can be said to achieve a radiant cognitive blankness, it would be the Jamesian heiress—in particular, the two American heiresses abroad, Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, who center The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, respectively. These heroines are innocent—that is, virtuously ignorant of others’ manipulative intentions, or indeed of the possibility that intentions can be manipulative— for two reasons that, in the eyes of the perfectly socialized but hard-upfor-cash European aristocracy, are almost indissociable: their wealth and their Americanness. Both factors, to begin with, make their bearers insensitive to European social forms, which are both unfamiliar and irrelevant to an American making her grand tour like Milly Theale: as a curiosity and a potential source of income for any enterprising young

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man, Milly is guaranteed social and narrative centrality independent of her personal charms. More accurately, perhaps, those charms are in fact constituted by her unassailability, her inability to lose—face, money, innocence—under the normal pressures of social interaction; if Milly behaves as though unconscious of her wealth, it is precisely because, her friend Mrs. Stringham muses, “she couldn’t have lost it if she tried—that was what it was to be really rich.”94 Milly’s invulnerability makes an instructive comparison with Mademoiselle Noémie in The American, who, Christopher Newman posits, “had never parted with” her innocence, simply because “she had never had any”:95 raised by a financially ruined father and determined to marry her way into wealth and status, Noémie must rely on mentalistic subtlety to capture and hold Newman’s attention, a feat that Milly accomplishes without effort wherever she goes. The confrontation between an innocence that cannot be lost and one that was never had structures the pairs of women—Milly and Kate Croy, Maggie Verver and Charlotte Stant— at the heart of both The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl: one wealthy, American, and pure; one European (or Europeanized), cunning, and in a constant state of financial struggle. That the heiress’s innocence is less a matter of virtuous intentions than of the absence of intention is best demonstrated in an extraordinary passage from The Golden Bowl in which Prince Amerigo hits upon a metaphor for his new wife’s mind: He remembered to have read, as a boy, a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife’s countryman—which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole—or was it the South?—than anyone had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself,

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had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known

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curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous.96

“What imagination Americans could have”: the phrase implies some kind of imagination that they couldn’t, to which the Prince’s earlier musings on Mrs. Assingham’s “abysses of confidence” provide a clue. Mrs. Assingham, like Maggie and Adam Verver (the Prince’s other “new friends”), cannot fully imagine that others’ intentions might diverge from their behavior precisely because her own “disinterestedness” is “rather awful.”97 Lacking any fear of losing social status by causing offense or missing a key implication, Mrs. Assingham displays a capacity for trust that, judging by the Prince’s discourse of the sublime (those “awful” “abysses”), strikes him as practically inhuman. For the Prince and his compatriots, behavior may well be an opaque “curtain,” but its manifest characteristics—that simultaneously royal and menacing “purple even to blackness”—signal that it is indeed concealing something, even if that object remains obscure. The darkness may be “ominous,” but it is at least “intended,” bespeaking a human agency and offering a starting point for mentalistic reasoning: what might this individual have an interest in hiding? Raised with the confidence that motives are real psychic entities that shape human actions— perceptible in outline if not in detail through the veil of behavior, as an object’s concealed presence gives shape to a drapery—the Prince is disconcerted to encounter an entire nation of people whose actions seem to conceal nothing in particular, whose veils are not deliberate dissimulations but empty signs. I will return shortly to James’s surprising choice of a scene by Edgar Allan Poe—a writer for whom James elsewhere professed some disdain98—to illuminate this distinction. For the moment, it will suffice to note that when Maggie does finally begin to perceive what the curtain conceals, “the thing hideously behind ”99— adopting both the Prince’s social perspective and his metaphorical vocabulary—it is only under the threat of loss: with her marriage in jeopardy, Maggie is awakened to a mentalistic world that would have remained invisible if her social position had remained stable. Significantly, Maggie experiences this awakening in part as a transition from

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“humbugging”—which she had previously “practised with her father,” and which she had found “comparatively simple”—to outright lying, which requires from her a new level of doubled awareness that she compares to that of “some young woman of the theater.”100 James was neither the first nor the last to notice that social and economic insecurity makes a mastery of ToM, and its concomitant deceptions, especially needful. Elsie Michie has noticed a similar pattern, for instance, in the nineteenth-century British novel, where “the vulnerability of the poor woman’s situation makes her behave in a manner that is colder and less open or frank than that of her wealthy rival”101—more concerned with the inferences that others might be drawing about her motives and emotions, and therefore more apt to manage and conceal those mental states during interpersonal interactions. Much more unusual is James’s fascination with the relief from or even ignorance of mindreading that comes with money, which his novels and travel writings frame as particularly distinctive of American high society. In a nation where “wages,” as James argued, “. . . are largely manners,” high status is valued precisely because it promises a reprieve from the constant mindreading to which the middle-class social climber must resort in self-defense.102 Rather than promising greater social polish and interpersonal sensitivity, wealth strips its owner of whatever Machiavellian intelligence they may have once possessed, providing them with a far simpler means of predicting and manipulating others’ behavior: “money,” which, James declares in The American Scene, “. . . is the shortcut.”103 As the least common denominator of desire—whatever it is you want, you will almost certainly be better able to obtain it with money— money, as we glimpsed in chapter 3, offers a simpler and more psychologically agnostic replacement for mental-state reasoning. In terms of the pragmatics of behavior, the wealthy individual, rather than determining what their interlocutor actually desires, can confidently offer a neutral means to that desire; adopting an economic perspective on human action throws a kind of protective behaviorist cover over the thorny questions of motive and belief, reducing the latter to incrementally measurable behavioral dispositions (will you sell at this price, or at that?). For James, the ability of rich Americans to dispense with

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mentalistic reasoning altogether represents both the most distinctive and the most disconcerting aspect of his native country—one to which he devotes considerable intellectual energy in the New York chapters of The American Scene. The “confidence and innocence” of high-society Americans, James observes, “are those of children whose world has ever been practically a safe one”—safe not only materially, insofar as their wealth protects them from physical menace or need, but also socially: James expresses wonder at “the immensity of the native accommodation, socially speaking, for the childish life  .  .  . the safety of the vast flat expanse where every margin abounds and nothing too untoward might happen.”104 Americans are protected from the specter of the “untoward” not by some native congeniality or delicacy, but (quite the contrary) because there exist no fine social distinctions within the moneyed class, “no one” for the aspirant young lady, “in congruity and consistency, to curtsey to.” What makes these rich Americans truly childish rather than merely uncouth, however, is that they insist on curtseying all the same. “In worlds otherwise arranged,” James muses, “. . . the occasion itself, with its character fully turned on, produces the tiara”—that is, the forms of style and etiquette emerge from the need to inaugurate an exchange of social capital, whether by expressing deference or signaling one’s own high status. In the United States, by contrast, where the upper classes are as light on social capital as they are heavy on the literal kind, the tiara “has, by arduous extension of its virtue, to produce the occasion.”105 A physical object that participants collectively decide to read as something other than itself, a performance that uses material conditions to generate the mental states that would normally inspire them: the American lady at the opera, in James’s description, is engaged in an unmistakable game of pretend, albeit one more consensual and less urgent than those in Twain and Wells Brown. James’s choice in both The American Scene and his novels to represent these pretenses to aristocracy, and the general interpersonal incompetence of wealthy Americans, as basically innocent can of course be read as a convenient tactic of exoneration that elides both the exploitation through which money and power are acquired and the real

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damage that the wealthy can wreak on their vulnerable employees, neighbors, or constituents, if not on each other. The “innocence” may feel especially hollow when one considers that recent psychological research has to some degree borne out James’s instincts, finding that individuals of higher social class are worse at recognizing and interpreting facial expressions than their lower-class peers—a phenomenon that the investigators explain by noting that financially insecure individuals, “lacking resources and control,” must accomplish their interpersonal goals by “orient[ing] to other people.”106 (Let this example serve as proof positive of nineteenth-century American literature’s fruitfulness as a source of sociocognitive hypotheses!) From the vantage point of our second Gilded Age, the work of Michael W. Kraus and colleagues not only offers some support for James’s implicit theory, but makes it more difficult to treat the upper class’s relative inability to navigate other minds as anything other than entitled. In closing this chapter and (nearly) this book, however, my goal is merely to point out the continuity between what James calls “this ‘childish’ explanation” and The American Scene’s other attempts to characterize what the “restless analyst” perceives as a distinctively American failure of interpersonal cognition—a flawed cognitive model that can tell us something about the organization of American social systems. Like Charles Brockden Brown at the opposite end of the nineteenth century, James approaches this cognitive model slantwise, through a layer of spatial metaphor that renders concrete the mentalistic distinction between exterior reality and interior consciousness, only to undermine that distinction through its metaphoric intermediary. As we will see in this book’s coda, however, the preferred trope of The American Scene is not the empty or violated chest of Brown’s fictions but the empty or wall-less house.

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of money as a “short-cut,” we find that the particular corners being cut are architectural. The “new rich” of New England, according to James, build houses that, for all their magnificence, “are only instalments, symbols, stop-gaps,” having “nothing to do with continuity, responsibility, transmission.”1 These expensive houses are powerless to secure for Americans “the highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing”: “constituted privacy”—privacy that is not merely an accident of invisibility or anonymity, but an integral component of personhood. James does not explicitly state, in this early passage, precisely what “odd treachery” makes privacy inaccessible to these wealthy Americans, but we might begin to identify it by noticing that the “void” or “vacancy” that James identifies in the same passage as his object of fascinated inquiry recalls the “abyss” of Maggie Verver’s infinitely trusting disposition.2 The latter is abysmal, paradoxically, insofar as it cannot tolerate depth, dimension, “the thing hideously behind”: whereas ToM’s understanding of consciousness is predicated on enclosure and concealment, Maggie’s mind dizzyingly reverses this spatial logic, suggesting the uselessness of attempting to construct a private consciousness—a sealed container for mental states—when those mental states themselves are absent. If the social universe of the United States lacks, in James’s estimation, RETURNING TO JAMES’S IDENTIFICATION

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the knowable communities of modest size that would allow for the formation of complex social interdependencies—a lack that The American Scene explains partly by the absence of European hierarchies and partly by the increasing ethnic heterogeneity of the population3—then it is no wonder that the New Englanders find it difficult to conjure up that “constituted privacy”: they are building on a behaviorist void. The restless analyst’s task, James decides in this early passage, is not to taxonomize interpersonal customs or insert mindreading where it does not exist—not, in the terms of his analogy, to “take the long road”— but “to see how the short-cut works.”4 How the shortcut works, it becomes clear in the New York section of The American Scene, is by becoming a style. There is something pathetic, admittedly, in the attempt of those brand-new New England homes to assume the outward appearance of old-world country estates without the “presumption of constituted relations, possibilities, amenities, in the social, the domestic order”—the “inwardly projected” interpersonal expectations and intentions that constitute the content of the mind-as-container and underwrite the European social forms that Americans can only imitate.5 But what if Americans, aware of the pitfalls of propositional reasoning in a world of strangers, decide not to imitate interiority but to spurn it outright? Such is the project, James suggests, of New York architecture, which insists on “nipping the interior in the bud . . . denying its right to exist . . . ignoring and defeating it in every possible way . . . wiping out successively each sign by which it may be known from an exterior.”6 If “the basis of privacy” must remain “somehow wanting” for Americans, who have such difficulty drawing and maintaining the border between their own mental states and the external world, then why not abandon that goal—why not erase all distinction “between the place of passage and the place of privacy,” ensuring that whatever a home’s occupant says, whatever propositional mental statements they voice, “must be said for the house”?7 Such emptiness and openness, which attempts to “minimiz[e], for any ‘interior,’ the guilt or odium or responsibility . . . of its being an interior,” aspires to an innocence akin to Milly’s or Maggie’s: the rich New

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Yorkers who inhabit these homes use their financial resources not to construct some simulacrum of European social life but to revel in its absence, wielding the impossibility of conscious interiority as a privilege and a virtue.8 James evidently rather detests this design fad, which deprives him of the comforting not-quite-public spaces—“windows, porches, verandahs, lawns, gardens, ‘grounds’”9—that demarcate the limits of the house and the person, allowing interiority and its contents to be constituted as private and thereby to be selectively communicated or withheld. The link between architectural and psychological interiority emerges here as not merely analogical but causal, since successful intentional inference and communication depend on the ability to control (or at least reliably identify) the audience of one’s utterances and behaviors—in other words, to accurately estimate who has access to what information. Only in rooms, or at the very least “room-suggestion[s],” can “the social relation” take place “at any other pitch than the pitch of a shriek or a shout.”10 In its refusal of niches and boundaries, the modern New York house of The American Scene is almost the diametric opposite of the “house of fiction” that James famously imagines in his 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady: having “not one window, but a million,” the house of fiction is nonetheless not infinitely porous, but “pierceable” only “by the pressure of the individual will”—the home of millions of particularized, bounded consciousnesses. Each observer peering out their window watches “the same show,” James stipulates, “but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine.”11 Once again, as in Stowe, the singularity and privacy of consciousness—one of ToM’s basic assumptions—is figured through multiple observers reacting differently to the same scene, with the modernist difference that not only the “reflections” but the very perceptions of the observers diverge. For Dorothy Hale, the “house of fiction” passage is a key moment in the development of the novelistic ideal of representing individual interiority, defining “point of view” as a formal component of prose fiction:

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here is one of the most powerful statements of the commonplace with which this book opened—that rendering consciousness in linguistic form is the novel’s primary mandate.12 Though, perhaps, less fictional, the interior-free houses of The American Scene are no less metaphorical than the “house of fiction.” Their openness signals not only an undifferentiated social system but the promiscuous circulation, epistemic flux, and uncertain ownership of mental “contents” that characterizes that social world. While James’s window metaphor in the “house of fiction” passage suggests that other minds are intelligible if we can only inhabit their point of view, the easily accessible but fundamentally flat New York homes stand in for less cohesive minds: we already know more about these houses’ inhabitants than we are supposed to, and we will always know less than we want to. But, once again, this very deprivation is what piques the restless analyst’s interest in “that large mass of American idiosyncrasy”13—James’s restless analyst, and also this one, writing these words. This book has unpacked some of the ways that nineteenth-century American authors formally interrogated, and occasionally dismantled, the interpersonal heuristics and cognitive forms of Theory of Mind—whether with the end of instituting a different system of behavioral interpretation or simply because they found those heuristics and forms inadequate to their social experience in the United States. Many of the resulting narrative choices, when their peculiarity has even been noticed, are easily dismissed as aesthetically crude or forced—the awkward passive constructions of Charles Brockden Brown, the outré exposition of Poe, the contrived eavesdropping of Stowe. Yet The American Scene suggests that even James, that master of represented interiority, came to see the pluralistic psychologies of his countrymen less as a botched attempt to inhabit an inherited novelistic tradition than as a compelling attempt to articulate their own. After this detour through one metaphor of mind, we are finally equipped to answer the question raised by another. Why, when Henry James—patron saint of the “art novel,” champion of formal closure and continuity—needed an analogy for the psyche of his American protagonist, did he reach for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym? Why, even

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more, would he place this allusion in the mouth of an Italian Prince? It is no accident that Prince Amerigo’s frame of reference for American literature centers on Poe rather than, say, William Dean Howells or James Russell Lowell or one of the many other American writers whom James discussed in his review-essays: although he remained a bit of an embarrassment in the late nineteenth-century United States, Poe was already esteemed and widely known in Europe, making the Prince’s familiarity with Pym more plausible than it might otherwise seem.14 More significantly, however, the use to which Amerigo puts his memory of Pym—borrowing a literary trope to model, and make predictions about, a kind of mind with which he is unfamiliar—hints at the reason for Poe’s popularity abroad, at least as James understood it. Insofar as Poe depicts some of the predictable failures of mindreading that emerged in nineteenth-century US literature—failures that shaped both fictional and actual American minds—he not only serves as a more plausible representative of “Americanness” than authors who attempted to elide those failures, but also offers a kind of sociocognitive template that readers can apply when confronted with behavior that eludes explanation in terms of reasons. James predates the drastic revision of the nineteenth-century American canon between the 1920s and 1940s; in this as in many other domains, he is an amphibious figure, a plausible member of both the old realist canon that Lawrence and Matthiessen discarded and the new protomodernist “romance” canon that the mid-century Americanist critics would celebrate. When James, straddling these two worlds, invokes Pym’s incomplete ending, he is not simply putting aside his love of novelistic craftsmanship and elegant, logical form for the sake of a moment of characterization; rather, he is suggesting that Pym represents a distinct but similarly functional understanding of novelistic form. That James, an American who spent most of his life in Europe, here represents a European aristocrat thinking through a psychological puzzle with the help of an American text—conspicuously filtered through his own interests and blind spots (could an American reader ever forget the significance of Pym’s journey to the South Pole rather than the North?)—calls attention to the multilevel participation of US

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literary production in the global literary system: through travel, translation, dissemination, and correspondence, American writers were densely connected to the English and continental literary worlds, and vice versa. But the placement of Poe in James’s novel suggests that these interconnections did not necessarily lead to formal continuity: on the contrary, an anti-isolationist, anti-exceptionalist view of American literature, which acknowledges its embeddedness in transatlantic cultural networks, may end up making the distinctive morphology of American novels all the more striking in comparison to their European contemporaries. (This certainly seems to have been the case for James, who after decades abroad was struck in The American Scene by the “large . . . idiosyncrasy” of his home country.) Only a comparative approach— one that sees the American novel as adapted to a niche in a cognitive ecosystem, not to mention an international literary system—can take the full measure of this idiosyncrasy, its origins and manifestations. Conversely, only through an acknowledgment of American literature’s sociocognitive particularity can that literature’s interaction with other national novelistic traditions be fully explained and understood.

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Acknowledgments

go to the people most directly responsible for this book’s existence: the superlative team at Stanford University Press, especially Faith Wilson Stein, Erica Wetter, Susan Karani, Caroline McKusick, and Sunna Juhn. Faith is aptly named: her faith in this book surpassed mine at various times and, together with her patience, wisdom, and sure editorial hand, ensured that it would see the light of day. Thank you, Faith, for sustaining me through rounds of revisions and crises of confidence. For making this book readable, sincere thanks are likewise due to marvelous copyeditor Lys Weiss and excellent indexer Shannon Li. My mind and soul are so tightly bound to J.D. Porter’s that to thank him feels oddly self-aggrandizing. The first word of the dissertation on which this book was based, the last word of these acknowledgments, and all the words in between were written with him. Like everything else in our shared life, this book is equally his and mine; like everything else in my life, it is better because of him. J.D., there is nothing I can write here, short of reproducing our wedding vows, that would adequately measure my joy in thinking with you: the book itself is all my evidence. (You know how much it pleased me to write that pentameter.) Enkidu joined our little family relatively late in the writing process, and it would be just like him to take all the credit—but I do owe him BEFORE ALL ELSE, MY THANKS

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thanks for warming my lap with his furry frame and my heart with his goofy grin. My parents and my sibling May are appearing relatively early in these acknowledgments, but I’m writing this section last, because it’s the most difficult. Anyone who has met my family knows that I make sense, if at all, only in their company—so I’ll have to confine myself to mentioning a tiny handful of the infinite riches I owe them. If I feel at home in the world of literature and have never doubted for a second that I belong there, it’s because that’s where Andrew Walser raised me. If I managed to convince other people that this book was worth publishing, it’s because Jamie Gillespie taught me self-confidence. And it’s no exaggeration to say that the entire issue of mindreading and mindwriting came alive for me because of May Walser’s brilliant, unique, continually astonishing mind. I love you guys. “Monster thank you.” With my marriage, I gained a family whose overflowing support and love has helped sustain me—emotionally, intellectually, and materially—throughout the often lonely writing process. Becca and Don, Curtis and Sarah, David and Brooke, Risa and Bill, Sam and Skye: thank you for the grace you’ve extended me and the home you’ve given me. I’m grateful to have an extended family that endlessly inspires me—Gillespies and Walsers, but also, now that you’ve welcomed me so generously, Porters and Pringles. You are artists and nurses and lawyers and pastors and activists and scientists and teachers and readers and parents and siblings and joyful existers. What an incredible crew. Everyone who has met Nancy Ruttenburg knows that she’s a gem: hilarious, wise, endlessly knowledgeable but refreshingly down-toearth, pragmatic but possessed of deep reserves of enthusiasm and earnestness. I don’t know what lucky star paired me with Nancy as an advisor, but I do know that nothing about my career, including of course this book, would exist without her. Who encouraged me to draft a dissertation prospectus during my first year of grad school, just to get the ideas out? Who wrote the most detailed and most rigorous comments on every seminar paper and dissertation chapter? Who put me up for the Society of Fellows a second time, believing when I didn’t that I belonged there? Who served as my cheerful guide through the

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hideousness of the job market, devoting unimaginable time and energy to the cause, and continued to support me—practically and emotionally—when I changed course completely? You did, Nancy! Take a bow—take two, or ten; and thank you for bringing me into your fun and brilliant orbit. As always, you’ll find me as fond as a flying fox feasting on phantasmagorical fruits—or, better yet: as fond as a friend. I am indebted to Gavin Jones and Franco Moretti, the other two members of my committee, for their rigorous and generative reading of my dissertation. Gavin, to my endless gratitude, first suggested that the Society of Fellows might be a good fit; his encouragement opened that world to me. And it would be absurd not to acknowledge the deep and ineradicable influence that Franco has had on the way I think, especially but not exclusively the way I think about literature. He gave me, literally, a good-sized chunk of the library he kept in his office at Stanford; he also modeled an intellectual fearlessness, a bold breadth of inquiry, a refusal to bore or be bored, that made me the scholar I am. Many other faculty members read and generously critiqued portions of my dissertation even though they weren’t institutionally obligated to; sincere thanks in particular to Sianne Ngai and Alex Woloch. Mark Algee-Hewitt literally kept me alive (housed, fed, with access to a university library) at several points over the past decade. I can’t possibly thank him enough for that, or for the uniquely wonderful community that he has created at the Stanford Literary Lab. Thank you, Mark, not only for making the Lab what it is, but for trusting me to help you sustain it; thank you, Mark and Bridget Algee-Hewitt, for a mentorship and friendship that crosses time zones and survives pandemics. Fortune favored me by surrounding me with the best PhD cohort ever: Dalglish Chew, Morgan Day Frank, Erik Johnson, Derek Mong, J.D. Porter, and Vanessa Seals. Arriving at Stanford at age twenty-one, with little knowledge of my field and much less of the world, I found among you an amazingly safe and nurturing place to grow. What I learned from you about literary history and theory, vast as it is, looks tiny next to what I learned from you about how to be a person—and a colleague, and a friend. Vanessa, especially, knows—I hope you

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know—the extent of my debt. Thank you for keeping me sane(-ish): closing down the bars when that was what we needed, staying in and watching Happy Endings when that was what we needed, and helping me think about everything from Charles Brockden Brown to the apocalypse to the mysteries of human relationships. It’s always been an honor to call you my friend. Outside of our magnificent seven, many other Stanford friends offered camaraderie, guidance, and invaluable feedback on the ideas in this manuscript—over cheap liquor at the Nuthouse or expensive coffee at Coupa, in the windowless grad lounge or on the terrace watching the palm trees glitter. Jessie Beckman, Tasha Eccles, Erik Fredner, Vicky Googasian, Mary Kim, Anita Law, Tanya Llewellyn, Andrew Shephard, Mark Taylor, Akemi Ueda, Connie Zhu: thank you, thank you, thank you. The Harvard Society of Fellows may be the best place in the world to do intellectual work. When surrounded by several generations of genius in every imaginable field, it’s hard not to be inspired and indeed transformed. I entered the Society as a literary scholar, spent much of my time there learning about the history of science and the philosophy of race, and left as a law student—a confusing trajectory, but perfectly logical in the atmosphere of exhilarating intellectual play that one finds in the Yellow House. I am grateful to the chair of the Society when I arrived, Wally Gilbert, and the current chair, Noah Feldman, for defending and preserving that precious rarefied air. Noah also made my eventual career change seem not only possible but desirable: any good that I do in the legal field ought to accrue to his credit. Senior Fellows Elaine Scarry, Maria Tatar, and my “grand-advisor” Bill Todd approached my work with a seriousness and generosity that, thanks to their improving guidance, I could almost feel it deserved. Kelly Katz and Ana Novak were of course endlessly helpful and omnicompetent, but also just really, really fun to talk to. Conversations with Junior Fellows were so unfailingly stimulating that I can honestly and sincerely thank everyone whose tenure overlapped with mine. A few “fellow Fellows” went so far above and beyond, however, that they require special mention. Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Matthew Spellberg, Maggie Spivey, Moira Weigel, and

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Daniel Williams were models of collegiality and kindness. Len Gutkin and Marika Takanishi Knowles generously gave me opportunities to write that challenged and improved me. Kevin Holden was my Marvel buddy and poetry pal. Madhav Khosla asked me how my book was going so many times that I finally caved and wrote it. He also, with Naomi Levine, helped me pick out my wedding dress. Naomi’s encouragement, warmth, and good humor in all things made my days brighter and my work better. And Aspen Reese’s brain made mine spark and sputter in the best way. Thank you, Aspen, for making my mind better by contact with yours. Looking for a job as an English professor is an exhausting and often degrading experience. Although I didn’t end up pursuing that path to the end, I will always be grateful to the academics who provided moral, practical, and intellectual support in ways large and small, from panel invitations to Twitter DMs to questions and suggestions that reshaped my thinking. Directly or indirectly, they helped me finish this book and make sense of my career. The list is long but certainly includes Heather Brink-Roby, Jen Fleissner, Garry Hagberg, Claire Jarvis, David Kurnick, Wendy Anne Lee, Yoon Sun Lee, Xander Manshel, Laura McGrath, Leah Price, Simon Stern, Ted Underwood, and Nathan Wolff. I owe you. This book finally began to make its way toward publication when I was teaching English at the Nueva School in San Mateo, California. My first high school teaching experience, during a pandemic no less, was remarkably unscary and unstressful thanks to the remarkable colleagues and role models I found there. Claire Yeo and Allen Frost, thank you for your graceful, good-humored leadership. Gretchen Kellough and Jen Neubauer, thank you for entrusting me with your classes while you birthed and raised your own children. Jen Paull, thank you for talking Proust with me. Overflowing thanks to the Nueva English faculty—Allie Alberts, Ariel Balter, Jamie Biondi, Amber Carpenter, Alexa Hart, Jasmin Miller, and Kevin Quinn—for making me a better teacher and reader through your example. My last and deepest thanks are due to every single student I taught or just talked to at Nueva, at Stanford, and at the City College of New York. You probably didn’t realize the profound positive influence you

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had, the delight you brought me daily, the affection I had and still have for each and every one of you—but now you know. This book is dedicated to the two people to whom all my accomplishments, such as they are, have been dedicated—the two people I most want to make proud—two people for whom my love and esteem is folded into every sentence: To Nancy J. Walser, and in memory of Clarke L. Walser.

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Notes

Introduction 1. The subheading “Who Reads an American Mind?” refers to Sidney Smith’s famous dismissal of American literature in an 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review, “Who Reads an American Book?” In 1820, the answer to this rhetorical question was indeed “almost no one”—barely even Americans themselves. 2. On cognitive comprehension of others’ mental states, see David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342, no. 6156 (2013): 377–80. On empathy and “social acumen,” see Raymond A. Mar et al., “Bookworms versus Nerds: Exposure to Fiction versus Non-Fiction, Divergent Associations with Social Ability, and the Simulation of Fictional Social Worlds,” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 5 (2006): 694–712. (Curiously, the last author among Mar et al.—by the conventions of psychology articles, the senior author whose lab or department is responsible for the research—is Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist now best known for his exceedingly conservative views on gender roles.) Castano himself has suggested, in an article in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, that “Reading Literary Fiction Boosts Leadership Qualities” (146, no. 12 [2020]). Attempts to replicate Kidd and Castano’s study have not succeeded, and although the argument does not stand or fall by this particular study, the rest of this introduction and this book as a whole should make clear that I believe that novel-reading’s impact on social reasoning is unlikely to take the form of a simple up-or-down adjustment. See Maria Eugenia Panero et al., “Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind?

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An Attempt at Replication,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111, no. 5 (2016): e46–e54. 3. Dorothy J. Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 9–10. 4. By the “proposition” in “propositional mental states,” I mean something like what Frege called a “thought”: that is, “something for which the question of truth arises” (Gottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” translated by P. T. Geach, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 65 [1956]: 289–311, at 292). Another way to define a proposition is by appealing to the concept of “propositional knowledge” or “knowing that”: a proposition is the kind of thing that can follow the statement “I know that . . .” In the broader context of cognition, propositions can also follow statements like “I believe that . . . ,” “I hope that . . . ,” “I fear that . . . ,” and so on; belief, hope, fear, and their ilk are known as propositional attitudes. For more information on “knowing that,” see Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and Matthias Steup, “The Analysis of Knowledge,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (summer 2018 edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2018/entries/knowledge-analysis/. 5. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 48. 6. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 10. The term “poverty of the stimulus” was coined by Noam Chomsky to describe what he believed was a fatal problem in behaviorist accounts of language learning: the speech that infants and young children hear is simply too disorderly, idiosyncratic, and incomplete to allow them to infer grammatical rules without some kind of innate neural machinery. The argument is by no means universally accepted, but it offers a useful parallel to ToM research, which also blossomed during the turn away from behaviorism and toward cognitive psychology in the 1970s and 1980s. For an overview of the “poverty of the stimulus” concept, see Howard Lasnik and Jeffrey L. Lidz, “The Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus,” in The Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar, edited by Ian Roberts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 221–48. 7. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 5. 8. Trilling, quoted in Jennifer Fleissner, “Familiar Forms, Unfamiliar Beings,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (2013): 455; Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 34. 9. Joseph Csicsila demonstrates that the nineteenth-century American canon was drastically narrowed and revised over the course of a few decades

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in the twentieth century: from a “bewildering[ly] inclusive” hundred or more writers in anthologies of the 1920s, the roster of important American literary figures rapidly shrank to what literary historian Evelyn Bibb, in 1965, dubbed the “‘classic’ eight”: Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Twain, and James. Joseph Csicsila, Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literary Anthologies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 10, 17. As Maurice Lee has recently documented, six of this elite eight can still be found among the top eleven most taught authors on syllabi of courses in antebellum US literature; the only ones missing, Twain and James, fall outside of the historical constraints of the question. The six most taught authors overlap almost perfectly with the six antebellum authors on Bibb’s list; the one exception is Frederick Douglass, who has knocked Poe out of the top five. In other words, the expansion of the canon in the late twentieth century is real, but may have been overstated. Maurice S. Lee, “Introduction: A Survey of Survey Courses,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 4, no. 1 (2016): 128. 10. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 101. 11. Edgar A. Dryden, “Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne [review],” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37, no. 2 (1982): 223; Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 55. 12. Jordan Alexander Stein, “Are ‘American Novels’ Novels? Mardi and the Problem of Boring Books,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 50. 13. Cecelia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 149–50. 14. Not all psychologists who believe that mindreading capacities are largely innate would describe ToM as a “module.” In the context of cognitive science, the term “module” implies a specific cluster of requirements first articulated by Jerry Fodor; most relevant for my purposes are “domain specificity,” “mandatory operation,” “characteristic . . . breakdown patterns,” and “ontogenetic pace and sequencing.” Jerry A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 47–101. In other words, cognitive modules operate on a specific type of stimulus; they cannot be turned off at will; and they develop and fail in specific, predictable ways. Although they are often a bit laxer about the criteria for modularity, evolutionary psychologists have been particularly committed to the idea that ToM is a module, as are some developmental psychologists who study its dysfunction. For an example of the former, from two of the founders of evolutionary psychology, see John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Conceptual Foundations of

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Evolutionary Psychology,” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by David M. Buss (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 5–67, at 18–19 (which presents mindreading as an “instinct”); for the most prominent example of the latter, see the work of Alan Leslie, especially Brian Scholl and Alan Leslie, “Modularity, Development, and ‘Theory of Mind,’” Mind and Language 14, no. 1 (1999): 131–53. 15. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 3. It is unclear to me whether Baron-Cohen is aware of his own Molière reference, since “apocryphal” is not the same thing as “fictional”—but, either way, the equation of mindreading to prose is certainly suggestive in the context of novel theory. 16. This hypothesis is supported by, among other things, studies of people on the autism spectrum, who can learn to explicitly attribute mental states to others but do not seem to unconsciously and “implicitly” anticipate others’ actions on the basis of presumed beliefs and intentions as neurotypical adults do. See Atsushi Senju et al., “Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome,” Science 325, no. 5942 (2009): 883–85. 17. On the less than “effortless” operation of mindreading even in neurotypical adults, see Nicholas Epley’s Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Feel, Believe, and Want (New York: Knopf, 2014), which points out that we regularly ignore or simplify evidence of others’ mental states: “Although it is indeed true that the ability to read the minds of others exists along a spectrum with stable individual differences,” Epley acknowledges, “. . . the more useful knowledge comes from understanding the moment-to-moment, situational differences that can lead even the most social person . . . to treat others as mindless animals or objects” (42). 18. Kristin Andrews, Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a New Folk Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 3. I draw this example, and the broader point about the irrelevance of mental states to routine interpersonal interactions like this one, from Heidi Maibom, who argues that we navigate such interactions by means of “social models” (as opposed to scripts, formalized procedures, or psychological models): “Social Systems,” Philosophical Psychology 20, no. 5 (2007): 568–69. One need not accept Maibom’s theory of how we reason on the basis of context-specific social roles, however, to agree that we often do. 19. For an up-to-date introduction to pluralistic folk psychology, see Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches, edited by Kristin Andrews, Shannon Spaulding, and Evan Westra, Synthese (2020). Andrews and Spaulding have both published books that defend a pluralistic understanding of social cognition: Andrews, Do Apes Read Minds? and Spaulding, How We Understand Others (New York: Routledge, 2018). As I hope I make clear, I align myself with the broad

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theoretical commitments of pluralistic folk psychology; if I refer to the suite of strategies that people use to interpret and influence others’ actions as “social cognition” rather than “pluralistic folk psychology” or something of the sort, it is only because, like Maibom, I suspect that many of those strategies have very little to do with psychology per se (“Social Systems,” 567–68). 20. Tadeusz Wiesław Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 20–21, 86. 21. Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, nos. 2–3 (2010): 61. 22. For instance, Heyes cites research on two generations of users of Nicaraguan Sign Language: the earliest users of the language, who learned it when there were relatively few signs for mental states, and later users who inherited a more robust mental state vocabulary. Studies found, in Heyes’s summary, that the first cohort’s “understanding of false belief lagged behind” the second’s (Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets, 152). A similar phenomenon, she suggests, can be found in Samoa, where talking about mental states is socially discouraged, and where children “develop an understanding of false belief . . . four or five years later than children in Europe and North America” (153). In both cases, Heyes’s framing implies that beliefs are observer-independent entities in the world that children who grow up in different contexts may be more or less well equipped to comprehend. It seems just as possible, though, that the false belief test in each of these studies measures not some generalized sociocognitive competence, but one’s familiarity with specifically Euro-American cognitive concepts and heuristics. The latter reading takes inspiration from Lisa Feldman Barrett’s argument that studies purporting to demonstrate the “universality” of emotional expression actually measure the participant’s familiarity with English emotion concepts. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 47–51. 23. One promising attempt at such integration has been put forward by Jane Suilin Lavelle, who argues that pluralistic folk psychology should take more explicit account of cultural variation when it describes the diversity of mindreading strategies in any given individual’s toolkit: “the methods we use when understanding other people’s behavior vary in accordance with our goals,” Lavelle agrees, but they also vary “depending on background commitments the explainer has: commitments that are shaped by cultural considerations. What in North America may be a strategy for explaining another’s behavior when the outcome does not much matter to you, in East-Asian cultures may be a strategy used for explaining the behavior of close kin.” This last example, insofar as it deals with the culturally and situationally variable fit between types of explanation and types of behavior, resonates with what I label “the pragmatics of behavior” (see chapter 2, below). Jane Suilin Lavelle,

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“The Impact of Culture on Mindreading,” Synthese (2020): 2, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11229-019-02466-5. 24. T. M. Luhrmann, ed., “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” Suomen Anthropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4 (2011): 5–69. 25. Eve Danziger, “On Trying and Lying: Cultural Configurations of Grice’s Maxim of Quality,” Intercultural Pragmatics 7, no. 2 (2010): 199–219, especially 204. Some evidence suggests that North Americans are unusual, compared to other large cultural groups, in their obsession with intention, offering psychological explanations for actions and events even when situational explanations are readily available; see Lavelle, “The Impact of Culture on Mindreading,” 12–13. 26. Jill G. De Villiers and Jennie E. Pyers, “Complements to Cognition: A Longitudinal Study of the Relationship between Complex Syntax and FalseBelief Understanding,” Cognitive Development 17 (2002): 1056. 27. This sentence is a rather free summary of what I take to be one of the main findings of Luhrmann’s research on US evangelical Christians. Luhrmann notes that “our capacity to distinguish between what we have seen or heard and what we have thought is learned” (When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God [New York: Random House, 2012], 217–18); the “skill of prayer” in these spiritual communities involves training oneself to interpret and, eventually, experience some of one’s thoughts as interventions from God—that is, to “experience part of [one’s] mind as the presence of God” (xxi). Luhrmann describes this process as a kind of “attentional learning,” in which “people learn specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions . . . and . . . both what they attend to and how they attend changes their experience of their minds” (xxi). I argue that exactly these terms can equally describe the experience of reading or consuming narratives in other media, particularly if many of the narratives one consumes share a similar attentional distribution. 28. I draw this example from De Villiers and Pyers, “Complements to Cognition,” 1043. 29. T. M. Luhrmann, “Overview,” in “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” 6. 30. The components of what I am calling a history of cognition would include work on the history of cognitive concepts, like Natalie Phillips’s Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)—but it would also include analyses of historically specific cognitive practices, as in Emily Ogden’s Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), and of archives and artifacts that register particular cognitive heuristics, as in Alicia Puglionesi’s Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (Stanford:

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Stanford University Press, 2020). That these books were all published within the last five years suggests that the history of cognition may be an idea whose time has come. 31. In this respect, my book answers Jonathan Kramnick’s recent call for a “horizontal relation among the disciplines” that would use the unique disciplinary affordances of literary studies to tackle questions about how the mind works and how humans interact with the natural world. Jonathan Kramnick, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 18. 32. Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 40; Joshua Gang, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). I return to Gang’s work in chapter 2. 33. In Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), see especially chap. 3, “Getting Inside Heads in Moby-Dick,” 101–71. In Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014), see especially chap. 2, “Confidence in the Nineteenth Century,” 50–65. 34. See especially Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Rebhorn, “Billy’s Fist: Neuroscience and Corporeal Reading in Melville’s Billy Budd,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 72, no. 2 (2017): 218–44. 35. Matthew Wilson Smith, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 8–9. 36. Murison, “A Bond-Slave to the Mind: Sympathy and Hypochondria in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee,” in The Politics of Anxiety in NineteenthCentury American Literature, 17–46; Rebhorn, “Ontological Drift: Medical Discourse and Racial Embodiment in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 61, no. 2 (2015): 262–96. 37. On Melvillean materialism, see Meredith Farmer, “Melville’s Ontology,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2016. For an overview of the “new materialisms,” see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). The term “vibrant matter” belongs to Jane Bennett, whose analyses of “distributive agency” echo both Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage” and Bruno Latour’s actor network theory. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21, viii. It is worth noting that the materiality of the mind only seems like a radical proposition in a very specific disciplinary context. Murison contrasts the

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methods of the “neuroscientific turn” in the humanities with “the predominant psychoanalytic model” that frames the nervous system as “the screen of a ‘deeper’ psyche.” Justine Murison, “‘The Paradise of Non-Experts’: The Neuroscientific Turn of the 1840s United States,” in The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinary in the Age of the Brain, edited by Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell M. Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 29. Within the contemporary mind sciences, however, the proposition that mind is (active, dynamic) matter is settled enough, and psychoanalysis obsolete enough, that the comparison feels curiously misplaced. 38. Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 344n7, 46, 343–44n5. Interestingly, when one does come across a nineteenthcentury physician who presents typical and disordered cognition as continuous—for instance, John Conolly, one of the major figures in Victorian psychiatry, who argued that “insanity is often but a mere aggravation of a little weakness  .  .  . which all men now and then experience”—it is in the highly specific context of detecting well-concealed mental illness in normally presenting individuals, often for the purpose of a legal determination of competence. Connolly quoted in Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 75. See below in this chapter for a discussion of these determinations as points of contact between medical and folk theories of mind. 39. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Henry Holt & Co., 1950), I.115, I.658, II.78, II.287, II.289, I.291–401. 40. James, The Principles of Psychology, I.417. 41. See, for instance, Carolyn C. Goren, Merrill Sarty, and Paul Y. K. Wu, “Visual Following and Pattern Discrimination of Face-Like Stimuli by Newborn Infants,” Pediatrics 56, no. 4 (1975): 544–49; the first of many studies to demonstrate that infants preferentially track faces and facelike stimuli mere minutes after birth. 42. Perhaps the most influential statement of this theme is David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions, 2009), which argues that physicians and alienists of the 1830s premised their theories about the origins of mental illness on “a critique of Jacksonian society” (109). The common nineteenthcentury idea that madness was “the price we pay for civilization,” in the words of medical superintendent Edward Jarvis, seems to have originated around this time (quoted, 112). 43. On the bidirectional metaphor between the state and the nervous system, see especially chap. 5, “Anxiety, Desire, and the Nervous State,” in Christopher Castiglia’s Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of

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Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008): 168–216. 44. Courtney E. Thompson, An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021), especially 26–29. To be clear, Thompson’s primary interest is in mapping the intellectual history and popular uptake of phrenological ideas about criminal behavior; these possible readings are my own, although Thompson’s book provides abundant and useful material for such inquiries. 45. Murison, “‘The Paradise of Non-Experts,’” 37–38. 46. The popular uptake of nineteenth-century neuroscientific concepts has been particularly well documented in the context of theatrical performance. Rusert, for instance, reconstructs the culture of popular stage performance around race science in the antebellum United States, and Courtney E. Thompson follows Rusert in tracing phrenology in both satirical and earnest forms on the minstrel stage and in mass material culture. Across the Atlantic, Alison Winter has productively analyzed Victorian mesmeric performances in the context of working-class theater culture, and Matthew Wilson Smith’s The Nervous Stage reads not only melodrama but avant-garde theater of the long European nineteenth century as invested “not principally [in] representation but [in] sensation”—that is, in the manipulation of the audience’s collective nervous system. Brit Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 113–48; Thompson, An Organ of Murder, 100–131; Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), especially 85–87; Smith, The Nervous Stage, 44. 47. Suzuki, Madness at Home, 93 (original emphasis). 48. “Coroners’ inquests and lunacy inquisitions,” Sarah Wise observes, “regularly took place in the largest ‘public’ building an area possessed, and very often these were inns and taverns.” Sarah Wise, Inconvenient Persons: Lunacy, Liberty, and the Mad-Doctors in England (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 21–22. 49. In the mid-nineteenth century, one can track this disagreement among the heirs to the great innovators of the “moral treatment,” Philippe Pinel and Edward Francis Tuke. Jean-Étienne Esquirol, Pinel’s student and successor at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, codified the monomania diagnosis for a generation of students and encouraged its use in legal defenses; Thomas Harrington Tuke, Edward Francis’s son, resoundingly rejected the idea of “a delusion on one subject” without impairment on any others—in other words, the idea of monomania. Thomas Harrington Tuke, “On Monomania, and Its Relation to the Civil and Criminal Law,” The Lancet 90 (1867): 387–88. The regular invocation of monomania in insanity pleas in antebellum US criminal

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trials suggests that American jurists and physicians followed Esquirol more than Tuke. For an account of one such trial, and the confusion that the monomania concept produced, see Ronald White, “The Trial of Abner Baker, Jr., MD: Monomania and McNaughtan Rules in Antebellum America,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 18, no. 3 (1990): 223–34. 50. Suzuki, Madness at Home, 42. 51. Thus Esquirol’s Mental Maladies (originally published in 1838 as Des maladies mentales) includes detailed discussions of the postmortem condition of the patients treated at the Salpêtrière—for instance, a “Table of Pathological Lesions Found in the Bodies of Lypemaniacs” after death. (Esquirol uses the term “lypemania” more or less interchangeably with “melancholy.”) JeanÉtienne Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies, translated by E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845), 225. 52. Wise, Inconvenient Persons, 24. 53. Isaac Ray, A Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), 165. 54. Nancy Tomes, The Art of Asylum-Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 102. This assumption could create strange impasses when an individual’s mental illness was obviously of long standing and lacked a clear moment of onset. When Charles Guiteau was tried for the assassination of James Garfield, the young neurologist Edward Spitzka testified that the defendant had not only been insane at the moment he committed the crime, but “had been in a more or less morbid state throughout his life”—a claim that, in light of the bizarre behavior that Guiteau had displayed for decades, seems highly plausible. For the prosecution, however, John P. Gray, a respected elder statesman in the psychiatric community, argued that Guiteau’s history of strange (and often criminal) acts proved him to be immoral rather than insane: his testimony began by explicitly defining mental illness as “a change in the individual, a departure from himself, from his own ordinary standard of mental action, a change in his way of feeling and thinking and acting.” Gray’s more traditional model of mental illness carried the day, although the desire to see an assassin hanged may have been the primary factor in the jury’s guilty verdict. Spitzka quoted in Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 157; Gray quoted 191–192. 55. Tomes, The Art of Asylum-Keeping, 102. 56. Suzuki, Madness at Home, 50. 57. Suzuki, Madness at Home, 50. 58. Suzuki, Madness at Home, 89. 59. James E. Moran, “Asylum in the Community: Managing the Insane in Antebellum America,” History of Psychiatry 9, no. 34 (1998): 222, 225; Susanna L.

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Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 113. 60. Suzuki, Madness at Home, 13. 61. “While wills that deviated from societal norms were vulnerable to challenge,” Blumenthal notes, “the ensuing trials often placed these norms at issue along with the testator’s mind,” and the norms did not always win the day (Law and the Modern Mind, 108). Of course, the very fact of having one’s sanity questioned, particularly during one’s lifetime (as opposed to in a dispute over a will) could be destructive in itself. The antebellum South, in particular, used insinuations and outright diagnoses of insanity to discredit whites who supported abolition, freed their enslaved laborers, or shared their property with Black people. For one especially distressing case, in which a son had his father committed to a Virginia asylum largely on the grounds of his “great tendency to give away property” to his free Black neighbors, see Wendy Gonaver, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 103–5. 62. Quoted in Raymond de Saussure, “The Influence of the Concept of Monomania on French Medico-Legal Psychiatry (from 1825 to 1840),” Journal of the History of Medicine 1 (1946): 395. 63. Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind, 166–67. 64. Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind, 179. 65. New Jersey Court of Chancery, Pironi v. Corrigan, 47 N.J. Eq. (1890), 135, https://www.ravellaw.com/opinions/e1fbb22480ce349ac571fd9821d1de69. 66. Lloyd Pratt, The Strangers Book: The Human of African American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 52. Note that Pratt begins the chapter from which this phrase is drawn with an epigraph from Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine” that speaks directly to the kind of economic transactions I am discussing here: “Well, suh, you is a stranger ter me, en I is a stranger ter you, en we is bofe strangers ter one annuder, but ’f I ’uz in yo’ place, I wouldn’ buy dis vimya’d” (44). Like the judges that Blumenthal discusses, Julius here evaluates the advisability of a transaction by transposing himself—a “stranger” to the potential buyer—into the exchange. The irony, of course, is that Julius uses this contractual logic of interchangeability to introduce a nonfungible factor into the transaction: the “goopher,” which, in Julius’s telling, not only curses any Black person who eats the grapes off the vine, but inextricably binds the health of the vineyard to one particular enslaved man who has since died. Although most of the old goophered vines have died, Julius claims, a few have grown back among the new vines, and only a practiced eye can tell them apart: “I ain’ skeered ter eat der grapes, ’caze I knows de old vimes fum de noo ones; but wid strangers dey ain’ no tellin’ w’at mought happen.” Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, NC:

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Duke University Press, 2006), 19. Through the narrative of the goopher, Julius seeks—and almost manages—to transform the rational stranger of contract into the ignorant stranger whose lack of local knowledge makes him incapable of transacting business with individuals whose history and dispositions he does not know. “Almost,” of course, because the story’s white narrator does in the end buy the vineyard. 67. Blumenthal, Law and the Modern Mind, 184. 68. Quoted in Tomes, The Art of Asylum-Keeping, 218. 69. Pratt, The Strangers Book, 2. 70. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 2. 71. Luhrmann, “Overview,” 6–8. 72. Four chapters follow this introduction, but Luhrmann lists five dimensions: readers will note that I have excluded “sensorial weighting” from my schema. In part, this is because it seems to me the item on the list that is least relevant to social cognition—that is, to understanding other minds rather than metacognitively manipulating one’s own; in part, I think, the texts I discuss simply experiment less with the sensory norms of ToM than they do with that model’s other parameters. That said, excellent work has been and is being done on the history of the senses in the nineteenth-century United States. See, for instance, Erica Fretwell’s Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), which examines the role that psychological experiments on sensory perception played in organizing racial difference.

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Chapter 1 1. Toni Morrison, A Mercy (New York: Random House, 2009), 188. 2. For documentation of the many everyday manifestations of this metaphor for linguistic communication, see Michael J. Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,” in Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 164–201. 3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System,” Cognitive Science 4 (1980): 196; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9. 4. Brad Pasanek, Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), ix–x. 5. The term “compromise” is taken from Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, edited by Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1:392. See also D. A. Miller’s description of Austen’s free

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indirect discourse as a device through which “narration comes as near to a character’s psychic and linguistic reality as it can get without collapsing into it, and the character does as much of the work of narration as she may without acquiring its authority.” D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 59. 6. Like any shared language, this presumed mental language rests on a foundation of cultural homogeneity. “Others become knowable in such precise detail,” Julie Choi has noted in an essay on free indirect discourse and “common sense,” “only to the extent that they are essentially the same as ourselves.” Julie Choi, “Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the Novel,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (1996): 656. 7. Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 9. 8. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 104–5. 9. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 106–7. 10. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, in Three Gothic Novels (New York: Library of America, 1998), 337. Although Mervyn attributes his curiosity to his desire to teach himself “the Tuscan language” (337), this project of his is not mentioned in any other scene in the novel, and provides only a weak explanation for his sudden urge to read up on the history of “the Ducal house of Visconti” (314). In context, then, the motive driving Mervyn’s opening of the book remains as opaque and inadequate as most of his other pivotal decisions in the novel; see note 55, below, for an example. 11. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 344. 12. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or The Secret Witness, ed. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 187. 13. Brown, Ormond, 187. 14. Brown, Ormond, 184, 185. 15. A few examples: Arthur Mervyn discovers a handwritten note in the bedroom of Welbeck’s daughter and “seize[s] the paper with an intention to peruse it,” only to be startled by “a stunning report” that turns out to be a gunshot (Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 303); Constantia Dudley readies “her implements of writing” in the small “closet” where she composes her letters to Sophia Courtland, but is forced to abandon them when she discovers Ormond and a dying—murdered?—man in the room next door (Brown, Ormond, 206–9); and Clara Wieland’s final, deadly confrontation with her brother is brought about by her return to Mettingen in the interest of securing the “journal of transactions in short-hand” that contains “the most secret transactions of her life.” Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or The Transformation. An American

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Tale, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 145. 16. Because of Brown’s obsessive repetition of key scenes in the four novels that he produced between 1798 and 1799, my reading of Wieland below will describe features familiar to readers of Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn as well. In some respects, these novels address a diverse range of subject matter relevant to the early republic: theories of race, women’s rights, revealed religion, urbanization, political conspiracy, transatlantic revolutionary currents. When it comes to cognitive metaphors, however, these texts are remarkably, even crudely consistent, returning to the same tropes even when they contribute little to the main thrust of the narrative. It is this forced and unnecessary quality, I would argue, that makes these scenes especially deserving of explanation. 17. Brown, Wieland, 150. 18. Brown, Wieland, 150, emphasis added. As David Kazanjian has pointed out, the evacuation of Carwin’s own interior is underlined by Brown’s preference for the term “biloquism” over “ventriloquism.” The latter, “meaning voices coming from the venter or belly, suggests voices from an unknown origin, or some deep and unlocatable interiority”; by contrast, Carwin’s voices, as described by Brown, represent “a mere trick of the mouth”—of the superficial features of “teeth, palate and tongue”—“rather than an unknown, supernatural, or preternatural emanation from the venter.” David Kazanjian, “Charles Brockden Brown’s Biloquial Nation: National Culture and White Settler Colonialism in Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist,” American Literature 73, no. 3 (2001): 483. 19. Brown, Wieland, 55. 20. Brown, Wieland, 57. 21. Brown, Wieland, 158, 161. 22. Brown, Wieland, 169, 165. In the words of Robert Levine—who, like Gordon Wood and Charles Bradshaw, situates Wieland and its characters’ obsession with determining the origins of behavior in the context of conspiratorial thinking in the early republic—“for those who insist on and desperately need a first cause, a voice must be everything.” Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28. See also Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1982): 401–41; and Charles C. Bradshaw, “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” New England Quarterly 76, no. 3 (September 2003): 356–77. Wood’s observation that the eighteenth-century “paranoid style” stems in large part from the efforts of moral philosophers and theologians to reinsert free will into “the new cause-and-effect philosophy” by “trying to identify causes in

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human affairs with the motives, mind, or will of individuals” (416) is especially applicable to Wieland, which attempts to disentangle the inferential construct of “motive” from the causal influences that it dismisses as unintentional and therefore irrelevant. “Intention is not the same as causation,” Christopher Looby notes in his discussion of Wieland, and one might summarize the novel as the traumatic replacement of the former by the latter. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 150. 23. Brown, Wieland, 47. 24. Brown, Wieland, 47. 25. Brown, Wieland, 47. 26. Steven Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 82. See also Roland Hagenbüchle, who likewise argues that Brown resists Lockean empiricism—in Brown’s novels, “sense impressions are from the start described as untrustworthy; instead of clear ideas  .  .  . linked together on the principle of association, we observe an endless series of unreliable hypotheses”—but, rightly in my view, makes an exception for Hume, whose doubts about both causality and identity Brown echoes. Peter Kafer and Beverly Voloshin both see Brown’s gothicism as a means of “highlighting the disturbing implications of [Locke’s] optimistic epistemology” and “recast[ing] the Lockean model of the linear, self-present self”; Alan Axelrod, meanwhile, sees Carwin as a politically and ideologically dangerous figure insofar as this character, “conceived in the American halcyon of Locke’s epistemology,” is able to intervene in the seemingly transparent formation of sensory impressions on the mind. My intent is not to imply that these critics are wrong; indeed, Voloshin’s argument in particular strikes me as quite insightful in its suggestion that Brown’s fiction works to resurrect the unconscious ideation and “unperceived thoughts” whose existence Locke, or at least the Locke of the Essay and its American reception, denied. Rather, I suggest that we expand and complexify the eighteenth-century empiricism of Brown’s milieu, allowing room not only for Hume but for a more conflicted Locke (see below). Roland Hagenbüchle, “American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Epistemology: The Example of Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 124–25; Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 127; Beverly R. Voloshin, “Edgar Huntly and the Coherence of the Self,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 262, 265; Alan Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 87. 27. This hesistancy appears most clearly in Locke’s discussion of desire and preference in chapter 21 of the Essay. According to Kramnick, Locke uses the

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term “preference” rather than “desire” because the latter, for him, implies a particular and indeterminable subjective state (“uneasiness” at not having the object of desire): “To say that the prisoner prefers to stay in his cell is simply to observe that he has not left. To say that he desires to stay in his cell would make a claim about the uneasiness that the prisoner is experiencing, and the uneasiness of another person is ‘something remote.’” “Preference,” in other words, describes a behavioral disposition rather than an inferred mental attitude. This agnosticism with respect to mental states may also account for Melville’s use of the concept of “preference” in “Bartleby”: see chapter 2, below. Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 146. 28. Watts, The Romance of Real Life, 87. 29. Brown, Wieland, 1. 30. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 590. 31. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 363, 332 and 528, 379. 32. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice I (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1992), 240. For a survey of Godwin’s intellectual circle and its fascination for Brown, see Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro’s introduction to their edition of Wieland (Brown, Wieland, ix–xlvi). Barnard and Shapiro describe Brown as interested in “the structural pressures that create effects of insincerity,” but hold that Brown, like Godwin and his peers (whom these authors name “the Woldwinites”), viewed sincerity as an unambiguous good: “the novel seems to  .  .  . suggest that nearly all of the novel’s tragic events might arguably have been avoided or moderated if Mettingen’s inhabitants had practiced group sincerity in the sense that Brown and the Woldwinites understand it” (xxiii). My discussion of Arthur Mervyn is intended to show that Brown did not simply subscribe to, but rather remained skeptical of, Godwin’s social ideal. 33. William Godwin, Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: Penguin, 2005), 174. 34. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 174. As Kafer notes, in Caleb Williams “there is never any doubt for the reader what ‘the truth’ is—as there is never any doubt for William Godwin. Arthur Mervyn, on the other hand, in its tendency to draw attention to its own inconsistencies and contradictions, has been called the first ‘metafiction.’ Its essence is a lack of certainty about truth.” Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic, 136. 35. Godwin, Caleb Williams, 175. 36. Brown, Wieland, 52. 37. When turned against oneself, moreover, a weapon allows one to counteract the detachment of will from action by canceling both will and action in the act of suicide—the only deed, one might say, in which intention

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and behavior perfectly coincide. Although this possibility is not given much attention in Wieland, it becomes a prominent concern in Ormond, where Constantia contemplates “her own destruction” as the only way to preserve the integrity of her will in the face of Ormond’s threats of rape. Brown, Ormond, 216. 38. Brown, Wieland, 51. 39. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hind, Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 19. This phrase is as good a definition of the Lockean mind as any, but for Hind, who deliberately distances herself from psychological interpretations of these spaces, the shifting occupations and possessions of private space in Brown’s fiction reflect the conflicts inherent in the interaction of “a changing market economy outside the household” with traditional “domestic economies” (20). 40. Brown, Wieland, 52, 51. 41. Brown, Wieland, 51, 79. 42. “He allied himself with no sect, because he perfectly agreed with none. Social worship is that by which they are all distinguished; but this article found no place in his creed. He rigidly interpreted that precept which enjoins us, when we worship, to retire into solitude, and shut out every species of society.” Brown, Wieland, 12. 43. Brown, Wieland, 70. 44. Brown, Wieland, 70. 45. Brown, Wieland, 71. 46. Brown, Wieland, 71. 47. Brown, Wieland, 72–73. 48. Brown, Wieland, 145. 49. Brown, Wieland, 145–47. 50. Brown, Wieland, 73. 51. Brown, Wieland, 73. 52. For more on the tactic of inventing an unobserved observer to stand in for the narrator, see my discussion of Dred in chapter 3. 53. Brown, Wieland, 73. 54. Brown, Wieland, 114. 55. Compare this scene with a similar moment in Arthur Mervyn, in which the title character describes his reaction after hearing unexpected steps from another room in the house he has entered: “There was no reason to suppose that this sound was connected with the detection of me, in this situation; yet I acted as if this reason existed, and made haste to pass the door and gain the second flight of steps.” Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 295–96, emphasis added. 56. Brown, Wieland, 114. 57. A century later, however, William James would echo and further radicalize Brown’s elimination of human agency from cognitive verbs: “If we could

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say in English ‘it thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption.” James, The Principles of Psychology, 224–25. 58. Brown, Wieland, 70, 73, 114, 116, 47, 55. 59. Among the examples: as Carwin’s history becomes clear, “a suspicion was, sometimes, admitted”; Pleyel recounts his growing admiration for Clara by noting “what correctness and abundance of knowledge was daily experienced”; later, Carwin’s “parting declarations were remembered.” Brown, Wieland, 59, 97, 109. 60. Brown, Wieland, 173. 61. Using the terms of cognitive linguistics, the passive construction presupposes the existence of an agent. On presuppositions as “proposition[s] whose truth is taken for granted by some utterance,” see Vera Tobin, Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 127–30. 62. Brown, Wieland, 78, 88. 63. Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1975), 770. 64. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 770. If detection is, as has often been asserted, a kind of reading, it is thus a perverse and unconventional variety, insensitive to the rich world of intentional signals and focused only on the accidental detritus that exceeds the agent’s intentions. Indeed, even in Poe’s quasi-detective story “The Gold Bug,” which revolves around decoding a purposely concealed message, the text’s status as intentional communication is downplayed: interpreting the message may be a mentalistic task, but cracking the cipher, Poe emphasizes, is not, since the process of code-breaking involves locating arbitrary correspondences rather than inferring meanings. “Having once established connected and legible characters,” Legrand notes, “I scarcely gave a thought to the mere difficulty of developing their import,” much as Dupin vows in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” to ignore questions of motive while the (infinite!) task of determining the physical facts of the matter is yet unfinished. In the annals of perverse (that is, noncommunicative) uses of texts, it is perhaps significant that the coded document itself comes to light only because an enslaved man named Jupiter uses the paper not as symbolic content but as a source of material to “stuff ” in the “mouff ” of the titular beetle. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold Bug,” in The Complete Tales and Poems, 63, 46. 65. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 180. 66. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 180 (original emphasis).

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67. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Random House, 2003), 709. 68. Like any reader of the late novels, I am indebted here to Sharon Cameron’s Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), which brilliantly illuminates the mechanisms by which intentionality is dispersed over a field of characters rather than localized in a single one. 69. James, The Wings of the Dove, 709. 70. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” in Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays (New York: Library of America, 2002), 785, 786. 71. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 781. 72. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 782. 73. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 787–89. The narrator gathers, however, that it is “quite along the line of Baxter’s philosophy,” which holds that society is forcing “democratic mediocrity” upon its individual members: “Life would soon become so monotonously uniform and so uniformly monotonous as to be scarce worth the living” (784–85). Baxter, in other words, opposes the tendency to treat individuals as interchangeable outlines that this book’s introduction identified as central to the logic of contract—but his opposition seems to stem more from a belief in natural aristocracy (hence the Spencer comparison) than a desire for a Pratt-like “stranger humanism.” 74. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 787. 75. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 788. 76. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 788. 77. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 783–84. 78. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 789–90. 79. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 792. It is perhaps no accident that Henry James so often placed his own literary contributions at the “margin,” a term that hints at the space of posited but invisible—and impossible to expose—mental states. For more on James’s treatment of white space, both on the page and in the mind, see chapter 4. 80. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,”790, 792. 81. Chesnutt, “Baxter’s Procrustes,”783. 82. In particular, I would conjecture that, although they did not call it “mindshaping,” nineteenth-century Americans had a theory about who was supposed to take on the work of rendering minds mutually intelligible by instructing, modeling, gently disciplining, and verbally interpreting behavior: women. Nowhere is this more visible than in the high sentimental fiction of the mid-nineteenth-century United States: the novels, like Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1851) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), that make up what Jane Tompkins has called “the other American Renaissance.” Significantly, these texts orbit around the pedagogical relationship between

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a parent (or parent-figure) and a female child, sometimes accompanied by emulative friendships or sibling relationships among multiple girls (as in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women). The nineteenth-century domestic sphere, both as represented in novels and as organized through cultural products, was full of technologies designed to make mindshaping easier—technologies that, viewed in this light, reveal how much routine women’s labor goes into making minds legible. Take, for instance, the face. Karen Halttunen has observed that women’s fashions in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were designed so as to give special prominence to the face: “the most transparent part of the body” in sentimental culture, and the one responsible for registering the internal states of its possessor. Ornaments around the face were minimized so as to draw attention to the blushes, smiles, and tears by which emotions manifested themselves. Such conventions not only worked to clear the field for mindreading by eliminating distractions from the social messages sent by facial expressions; they also formed a stark contrast to the “mask of insensibility” that young men of the era were encouraged to cultivate so as to avoid exploitation by confidence-men. If “sincerity could not be practiced safely in the streets and marketplaces of the antebellum city,” as Halttunen claims, its chief refuge was the private home, where mother’s mindshaping ensured that one’s own and others’ mental states would be both legible and relatively safe. The norms of antebellum American domesticity cast women in a reparative interpersonal role: their careful maintenance of the boundaries separating home from elsewhere preserved a foundation of cognitive homogeneity in the private sphere, even as the public sphere was constituted as heterogeneous, diffuse, and opaque. The nineteenth-century gendering of mindshaping and mindreading in turn made it easier for twentieth-century readers, from D. H. Lawrence to Ann Douglas, to represent women’s contributions to American fiction as conventional or reactionary. I recognize the danger of appearing to take a similar stance in this book, since most of the literary experiments in social cognition that I discuss are written by men. In response, I can only assert, first, that this book makes no pretense to completeness, and that the absence of a text or author from my discussion does not indicate that they have nothing interesting to say about social cognition; and second, that my work in progress takes up in much more detail and specificity the idea of mindreading as gendered labor that I have articulated in this note. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 147; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 83–88, 54–55. 83. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (New York: Random House, 2002), 209.

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84. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 205, 207. 85. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 222, 410. 86. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 409. 87. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 226. 88. The “Jane Austen-ish” quality of this “quite serious, somewhat plodding . . . study of the problem of marriage” is so overwhelming that it leads Leslie Fiedler to misstate its title as Persuasion, which, of course, is a genuine Austen production. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2003), 186. 89. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 192; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin, 1977), 43. 90. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 408. 91. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 217, 227. 92. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 27. 93. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 217, 205. 94. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 312. This strikingly gendered distribution of strategies for explaining and predicting behavior—Natty’s spooring versus Judith’s reading—is especially salient for a male writer who both invited the assumption that his anonymously printed first novel was the work of an English lady and, a few years later, published stories under a female pseudonym (“Jane Morgan,” ostensible author of Tales for Fifteen; or, Imagination and Heart). The divide between women who read—both novels and minds—and men who do not is more than a personal idiosyncrasy of Cooper’s, however: it powered both representations of gender in nineteenth-century American fiction and, to a large extent, the antebellum literary market itself. Lora Romero notes that “although the book is usually associated with the reign of the father, in the antebellum period books seem to be associated with the reign of the mother.” Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 44. 95. Cooper, The Deerslayer, 59. Chapter 2 1. James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 37; Eve Tavor Bannet, “Domestic Fiction and the Reprint Trade,” in Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 191; Stacey Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6. 2. Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 89.

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3. Salazar, Bodies of Reform, 37. 4. Christopher Castiglia, for instance, excoriates in his study of antebellum character formation “the pre-given rules that characterize, classify, and hierarchize interior traits in ways that make the disciplinary imperatives of those categories seem like the innocent naming of interiority’s inevitable conformity” (Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008], 13–4). Salazar argues that the “liberal agency” of Melville’s Confidence Man depends “on the production and consumption of a stream of completely legible character types” (Bodies of Reform, 39). Even Margolis, who ultimately and persuasively reads surveillance as “a kind of heuristic device” that makes the surveilled individual’s “thoughts newly or uniquely legible,” qualifies this finding with the adverb “surprisingly,” having expected to find in the publicizing of subjective experience merely another “tool of social discipline” (The Public Life of Privacy, 3). 5. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1975), 476–77. 6. Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” 475. 7. Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” 478, 476–77. 8. Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” 480, 481 (original emphasis). 9. Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” 481. 10. On the position of “Rue Morgue” at the origin of multiple detective fiction tropes, see Charles Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 74. 11. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” in Complete Tales and Poems, 180. 12. Tadeusz Wiesław Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 15. 13. Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 180. 14. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in Complete Tales and Poems, 154 (original emphasis). Here as elsewhere in the Dupin stories, incidentally, the detective’s traditional agon with the police—what Marty Roth calls “the police paradox,” which dictates that the representatives of law and order must be either incompetent or apathetic—stems primarily from a difference in strategies of behavioral interpretation. Whereas the police practice a kind of naïve ToM, attempting to explain crimes by discovering who may have wanted to commit them, Dupin rejects the supposedly direct conduit between intention and action, implying that an individual’s desire to commit a crime is less causally important than the physical circumstances that make it possible or even unavoidable for him to do so. This strategic divergence is not accidentally related to the more obvious difference between Dupin and the police: their relation to social institutions. The

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justice system in which the police participate depends on a basic assumption of personal agency, a conviction that individual action is explicable in terms of conscious choice; the police themselves, because of their professional status, are well positioned to accumulate the vast number of interpersonal interactions, often with the same criminals, that conduce to mentalistic reasoning. To borrow a concept from Raymond Williams, the urban environment, so opaque and anonymous to an average citizen, is maximally “knowable” to the police officer, whose authority to initiate an encounter with an individual of any social station helps him to develop robust predictive theories about why people behave as they do. It is perhaps for this reason that the police were such an asset to Dickens, whose Inspector Bucket, for instance, represents a major agent of coherence in the sprawling Bleak House: the “essentially opaque” community of London becomes, if not transparent, at least cohesive through his subject position. Poe could have coopted this knowability, using the relatively new professional police force as a means of making the city mentalistically graspable; that he did not suggests a primary interest in alternatives to intentional reasoning. Marty Roth, Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 61; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 165. 15. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 160, 167. 16. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 149–50. 17. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 149–50. 18. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1948, 412; Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 167. 19. In a tradition extending back to Roman law, the keeper of a wild animal is held liable for any damage done by that creature, even in the absence of actual negligence; untamed animals are understood to have “vicious propensities” that any reasonable adult would know about. Reinhard Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1136–37. 20. Thangam Ravindranathan, “Unequal Metrics: Animals Passing in La Fontaine, Poe, and Chevillard,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 24, no. 5 (2014): 12. 21. Ravindranathan, “Unequal Metrics,” 14. 22. That Poe was not especially comfortable with probability, at least in the mathematical sense, is evidenced by his completely inaccurate explication of the “Calculus of Probabilities” at the end of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (207). 23. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 159–60.

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24. Daniel Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” in Brainstorms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 4–5; Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 161. 25. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 161. 26. Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” 10. 27. Joshua Gang, “Mindless Modernism,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 46, no. 1 (2013): 128. 28. Gang, “Mindless Modernism,” 118. 29. Christopher Peterson, “The Aping Apes of Poe and Wright: Race, Animality, and Mimicry in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and Native Son,” New Literary History 41, no. 1 (2010): 153. 30. Peterson, “The Aping Apes of Poe and Wright,” 158. 31. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 146. 32. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Resident Patient,” in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 424. 33. See Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 38–43. Baron-Cohen theorizes that visual clues about what another person is perceiving—specifically, the direction of their gaze—provide scaffolding for the construction of what he calls “triadic representations”: comparisons of one’s own perceptual state, the inferred perceptual state of another person, and the shared physical world. The details of Baron-Cohen’s model are less important here than his argument that eyes are particularly salient and useful stimuli with respect to mindreading. Some evidence suggests that autistic people have a harder time discerning gaze direction than do neurotypical people, although the cause of this difference and its robustness across age and gender differences remain unclear: see Badouin Forgeot d’Arc et al., “Gaze Direction Detection in Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Autism 21, no. 1 (2017): 100–107, especially 101. 34. With this specific phrase, Zunshine is quoting famed mystery writer Sara Paretsky. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 150. 35. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 145. 36. For a detailed account of how Poe revised the story of the murdered Mary Rogers to make it seem as though he had known the true solution all along, see W. K. Wimsatt, “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56, no. 1 (1941): 230–48. 37. Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 191. 38. Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 170. 39. Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 206–7. 40. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” in The Complete Tales and Poems, 220. 41. Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 200–201.

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42. Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” 216. 43. Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” 209. 44. Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” 216. Codified in Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten’s Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), “Machiavellian intelligence” is often taken to be synonymous with social intelligence, although the reference to Machiavelli obviously emphasizes certain aspects of sociality—self-interestedness, for instance—over others like altruism and empathy. 45. Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” 216. 46. Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 26–27. 47. Anscombe, Intention, 27, 28. 48. I paraphrase these “rules” from H. P. Grice’s foundational text in pragmatics, “Logic and Conversation,” in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); I will return to Grice, and in particular to his “principle of cooperation,” in chapter 4. 49. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness, 2. 50. Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” 9–10. 51. Tamar Szabó Gendler, “Alief and Belief,” Journal of Philosophy 105, no. 10 (2008): 650. 52. Gendler, “Alief and Belief,” 656. Alber and Heinze define “unnatural” narratives as texts in which the fit between the represented world and our cognitive heuristics for making sense of the real one is less perfect. Their use of the concept, however, focuses on the assimilation of anomalous fictional data to “familiar interpretive patterns,” touting the ability of readers to “use parameters that are based on real-world experience and their exposure to literature to grasp textual oddities,” whereas I mean to emphasize the extent to which these anomalous narratives are both more closely linked to everyday cognition and less capable of being elided by readers than this analysis would suggest. Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze, “Introduction,” in Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, edited by Alber and Heinze (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 10. 53. The historicism-deconstructionism binary has been best articulated and critiqued in Nancy Ruttenburg’s “‘The Silhouette of a Content’: Bartleby and American Literary Specificity,” in Melville and Aesthetics, edited by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 137–55. The dynamic interplay of exceptionality and normalcy that Ruttenburg identifies as a persistent backdrop to “Bartleby” criticism, used in her essay to argue for the story’s exemplarity as an instance of what Jacques Rancière calls “the suspensive existence of literature,” is equally relevant to my argument against Bartleby’s supposed characterological uniqueness. Dan McCall, in The Silence

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of Bartleby, concisely summarizes Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches to the story, along with their weaknesses, although not without falling himself into the trap of portraying Bartleby as outside the pale of any interpretive strategy and therefore as a singular anomaly: “Bartleby is intractable. If he means anything other than the riddle of himself, he is not who he is.” Although I would similarly resist attempts to decode Bartleby or replace the character with a concept of which it is supposedly the empty symbol, McCall’s declaration of interpretive impasse misses the extent to which Melville does give his readers the tools with which to understand Bartleby—even though those tools replace the hermeneutic project of excavating interior meaning with the essentially empirical one of mapping external correlations. Dan McCall, The Silence of Bartleby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 77. 54. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–71; Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” in Essays: Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith (London: Verso, 1998), 68–90. 55. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: ‘Sad Fancyings’ in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 76, no. 4 (2004): 783. 56. Amit Pinchevski, “Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability,” Cultural Critique 78 (Spring 2011): 29. For historical arguments for the diagnosis, see, for instance, William P. Sullivan, “Bartleby and Infantile Autism: A Naturalistic Explanation,” Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers 3, no. 2 (1976): 43–60; and Ashley Kern Koegel’s “Evidence Suggesting the Existence of Asperger’s Syndrome in the Mid-1800s,” Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions 10, no. 4 (2008): 270–72. 57. Wendy Anne Lee, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), 26. 58. Lee, Failures of Feeling, 26, 27. 59. Lee, Failures of Feeling, 27. 60. On the alien metaphor in particular, see Alicia A. Broderick and Ari Ne’eman, “Autism as Metaphor: Narrative and Counter-Narrative,” International Journal of Inclusive Education 12, nos. 5–6 (2008): 463–65. It is worth noting that the other metaphor to which these authors draw attention represents the autistic person as trapped behind a wall or inside a shell (465–66); perhaps Bartleby lends himself so well to diagnoses of autism in part because of his final confinement in the Tombs. 61. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” in Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 51. 62. Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 51. 63. Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” 9. The plausible character names of the typical novel, as Ian Watt noted, are strategically empty: offering no clue

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as to a character’s behavior and demeanor, these merely denotative signs force the reader to engage with the character by speculatively projecting mental states into it—that is, by filling the hollow sign of “Tom Jones” or “Emma Woodhouse” with personality traits inferred from the figure’s represented actions. This engagement reflects the character’s status as, in Watt’s terms, “a particular individual in the contemporary social environment.” By providing a summary in miniature of each character’s typical behavior patterns, on the other hand, “Turkey,” “Nippers,” “Ginger Nut,” and their ilk do not solicit the imaginative attribution of, but rather replace and render moot, the character’s interiority, transforming a name from a container for causally effective beliefs and intentions to a kind of statistical record of the individual’s most frequently repeated actions. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19. 64. Melville, “Bartleby,” 10. 65. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 25. 66. Melville, “Bartleby,” 5, 7. 67. Melville, “Bartleby,” 18. 68. Melville, “Bartleby,” 17. 69. John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Laura Burroughs, “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 71, no. 2 (1996): 230. Many of Bargh’s results have been hard to replicate; indeed, the Replicability-Index blog, in a thorough overview of his research, places him “at the center of the replication crisis in psychology.” I am, to be honest, less interested in the validity of Bargh’s specific studies—the most suspect of which tend to rely on dubious literalizations of mental metaphors—than in the theoretical interventions his work has inspired from philosophers like Gendler. Ulrich Schimmack, “Replicability Audit of John A. Bargh,” blog post, March 17, 2019, Replicability-Index: Improving the Replicability of Empirical Research, https:// replicationindex.com/2019/03/17/raudit-bargh/. 70. Melville, “Bartleby,” 24–25. 71. Another way of describing this difference would be to invoke the “character” of the servant, which, as described by Bruce Robbins, “was the mask the people were expected to don in the face of power”; when employers claimed to take an interest in the character of a valet or a maid, Robbins explains, they were referring not to the individualized and agentic identity associated with literary character, but rather to the servant’s “conformity to certain pre-established and reassuring models” of “honesty, chastity, sobriety, and industriousness.” If the position of the employee already entails a certain degree of two-dimensionality, as Robbins hints, then Turkey’s “With submission, sir” naturalizes that flatness, suggesting to the lawyer that Turkey’s

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automatism is more that of the reliable family servant than the threateningly opaque wage employee. Bartleby’s “I prefer not to,” by contrast, provokes a search for reasons or intentions even as it refuses to gratify that search, suggesting that a subordinate’s flatness may under certain conditions provoke paranoia, rather than complacency, in an employer. It would be misguided, I think, to see “Bartleby” as the story of a subordinate’s tragically ineffective resistance, precisely because of the inadequacy of propositional mental states to the character’s behavior. Yet Robbins’s observation, in addition to identifying an undercurrent in the economy of mind in “Bartleby,” will prove even more relevant to the enslaver-enslaved relationship as discussed in chapter 3. Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 35. 72. Melville, “Bartleby,” 27. 73. Melville, “Bartleby,” 32, 30. 74. Melville, “Bartleby,” 32, 33, 31 (emphasis added). 75. Melville, “Bartleby,” 32. 76. Melville, “Bartleby,” 35. 77. Melville, “Bartleby,” 35. 78. Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 83. One might note that Vermeule’s explanation, too, acknowledges an absence of intention in the diegetic world only to correct it by an appeal to a higher plane—in this case, that of the author, whose motivation provides an explanatory compensation for the flat character’s deficient interiority. 79. Melville, “Bartleby,” 36. 80. In this respect, Bartleby resembles one of Marta Figlerowicz’s “flat protagonists”—but insofar as that reading would again focus on Bartleby the character rather than “Bartleby” the sociocognitive situation, it too would fall into the trap of arbitrating ontological status rather than mapping the pragmatics of behavioral interpretation. Figlerowicz, Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 81. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 30–31. 82. The two possibilities suggested by Vermeule in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? 197. 83. “Billy Budd” traces a similar shift—in that case, from the empathic projection of the interior states that supposedly cause behavior to the delineation of its effects—likewise under the aegis of a criminal investigation. For more on “Billy Budd,” see chapter 3. 84. I am thinking here of interventions like Martín Alcoff ’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Moya’s Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (Berkeley:

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University of California Press, 2002); and Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantitative Entanglements of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 85. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 174. 86. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 190. 87. Jeannine DeLombard, “Dehumanizing Slave Personhood,” American Literature 91, no. 3 (2019): 493. Hartman has detailed how slaveholders exploited “the recognition of humanity and individuality” for terrorizing purposes: Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5. Rinehart’s recent article, “The Man That Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery” (Journal of Social History 50, no. 1 [2016]: 28–50), troubles our easy conflation of “commodification” and “dehumanization” by adopting Igor Kopytoff ’s model of the commodity-as-process. Chapter 3 1. On “romantic racialism,” see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper, 1971), especially 101–2. 2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly, edited by Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1986), 126. Before the 1830s, Jones notes, antislavery activists had “employed a spectrum of approaches . . . including boycotts, legislation, logical arguments, and even acts of armed violence”; although these strategies hardly vanished entirely in the second quarter of the century, they were overshadowed by a rising discourse of sentiment and empathy. Paul Christian Jones, “The Danger of Sympathy: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Pathos,” Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 243. 3. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 192. 4. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 108. 5. Robert Dale Owen, The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), 220. 6. Quoted in Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 206. Admittedly many postbellum whites welcomed the dissolution of this quasi-feudal southern past, usually for self-interested reasons: a certain kind of white supremacist positively looked forward to replacing “racial caste” with “bourgeois concepts of social class,” enabling both their own upward mobility and the continuing exclusion of poor, property-less African Americans (213). These individuals, “postracial” avant la lettre, may serve as a reminder that white

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supremacism has historically been compatible with just about any set of social and political opinions. 7. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40. 8. This was true in both white abolitionist and proslavery contexts. Most egregiously, the unique personalities of individual enslaved people were invoked in antebellum southern courts to justify returning them to their captors, rather than reimbursing enslavers with the person’s value in cash. “Suddenly infused with nonfungible attributes,” these enslaved bodies were given “extraadded value and uniqueness,” a kind of ineffable individuality, precisely so that they could be categorized as the inalienable property of the slaveholder. Joan (Colin) Dayan, “Poe, Persons, and Property,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 110–11. 9. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 91. 10. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 198, 307. As Jamie Bolker argues, Dred frames “the African race’s essentialized connection to nature” as an explanation and a license for active resistance to enslavement, using a bioracialist paradigm very similar to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to put forward a more radical political argument. Jamie Bolker, “Stowe’s Birds: Jim Crows and the Nature of Resistance in Dred,” J19: The Journal of NineteenthCentury Americanists 6, no. 2 (2018): 240. As for Anne Clayton’s claim that “approbativeness is a stronger principle with the African race than almost any other” (Stowe, Dred, 307), I feel justified in identifying this character’s views with the author’s given that Stowe expressed the same idea in almost the same terms (‘The Africans as a race are exceedingly approbative”) in an 1858 newspaper article under her own name. Quoted in Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 150–51. 11. Stowe, Dred, 530, 438, 469. 12. Stowe, Dred, 469. 13. On the role of criminality in the public construction of Black selfhood and personhood, see especially Jeannine DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 14. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 231, 498, 361. One significant exception to this pattern of use: the “deep and dark” swamp into which Cassy and Emmeline flee (573), prefiguring the Great Dismal Swamp setting of Dred. 15. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 56. 16. Stowe, Dred, 198.

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17. Stowe, Dred, 495. 18. Gail K. Smith, “Reading with the Other: Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference in Stowe’s Dred,” American Literature 69, no. 2 (1997): 290. 19. Smith, “Reading with the Other,” 300–301. 20. Stowe, Dred, 198. 21. Stowe, Dred, 61. 22. Stowe, Dred, 143, 112. 23. For the narrator as eavesdropper, see, for instance, book 2, chap. 17: “so near as we could collect from the sound of his words, Tiff ’s prayer ran as follows” (Stowe, Dred, 407). 24. Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 166. 25. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1:356. 26. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 357. 27. Stowe, Dred, 388. 28. Stowe, Dred, 389. 29. Levine, Martin Delany, 178. Delany points to Stowe’s support for Liberian colonization, which he contrasts with her disdain for Haiti, as evidence of her desire to keep Black communities “subserviant [sic], to white men’s power.” M. R. Delany, “Mrs. Stowe’s Positions,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper [Rochester, NY], May 6, 1853, https://www.accessible-archives.com/. 30. Levine, Martin Delany, 146. 31. Jerome McGann, “Introduction,” in Blake; or, The Huts of America, edited by McGann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), xvi. 32. McGann, “Introduction,” xvi. Britt Rusert shares this assessment, although she understands the novel’s goals to be scientific as much as political (indeed, political insofar as they are scientific): “Delany exchanges a novelistic world of well-developed characters for a dynamic field of impersonal forces.” Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 173. 33. Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Jerome McGann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 13. 34. In this respect, Blake has something in common with the use of theatrical gesture to which Nicholas Rinehart has drawn attention in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition—with the significant difference that Delany withholds the soliloquies that, in Rinehart’s account, represent a form of “embodied consciousness.” Interestingly, for Rinehart, this embodied consciousness serves in part to compensate for the physical vulnerability of texts: crucial documents in the novel’s narrative are burned, trashed, or suppressed. Nicholas Rinehart, “Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in

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The Marrow of Tradition,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 43, no. 2 (2018): 3, 12–15. For an alternative reading of damaged or nonexistent texts in Chesnutt, see chapter 1, above. 35. Delany, Blake, 7. 36. Delany, Blake, 9. 37. Lisa Zunshine, “1700–1775: Theory of Mind, Social Hierarchy, and the Emergence of Narrative Subjectivity,” in The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, edited by David Herman, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 163. 38. Delany, Blake, 23, 94. 39. Delany, Blake, 50, 83. 40. J.W.C. Pennington, “A Lecture Delivered before the Glasgow Young Men’s Christian Association,” 1850, Black Abolitionist Archive, Document Number 10260, 3 (capitalized in original). Pennington argues that whites discovered the existence of the Black mind only after they had committed themselves to slavery, and were “alarmed to find that [they] must undertake the difficult task of forging chains for a mind like [their] own” (2). “From that moment to the present,” Pennington declares, “slavery has been literally A WAR OF MINDS” (3). 41. Delany, Blake, 81. 42. Delany, Blake, 194. The sentence is double-barreled, however, since the ambiguous placement of the prepositional phrase—thanks to the absence of clarifying commas, “under the most alarming apprehensions” could modify either “they . . . live” or “I live”—leaves open the alternative reading that the whites’ livelihood is dependent on Blake experiencing those apprehensions. 43. Rebecca Skidmore Biggio, “The Specter of Conspiracy in Martin Delany’s Blake,” African American Review 42, nos. 3–4 (2008): 440. 44. Delany, Blake, 207. 45. Delany, Blake, 41. 46. Delany, Blake, 208. 47. Rusert, Fugitive Science, 168–69. 48. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 246. 49. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 197 (all emphasis in original). 50. Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 94. 51. See especially Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 623–24. Stowe thus positions the vulnerable being—whether an enslaved person, an ill person, a white infant, or any other disempowered or incapacitated person—as a subject of experience only insofar as that experience can elicit either compassion or cruelty from an

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agential being (prototypically, a white able-bodied adult). In this respect, she is an early participant in constructing what Michael Lindblad has identified as the discourse of the “savage” and the “humane,” in which oppressed beings are construed as “available to death at a human being’s hands” precisely so that they can activate the mercy of white men, “the sole actors.” I am here drawing upon Joshua Bennett’s extremely useful summary of Lindblad in Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 35. 52. Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, “Black Masculinity Achieves Nothing without Restorative Care: An Intersectional Rearticulation of Frederick Douglass,” in A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass, edited by Neil Roberts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 236–37. 53. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 258. 54. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 259 (emphasis in original), 260–61. 55. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 259–60 (emphasis in original). 56. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 258–59. 57. Perhaps the most extreme articulation of this attitude lies in the 1829 opinion of Judge Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina, who held that it was legal for an enslaver to deliberately wound his captive: defining the slave as “one doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap his fruits,” Ruffin declared that “[s]uch services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own.” Orlando Patterson, who cites this decision (Slavery and Social Death [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], 3–4), includes this legal voiding of will in his concept of “social death,” the forcible severing of an individual from their social history and identity that allows the enslaver to create, re-create, or uncreate his captive at will (7). Stowe, too, found Ruffin’s opinion rhetorically useful: the introduction to Dred sarcastically declares that “[t]he writer has placed in the mouth of one of her leading characters a judicial decision of Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, the boldness, clearness, and solemn eloquence of which have excited admiration both in the Old World and the New” (Stowe, Dred, 4). 58. As Joanne Freeman has shown, however, violence in fact regularly invaded the domain of political reason when slavery was in question. Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence and the Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), especially 11. 59. Martin E. P. Seligman, “Learned Helplessness,” Annual Review of Medicine 23 (1972): 407–8, 409. 60. As of Seligman’s first writing on the subject, something like learned helplessness had been documented in dogs, rats, cats, mice, fish, and people (“Learned Helplessness,” 408).

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61. Maria Konnikova, “Trying to Cure Depression, But Inspiring Torture,” New Yorker, January 14 2015, n.p., https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria -konnikova/theory-psychology-justified-torture. Because of this extensive research on learned helplessness in people, I feel justified in making the uncomfortable leap from laboratory animals to human beings. That said, it seems important to acknowledge the initial conditions under which the concept was formulated and the experiment design that elicited these behaviors, especially in light of the history of classical conditioning—which begins, of course, with Pavlov’s dogs. Indeed, Seligman’s original findings arguably represent a kind of hinge between the behaviorism that dominated psychology in the first half of the twentieth century and the cognitive approach that began to take hold in the 1970s. While mimicking the structure of traditional conditioning studies, the experiment used an apparent failure of conditioning (the inability of the dogs in the uncontrollable scenario to learn how to escape the shocks) to argue that the animals must be constructing complex cognitive models of cause and effect—complex enough, at least, to distinguish between controllable and uncontrollable events and to generalize those categories in new situations. 62. This caveat feels necessary in light of Seligman’s turn, later in his career, to the self-help genre. He currently directs the Penn Positive Psychology Center. 63. Therí A. Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 44, 13. Sander Gilman and James Thomas have surveyed the historical processes, primarily in the aftermath of World War II, by which racism began to be understood as a mental illness or impairment in Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity (New York: New York University Press, 2016); this section’s title is derived from that book. 64. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 114. 65. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 152. 66. Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves ( Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), 14:81. 67. Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives, 14:81. 68. Quoted in Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 168–69. 69. Bay writes that “for all her bitter hatred of whites, even . . . Millie Manuel could come up with no other explanation for white cruelty” than “‘Jes ’cose they could, I guess’” (The White Image in the Black Mind, 168–69)—suggesting that there is something exculpatory, or at least not actively outraged, about the response. 70. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 168. 71. See, for instance, Jenny Sharpe, who describes the literature and culture of the African diaspora as haunted by “stories [that] have not been told”;

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Timothy Spaulding, who sees the gothic tropes of ghosts and specters as tools in an African American oppositional history; and Cristina Lombardi-Diop, for whom ghosts exemplify the condition of contemporary African migrants: “non-persons, humans who no longer have human substance.” Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xi; Timothy Spaulding, Re-Forming the Past: History, the Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 62–63; Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Ghosts of Memories, Spirits of Ancestors: Slavery, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic,” in Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections, edited by Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi (New York: Routledge, 2008), 166. 72. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 135. 73. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 595. 74. Levine, Martin Delany, 136. 75. Herman Melville, “Billy Budd,” in Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories, introduction and notes by Peter Coviello (New York: Penguin, 2016), 287. 76. Melville, “Billy Budd,” 287 (emphasis added). 77. Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 128. 78. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1, 147. 79. Critics are nearly unanimous in recognizing the animate objects of Chesnutt’s short fiction as, in Neil Matheson’s words, “a gruesome literalization of the dehumanizing effects of slavery.” The confusion between the human and the purely material realm enacted in the conjure tales, from Lonesome Ben’s transubstantiation into clay to the horrifying consequences of Dave’s conviction that he is “turnin’ ter a ham,” both figures and rings changes on what Houston Baker has called the “disastrous transformations of slavery”—most of all, the transformation of man into thing that so preoccupied Stowe and her peers. As I argue below, such readings are undoubtedly powerful, but risk eliding the real (if necessarily “qualified”) function of conjure as a “means of resistance”: a force that makes the enslaved individual’s needs and desires felt to their captor when no direct plea would succeed. Neil Matheson, “History and Survival: Charles Chesnutt and the Time of Conjure,” American Literary Realism 43, no. 1 (2010): 16; Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman, 132; Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 44; Richard Brodhead, “Introduction,” in Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman, 9. 80. Sundquist, in particular, notes that conjure’s power over those who believed in it was “doubly circumscribed” by the disdain of whites and the skepticism of such Black intellectuals as Douglass himself, who “might . . . dismiss

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it as a psychological game practiced upon the ignorant and gullible.” Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 367. Douglass’s mixed feelings about conjure and other African or diasporic “superstitions” are discussed in Levine, Martin Delany, 131–32. 81. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 129. While the convention participants focused primarily on accruing political power, some abolitionists also suggested that Black wealth could overcome color prejudice: see Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 82. 82. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship,140; Melville, “Billy Budd,” 287. 83. Delany, Blake, 44. As Blake’s “passport” metaphor suggests, Delany represents money less as a means to self-improvement than as a means of escape, writing not one but two scenes in which Blake convinces a reluctant boatman to give him passage with a bribe (ibid., 137, 144). In the latter instance, Blake also “buys” the boatman’s horses—or rather, compensates him after forcibly seizing them—in order to shoot them, thus preventing the enslavers pursuing him from crossing the river. There could hardly be a more perfect illustration of Delany’s distance from market ideology: in Blake, money is zero-sum, and every piece of property a white person has is one a Black person does not. 84. This dependence on community trust in particular agents was particularly visible in the antebellum United States, before the 1863 National Bank Act attempted to standardize currency on the federal level: notes from local banks retained “a clear connection with a particular locus and source—not just as an origin or branding mechanism, but as an essential component of their value.” (In this passage, Jason Berger is describing William Wells Brown’s speculative banking enterprise in Monroe, Michigan; we will return to this period of Brown’s life in chapter 4.) Even after wildcat banks disbanded, though, the connection between a banknote and an intention to fulfill a particular debt remained. Jason Berger, Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 183–84.

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Chapter 4 1. Google Books Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams/. 2. Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), especially 25. 3. P.T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World. An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, In All Ages (New York: Carleton Publisher, 1866), 18–19. 4. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 19–20. 5. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 20. 6. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 21.

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7. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 31. 8. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, 32. 9. The former phrase belongs to the psychologist Peter Hancock, whose Hoax Springs Eternal: The Psychology of Cognitive Deception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) unpacks the manipulative strategies behind a series of historical frauds. The latter titles a popular science text: Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde with Sandra Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2010). 10. Fricker identifies two primary forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, “when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word,” and hermeneutical injustice, “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” The epistemic inequality that fooling exploits, however, does not quite fall into either category: we might call it phenomenological or perceptual injustice, where a person’s answers to basic questions about the shared world of perceptual experience—What color is this? Is it cold in here?—are seen as being constitutively compromised by their subject position. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. 11. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, edited by Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long, and Thomas Cooley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 31. 12. I draw the example of the killdeer from Lilly-Marlene Russow, who draws a distinction between “minimalist” or “behaviorist” definitions of deception, which remain silent on the question of an organism’s mental states, and “more restricted” definitions that require that the deceiver intend to instill a false belief. For Russow, the killdeer’s behavior would be included as deception under the former definition but not the latter, which applies primarily to human lies; Twainian deception, I am arguing, occupies a curious middle position, since it is intentional on the deceiver’s part but operates through a medium other than false beliefs. Lily-Marlene Russow, “Deception: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit, edited by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 41, 48–50. 13. Hancock, Hoax Springs Eternal, 2; on sensory “common ground,” see Andreas Stokke, “Lying and Asserting,” Journal of Philosophy 110, no. 1 (2013): 33–60, especially 33. 14. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 53. 15. Carlo Ginzburg argues that the epistemology of clues—that is, the semiotic interpretation of material indices—“began to assert itself in the humane sciences” around “the end of the nineteenth century—more precisely in the

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decade 1870–80.” His dates are conveniently coincident with the development of Huckleberry Finn, which Twain began composing around 1876 and published in 1885. For evidence that Twain was aware of and interested in the increasingly clue-based disciplines of law, medicine, and psychiatry, one need only look to Pudd’nhead Wilson, whose representation of fingerprinting is anachronistic in the novel’s antebellum setting but quite timely for the book’s actual publication date of 1894. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 92. 16. Paul Faulkner, “Lying and Deceit,” in The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 3103. 17. Hancock, Hoax Springs Eternal, 7. 18. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and “Those Extraordinary Twins” (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 129. 19. Rachel McKinnon, “Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile M. Polhaus (New York: Routledge, 2017), 168–70. 20. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 186. 21. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 196. 22. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 186. 23. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 11, 70. 24. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 19–20, 9, 186. 25. This is not to suggest any moral or structural equivalence between abusive parents and slaveholders, although it may be worth noting that the two roles were often embodied by the same individual in the antebellum South. 26. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 19. 27. Glenda Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23, 121. 28. H. P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 26. In the case of traditional lying, of course, the two interlocutors are at cross purposes, but the success of the deception requires that the façade of cooperation be maintained; in the case of fooling, neither party believes themselves to be exchanging information for mutual benefit. 29. Fiedler represents “the pre-adolescent [white] girl dying or dead” as “the only safe, safe female”; Ann Douglas sees the child-centered American home as one contributor to “the feminization of American culture”; Karen Sánchez-Eppler describes how “the process of socializing and controlling children easily inverts, affording childhood a special kind of cultural power” that derives from its “vulnerability”; and Bernstein argues that “the sentimental child presented an exceptionally credible vessel” to contain the “‘purity’ or

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‘passionlessness’” associated with idealized domesticity. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2003), 267; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in NineteenthCentury American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74; Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 40. 30. The 1850s and 1860s, interestingly, seem to have been a period in which the concept of pretending itself was in semantic flux: the historically established sense of “to claim” or “to assert”—albeit, usually, deceitfully—was being joined by the newer meaning of “to make believe” or “to feign in fun.” The OED’s first citation for “pretend” in the sense of “to feign or simulate in play” is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice in Wonderland, suggesting that the Anglo-American fascination with children and children’s literature in the second half of the nineteenth century helped to draw attention to this feature of childhood. Similarly, the first use of “pretence” to mean “make-believe”— childish fiction rather than adult feigning—appears, according to the OED, in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863). See “pretence | pretense, n. and adj.” and “pretend, v.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, 2016). Like Twain a couple of decades later, some mid-nineteenth-century American writers shared an interest in pretend play without using the only recently repurposed word “pretend.” Take Hawthorne’s definition of Romance in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, where, as Karen Sánchez-Eppler points out, the much cited “moonlight in a familiar room” works its metamorphic “magic” on “childhood toys . . . things which were always in their daily usage subject to just the sort of transformation he describes.” By singling out the moonstruck “hobbyhorse” or “doll seated in her little wicker carriage,” in other words, Hawthorne aligns the fiction writer’s calling with play and specifically with pretend play. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, 62. 31. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 37. 32. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 30. 33. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 37–43. 34. Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby, 26–27. 35. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 194. 36. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, edited with introduction by Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Penguin, 1993), 119. 37. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, 218. 38. Space prevents me from treating The Marrow of Tradition with the thoroughness it deserves, but I hope to revisit the novel—in particular, the layered

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failures of social cognition that Chesnutt represents as characteristic of the criminal justice system—in a future piece. I am grateful to one of this book’s anonymous reviewers for pointing out the relationship between fooling and violence in the novel. 39. The year 1901 is the date of the manuscript pages of “A DoubleBarreled Detective Story” in the Morgan Library. Autograph manuscript, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” by Mark Twain, 1901, MA 2934, record ID 210643, Morgan Library and Museum, https://www.themorgan.org/literary -historical/210643. 40. To be sure, this inferential process is recursive and perpetually revised—at least if one is persuaded by Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok’s suggestion that classical detective fiction is characterized by what C. S. Peirce called abductive reasoning. Peirce’s own understanding of abduction fluctuated over the course of his career, but the method is characteristically aimed, not toward certainty, but toward the best (simplest, most parsimonious, most elegant) explanation of the available facts. Jennifer Weiss has argued that American detective fiction before the “hard-boiled” era is distinguished by its reliance on abduction. For my purposes, however, abduction and induction share the practice of constructing readings or interpretations on the basis of material data—and are therefore both vulnerable to fooling. Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebiok, eds., The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Jennifer Weiss, “Clue, Code, Conjure: The Epistemology of American Detective Fiction, 1841–1914,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014. 41. For the best known version of this argument, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). 42. Mark Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays (New York: Random House, 2012), 484–85. 43. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 485. 44. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 471–72. 45. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 473. 46. In part, Archy’s enhanced sense of smell simply stands in for the intuitive and inexplicable, playing into a Western tradition that associates olfaction with “passive reception” and “involuntary responses” rather than conscious awareness. Hsuan Hsu, “Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice,” American Literature 88, no. 4 (2016): 790. Interestingly, however, recent philosophical work has singled out smell as the one sense that is not subject to perceptual illusions—or, more precisely, as a sense that does not represent objects in the first place and therefore cannot represent them falsely. Claire Batty, “What the Nose Doesn’t Know: Non-Veridicality and Olfactory Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17, nos. 3–4 (2010): 11–12. In this sense, Twain’s

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decision to locate Archy’s ability in olfaction is no accident: because smells are not automatically perceived as properties of objects in the world, they provide a poor inroad for fooling. 47. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 450. 48. Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 72–73. 49. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 450. 50. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 452. 51. Interestingly, the idea that the Monmouth rebels were shipped to Virginia seems to have been a common misconception in Twain’s era: James Davie Butler, writing in the American Historical Review in 1896, specifically mentions the view only to discredit it, insisting that the rebels were deported primarily to “Barbadoes and Jamaica.” “If any were carried to Virginia,” he adds, “it was the remnant that did not prove salable on the islands.” James Davie Butler, “British Convicts Shipped to American Colonies,” American Historical Review 2, no. 1 (1896): 14. 52. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 451. 53. John Campbell, “The Seminoles, the ‘Bloodhound War,’ and Abolitionism, 1796–1865,” Journal of Southern History 72, no. 2 (2006): 259–60. 54. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 453. 55. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 458. 56. Scholars like Sandra Gunning have placed Pudd’nhead Wilson and Chesnutt’s novels in conversation, but I have yet to find any criticism that reads Twain’s late short fiction next to the conjure tales. Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51–77. 57. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 467, 468. I am persuaded by Brigitte Fielder’s argument that fully spelling out this slur adds nothing to a scholarly argument and is likely to cause harm, so I follow her lead in representing it this way. Brigitte Fielder, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 247. 58. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 481. 59. Peter Messent, “Comic Intentions in Mark Twain’s ‘A Double-Barreled Detective Story,’” Essays in Arts and Sciences 28 (1999): 42. 60. William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4. 61. Twain, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” 498. 62. Roberto Bolaño, “Our Guide to the Abyss,” in Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003, edited by Ignacio Echevarría, translated by Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011), 293.

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63. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, translated by E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845), 288–89. 64. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 289. 65. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 289. 66. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 229. 67. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 229. 68. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 334; Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 83. It is at times unclear to what extent these examples of curative fooling are merely conventional or allegorical, as opposed to actual performances undertaken by real physicians. It feels reasonable to assume that the cases dependent on the historical circumstances of the French Revolution are not invented out of whole cloth, but Alexander of Tralles’s snake-in-thevomit trick becomes a bit harder to take seriously when one learns that it was also attributed to Pinel himself. Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture, Kindle edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), loc. 2172. Then again, given that the Encyclopédie also advocated the animal-in-the-vomit “ruse” in its article on melancholy (Goldstein, Console and Classify, 84–85), perhaps this constituted a kind of eighteenth-century best practice. 69. The specifics of “moral therapy” are too complex to fully address here, but Goldstein’s summary remains authoritative: see Console and Classify, chap.  3 (64–119). It is important to note that what we would now consider physical abjection remained a feature of many asylums, especially those for the poor, long after Pinel. It is also worth noting that even Kirkbride’s persuasive methods at times became so elaborate as to overlap with fooling: while treating “a former army surgeon, who believed himself wanted for desertion,” Kirkbride went so far as to write to then-president of the United States Zachary Taylor in the hopes of obtaining a letter of reassurance (Nancy Tomes, The Art of Asylum-Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994], 216). (I can’t tell from Tomes’s account whether Kirkbride succeeded.) 70. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 320. In all of these respects, the monomaniac is contrasted with the “lypemaniac,” whom we might now identify as a depressive personality: though their delusions stem from a similarly local and “partial” cause, the lypemaniac’s obsession presents itself through sullen and anxious behavior (320). 71. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 346. 72. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 350. 73. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 351. 74. On the speedy dissemination of Pinel’s theories through the nineteenth-century United States, in large part through the influence of

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Quaker reformers, see Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 37–39. 75. A note on textual history: Brown first published Clotel (as the name was spelled in that edition) in London in 1853, and revised the text for each of the three subsequent editions (1860–61, 1864, and 1867). Most of the moments that I discuss are present in some form in the 1853 edition, but I have focused on the 1867 text for a few reasons. First, its positioning at the hinge of the antebellum and postbellum eras—the 1867 Clotelle actually includes the Civil War and its aftermath among its heroine’s adventures—makes it a closer analogue of Huck Finn, a novel begun immediately after the collapse of Reconstruction but set in a slave state before the war. Second, the likely audience of this last text was, as Christopher Mulvey has noted, “postwar readers of domestic fiction,” meaning that the Clotelle of 1867 positions itself more self-consciously as a novel and bears more relevance for any claims I make about fictionality. Finally, as I will argue at more length below, Clotelle; or, the Colored Heroine is prescient in its emphasis on physiology as a mark of Blackness and therefore of oppressed status—a mark that would become especially important in the era of segregation, and that opened up unique opportunities for fooling. For a concise but detailed account of the textual history of Brown’s novel, see Christopher Mulvey, “Clotel; or the President’s Daughter (1853),” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, https://encyclopediavirginia .org/entries/clotel-or-the-presidents-daughter-1853/. 76. Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, PostFacts, and Fake News (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 40. 77. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 167. 78. William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (London: Charles Gilpin, 1852), 99. Jason Berger’s reading of this anecdote (Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America [New York: Fordham University Press, 2020], 178–79) made me aware of its relevance for my argument. 79. William Wells Brown, Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (Philadelphia: A. Saifer, 1955), 12. 80. Brown, Clotelle, 18. 81. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 164, 165–67. 82. Brown, Clotelle, 9. 83. Brown, Clotelle, 11, 15–16. 84. Brown, Clotelle, 15, 11. 85. Brown, Clotelle, 76. 86. Brown, Clotelle, 76. 87. Brown, Clotelle, 71.

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88. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 157–58. 89. Brown, Clotelle, 71. 90. Isabella poses as a white man in order to escape her harsh captor, but is ultimately discovered when, during a general search of the hotel in which she is staying, police officers discover that her trunk is full of female clothes; fooling, as a stratagem based on objects, can be undone when those objects are missing or inconsistent. 91. I stress again that the metaphor of mental illness describes a parallel of cognitive form rather than any moral or etiological equivalence. See chapter 3, above, for a more detailed discussion of the disordered behavior of enslavers. 92. Of course, comparisons between feudal Europe and the antebellum South were frequent in the nineteenth century, and articulated by none better than by Twain himself; see, for instance, his excoriation of “the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization” that corrupted “the character of the Southerner.” Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper, 1901), 328. 93. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 161. 94. James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Random House, 2003), 146. 95. Henry James, The American, edited by James W. Tuttleton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 60. 96. James, The Golden Bowl, 17–18. 97. James, The Golden Bowl, 16. 98. James never devoted an entire essay or review to Poe, whom he mentions very rarely in his critical works. His only extended engagement with Poe—still a mere six sentences, and relatively short ones at that—appears in an essay on Baudelaire, where James’s verdict seems conspicuously mixed. Baudelaire’s “enthusiasm for Poe” indicates “a decidedly primitive stage of reflection,” one that “compromise[s]” the French poet in the eyes of his American admirers—but perhaps only because Baudelaire never measured up to Poe’s example: “Poe was vastly the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.” Whatever greatness Poe possessed, in other words, derived from his status as a humbug. Henry James, “Charles Baudelaire,” in Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 2:154. 99. James, The Golden Bowl, 471. 100. James, The Golden Bowl, 449. 101. Elsie B. Michie, The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 53. 102. Henry James, The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 197. 103. James, The American Scene, 11.

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104. James, The American Scene, 170–71. 105. James, The American Scene, 165. 106. Michael W. Kraus, Stéphane Côté, and Dacher Keltner, “Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy,” Psychological Science 21, no. 11 (2010), 1721. Coda 1. James, The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 11. Like surprisingly many passages in The American Scene, this one is voiced not by James or his “restless analyst” stand-in but by the houses themselves: objects, abstractions, and even air are all apt to begin talking in this text. Although what they say is usually identifiable with at least some part of the consciousness of James’s observer, Sharon Cameron is right to point out that these nonhuman speakers often provide an entry point for “a residual affection, surviving the condemnation, for what is being condemned” (Cameron, Thinking in Henry James [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 6)—that is, an affection for the qualities of childishness, ephemerality, emptiness, and shallowness that James persistently associates with Americans and their spaces. More on this below. 2. James, The American Scene, 11–12. 3. The former we have already observed in the “tiara” passage; the latter takes shape in James’s notoriously xenophobic representations of recent immigrants, or, as he understands it, “the alien” element in the United States (The American Scene, 117). When James’s “restless analyst” observes laborers working on a New Jersey estate, he is particularly struck by the lack of “communication with the workers . . . which, in a European country, would have operated, from side to side, as the play of mutual recognition, founded on old familiarities and heredities, and involving . . . some impalpable exchange” (118). On the one hand, James is here merely mourning the absence of the superficial, patronizing jocularity that binds landowner and laborer when both are of the same ethnicity—not a particularly tragic loss. James’s insistence on the impossibility of interpersonal inference and implication between individuals of different linguistic, national, and ethnic backgrounds, however, reveals his implicit assumption that the “mutual recognition” and “impalpable exchange” of ToM—the very qualities that he so values in his novels—are grounded in culturally homogeneous communities. This premise adds a bit more depth to James’s concerns about immigration: the almost osmotic mindreading of his fictions, where two or more individuals essentially create a shared consciousness through mutual mental-state inference, seems to him precariously dependent on the “old familiarities and heredities” that American social life largely lacks.

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4. James, The American Scene, 11–12. 5. James, The American Scene, 10. 6. James, The American Scene, 167. 7. James, The American Scene, 10, 166–68. 8. James, The American Scene, 167. 9. James, The American Scene, 168. 10. James, The American Scene, 167. 11. Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 46. 12. Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23–25. 13. James, The American Scene, 168. 14. The fact that James discusses Poe only in the context of Baudelaire is evidence for Poe’s esteem in Europe; as for the comparative disdain in which Americans held him, one might for instance point to American school readers of the nineteenth century, where a survey of eleven anthologies shows only five selections from Poe as compared to fifteen for Longfellow, eighteen for William Cullen Bryant, and twelve for Nathaniel Parker Willis. (I collected these data for a talk titled “Assembling a Reader” at the Stanford Literary Lab, February 4, 2017.) Charles F. Richardson, who compiled the first major classroom anthology for teaching American literary history, even uses Poe’s international reception as evidence of the need to remain skeptical about “the judgment of foreigners”: “the most intelligent Europeans often make the most startling mistakes concerning literary matters here. Victor Hugo declared, without hesitation, that Poe was ‘the prince of American literature,’ and yet, it is said, professed entire ignorance of Emerson’s name when it was mentioned to him.” Charles F. Richardson, American Literature 1607–1885 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), vi.

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Index

abductive reasoning, 234n40 abolitionist rhetoric. See white supremacist cognitive model Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain): deception practices, overview, 147–49, 231n12; fooling and pretend play, 154–55; fooling through gaslighting, 151–53; fooling through misleading sensory stimuli, 145–47 Agamben, Giorgio, 91 Alber, Jan, 90, 219n52 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 103 Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women, 214n82 Alexander of Tralles, 236n68 alterity, 1–2 The American Scene (James): ethnic heterogeneity, 239n3; innocence of wealthy Americans, 180–82; nonhuman speakers, 239n1; privacy of wealthy Americans, 183–86

Andrews, Kristin, 8, 198n19 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 39, 85–87 architectural interiority, 183–86 Arthur Mervyn (Brown): concealed memoir in, 40–41; hypocrisy vs. sincerity, 46–47, 210n34; interrupted reading, 207n15; motive in, 207n10, 211n55 attentional learning, 200n27 Auden, W. H., 76 Austen, Jane, 66, 100, 206–7n5, 215n88 autism, 92–94, 218n33, 220n60 Axelrod, Alan, 209n26 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 69 Barad, Karen, 103 Bargh, John, 96, 221n69 Barnard, Philip, 210n32 Barnum, P. T., The Humbugs of the World, 141–44 Baron-Cohen, Simon, 7, 87, 198n15, 218n33

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Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 199n22 “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Melville): centrality of peripheral character, 99–101, 222n80; critical reception, 91–92, 219–20n53; hyperopacity in, 90–91; interpretation shaped by interpersonal context, 94–96; interpretive strategies undermined by unexpected behaviors, 96–99; misreading Bartleby as autistic, 92–94, 220n60 Bay, Mia, 130–32, 228n69 behavior. See intention and motive; pragmatics of behavior behaviorist psychology, 77–78 belief, possession of the mind, 50. See also intention and motive Bennett, Jane, 201n37 Bennett, Joshua, 227n51 Berger, Jason, 237n78 Bernstein, Robin, 154, 155, 232–33n29 Bibb, Evelyn, 197n9 Biggio, Rebecca Skidmore, 119 Bird, Robert Montgomery, Sheppard Lee, 16 Black personhood and consciousness: collective, 119–21; dehumanization trope, 104–5, 106–7, 229n79; dependency on white people’s recognition, 109; difficulty of interpreting behavior of enslavers, 126–33; engagement in covert observation, 115–19; and gaslighting, 151–53; physiological racial stereotypes, 173–74; private interiority, 107–8, 110–14, 116; romantic racialism, 106, 108–9; sentimental subjectivity, 108–9, 110–11, 121, 224n8, 226–27n51; supernatural resistance, 134–35, 138, 229n79; unequal free agency

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in postbellum South, 136, 137–40, 223–24n6, 230n83; and white innocence, 155–56; white paranoia and failed social cognition of, 110, 118–19, 122–26. See also enslaver-enslaved relationship Blake (Delany): collective Black consciousness, 119–21; gestural representation, 116–19, 120, 225n34; market economy, 139, 230n83; and psychological depth criticism, 115–16 Blumenthal, Susanna, 25, 26, 205n61 Bolaño, Roberto, 165 Bolker, Jamie, 224n10 Bottex, Alexandre, 26 bounded mental states. See mind-ascontainer/mental-states-as-texts metaphor Bradshaw, Charles, 208n22 Brand, Dana, 70 Brodhead, Richard, 138 Brown, Charles Brockden: Edgar Huntly, 39–40; Memoirs of Carwin, 47; and Godwin, 46–48, 210n32; Ormond, 41–42, 207n15, 211n37; repetition of key scenes, 208n16. See also Arthur Mervyn; Wieland Brown, William Wells, 171; Clotelle, 170–75, 237n75 Bryant, William Cullen, 240n14 Burrows, George Man, 22 Butler, James Davie, 235n51 Cameron, Sharon, 3–4, 213n68, 239n1 Carlo Ginzburg, 231–32n15 Carpio, Glenda, 152 Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, 233n30 Castano, Emanuele, 195n2 Castiglia, Christopher, 216n4

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Index

Castle, Terry, 134 character theory, empty vs. flat, 99–100 Chase, Richard, 3 Chesnutt, Charles: “Baxter’s Procrustes,” 61–64, 213n73; Conjure Tales, 136, 137–40, 229n79; “The Goophered Grapevine,” 205– 6n66; The Marrow of Tradition, 155, 225n34, 233–34n38 Child, Lydia Maria, A Romance of the Republic, 175 childish innocence, 154–55, 181–82, 232–33nn29–30 Choi, Julie, 207n6 Chomsky, Noam, 196n6 cognitive emergency, 43, 55 Cohen, Lara Langer, 141 communities, interpretive, 111–12 conceptual metaphor, 36–37 conjure and the supernatural, 134–35, 136, 138, 139–40, 151–52, 162, 229–30nn79–80 Conolly, John, 202n38 container, mind as. See mind-ascontainer/mental-states-as-texts metaphor Convention of Colored Freemen (1848), 138 Cooper, James Fenimore, 3; The Deerslayer, 64–68, 215n94; Precaution, 66, 215n88 Csicsila, Joseph, 196–97n9 Cukor, George, 150 cultural variability, 9–11, 199n23 Cummins, Maria, The Lamplighter, 213n82 Danziger, Eve, 10 Dayan, Colin, 104–5 deception: denying ability of, 59; and humbug, 141–44. See also fooling

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dehumanization, 104–5, 106–7, 129, 139, 229n79 Delany, Martin: in conversation with Douglass and Stowe, 114–15, 225n29; Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 114, 138. See also Blake Deleuze, Gilles, 91, 201n37 DeLombard, Jeannine, 104–5, 107 Dennett, Daniel, 77, 88–89, 98, 129 depth, psychological, 115–16 design stance, 77 detective fiction: abductive reasoning, 234n40; code-breaking vs. interpreting in, 212n64; failure to detect fooling, 157–59; as genre, 73; and impossibility of epistemic certainty, 164–65; moral judgment in, 76; negotiation of mentalistic vs. materialistic reasoning processes, 76–84; plausible motives in, 73–74; social and cultural determinations in, 75–76 de Villiers, Jill, 10, 11 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 217n14 disability studies, 91–92 “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (Twain): failure to detect fooling, 157–59; fooling through olfaction, 159–60, 162, 234–35n46; impossibility of epistemic certainty, 164–65; overview, 156; vengeance and legacy of slavery, 160–61, 162–64 Douglas, Ann, 214n82, 232n29 Douglass, Frederick: and conjure, 230n80; in conversation with Stowe and Delaney, 114–15; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 121; in nineteenth-century American canon, 197n9. See also My Bondage and My Freedom

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Doyle, Arthur Conan: “The Resident Patient,” 79; Sherlock Holmes character, 75, 76, 79, 157–59, 162, 165 Dred (Stowe): private Black interiority, 110–14, 116; radicalism in, 109–10, 224n10 DuPre, F. S., 131 Eco, Umberto, 234n40 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 197n9, 240n14 empty vs. flat characters, 99–100 enslaver-enslaved relationship: collective resistance, 119–21; covert observation by the enslaved, 115–17, 118; dehumanization trope, 104–5, 106–7, 229n79; difficulty of interpreting behavior of enslavers, 126–33; and exploitative fooling, 170–74; legacy and vengeance, 160–61, 162–64; legal protection of enslavers’ actions, 127, 227n57; paranoia and failed social cognition of enslavers, 110, 118–19, 122–26; and restorative fooling, 170, 174–75; supernatural resistance, 134–35, 138, 229n79; white structures of surveillance, 117–19. See also Black personhood and consciousness epistemic injustice, 145, 150, 231n10. See also social inequality epistemic stance. See pragmatics of behavior Epley, Nicholas, 198n17 Esquirol, Jean-Étienne, 203–4n49; Mental Maladies, 166–70, 204n51

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Farmer, Meredith, 16 Fiedler, Leslie, 66, 154, 215n88, 232n29

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Fielder, Brigitte, 235n57 Figlerowicz, Marta, 222n80 flat vs. empty characters, 99–100 Flesch, William, 164 Fodor, Jerry, 197n14 folk psychology, 8–9, 20, 21, 23, 198–99n19, 199n23 fooling: alleviation of social inequality through, 170, 174–75; complicity of the deceived in, 149–50; as concept, 144–45, 148–49; curative, 166–70, 236nn68–69; exploitative, 170–74; failure to detect, 157–59; through gaslighting, 150–53; and impossibility of epistemic certainty, 164–65; inequalities in, 153–54; vs. lying, 148, 150, 151, 232n28; through misleading sensory stimuli, 145– 47; through olfaction, 159–60, 162, 234–35n46; through pretend play, 154–55; trust and credibility as unnecessary in, 147–48; and white innocence, 155–56 Foster, Charlotte, 131–32 Foucauldian discipline, 122, 169 Foucault, Michel, 70 Fredrickson, George, 108 free indirect discourse (FID): containment and accessibility in, 38–39; limitations in empty consciousness, 51–54 Freeman, Joanne, 227n58 Frege, Gottlob, 196n4 Fretwell, Erica, 206n72 Fricker, Miranda, 34, 145, 231n10 Gallagher, Catherine, 113 Gang, Joshua, 14, 77–78 Garfield, James, 204n54 Gaslight (film), 150 gaslighting, 150–53

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Index

gaze direction, 79, 218n33 gendered mindreading and literacy, 67–68, 213–14n82, 215n94. See also women Gendler, Tamar, 89 gestural representation, 78–79, 116–19, 225n34 ghosts, 134–35, 228–29n71 Gilman, Sander, 228n63 Godwin, William, 46–47; Caleb Williams, 47–48, 210n34 Gopnik, Alison, 154 Gray, John P., 204n54 Grice, H. P., 219n48 Guattari, Felix, 201n37 Guiteau, Charles, 204n54 Gunning, Sandra, 235n56

259

intention and motive: and agency in passive construction, 55–57; vs. causation, 208–9n22; dependence on observers and interpreters, 51–54; of enslavers, 126–27, 129– 30, 131–33; and mentalistic reasoning, 47–48; moral judgments, 76; negotiation of mentalistic vs. materialistic reasoning processes, 47–48, 76–84; overattribution of, 124; and plausibility, 73–74; and social accountability, 39; social and cultural determinations, 75–76; and suicide, 210–11n37; tautological explanations, 72, 81, 85–86, 131–32; undermining consciousness’s authority over, 46, 47, 49, 50–51. See also pragmatics of behavior

Hagenbüchle, Roland, 209n26 Hale, Dorothy, 1, 2, 4, 185 Halttunen, Karen, 214n82 Hancock, Peter, 147, 231n9 Hancock Alfaro, Ange-Marie, 121–22 Hartman, Saidiya, 104, 223n87 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 197n9; The Scarlet Letter, 233n30 Heinze, Rudiger, 90, 219n52 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 18 Heyes, Cecilia, 6, 9, 199n22 Hind, Elizabeth Jane Wall, 211n39 history of cognition, 12, 200–201n30 Howells, William Dean, 187 Hugo, Victor, 240n14 humbug, 141–44. See also fooling Hunt, Ebenezer K., 166 hyperopacity, 89–91, 97, 101, 124, 147

James, Henry: on margins, 213n79; The American, 60, 178; The Golden Bowl, 177, 178–80; in nineteenthcentury American canon, 187, 197n9; and Poe, 178, 179, 186–88, 238n98; The Portrait of a Lady, 185; The Wings of the Dove, 60–61, 177–78. See also The American Scene James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 18–19, 211–12n57 Janet, Pierre, 18 Jarvis, Edward, 202n42 Johnson, Mark, 36–37 Johnson, Walter, 172 Jones, Paul C., 107, 223n2

inequality. See social inequality innocence, 154–56, 181–82, 232–33n29 insanity, 17, 22, 23–28, 129–30, 166–70, 202n38, 204n54, 205n61

Kafer, Peter, 47, 209n26, 210n34 Kazanjian, David, 208n18 Kidd, David Comer, 195n2 Kingsley, Charles, The Water-Babies, 233n30

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Kirkbride, Thomas, 28, 168, 236n69 Kopytoff, Igor, 223n87 Kramnick, Jonathan, 45, 201n31, 209–10n27 Kraus, Michael W., 180 Lakoff, George, 36–37 Latour, Bruno, 201n37 Lavelle, Jane Suilin, 199n23 Lawrence, D. H., 66, 214n82 learned helplessness, 127–29, 227–28nn60–61 Lee, Maurice, 197n9 Lee, Wendy Anne, 92 legal system: based on stranger interactions, 27–28; determinations of sanity and insanity, 21–26; protection of enslavers’ actions, 127, 227n57 Levine, Caroline, 29 Levine, Robert, 113, 114–15, 208n22 Lindblad, Michael, 227n51 linguistics, 10, 36, 86, 91, 104 Locke, John, 45–46, 209n26; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 45, 209–10n27 Lombardi-Diop, Cristina, 229n71 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 240n14 Looby, Christopher, 209n22 Lowell, James Russell, 187 Luhrmann, Tanya, 10–11, 30, 200n27 Lunbeck, Elizabeth, 17 lying, 148, 150, 151, 232n28. See also fooling

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Machiavellian intelligence, 83, 180, 219n44 Maibom, Heidi, 198n18 Manuel, Millie, 228n69 Margolis, Stacey, 69, 216n4

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materialist ontologies, 15–16, 18, 201– 2n37. See also detective fiction Matheson, Neil, 229n79 McCall, Dan, 219–20n53 McGann, Jerome, 115 Melville, Herman: “Benito Cereno,” 101–2; Billy Budd, 136–37, 222n83; The Confidence-Man, 101–2, 216n4; on individual agency, 136, 139; in nineteenth-century American canon, 197n9. See also “Bartleby the Scrivener” mental illness: autism, 92–94, 218n33, 220n60; curative fooling, 166–70, 236nn68–69; diagnosis in nineteenth century, 21–28, 202n42, 203–4n49, 204n54, 205n61; insanity, 17, 22, 23–28, 129–30, 166–70, 202n38, 204n54, 205n61; monomania, 168, 203– 4n49, 236n70; and social cognition, 16–20, 24, 25–26, 28–29 Messent, Peter, 163 metaphors of textual containment. See mind-as-container/mentalstates-as-texts metaphor metaphysics, 91 Michie, Elsie, 180 Miller, D. A., 206–7n5 mind-as-container/mental-states-astexts metaphor: as conceptual metaphor, 37; containment and accessibility in free indirect discourse, 38–39; and destroyed text, 57–60; dismantling through dislocation of behavioral origin, 43–45, 50–51, 208–9n22; dismantling through evacuation of consciousness, 49, 51; dismantling through invasion of interiority, 48–51; and empty/missing text,

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Index

39–43, 63; limitations of free direct discourse, 51–54; literal rendering of, 64–66; mentalistic reasoning, 47–48; and passive construction, 54–57, 212n59; and unopened text, 60–63 mindreading. See Theory of Mind (ToM) and social cognition mind sciences. See nineteenth-century mind sciences money and wealth: banknotes, 230n84; inverse correlation with social cognition, 176–82; and privacy, 183–86; and unequal free agency in postbellum South, 136, 137–40, 230n83 monomania, 168, 203–4n49, 236n70 Moretti, Franco, 206n5 Morrison, Toni, A Mercy, 35, 36, 59 motive. See intention and motive Moya, Paula, 103 Mullen, Harryette, 7 Mulvey, Christopher, 237n75 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Poe): consideration of motive, 74–76; interpretation by police vs. Dupin, 216–17n14; materialistic reasoning process, 78–80, 84; origins of detective fiction genre, 73; reasoning by negation, 76–77 Murison, Justine, 16, 20, 201–2n37 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass): critical reception, 121–22; difficulty of interpreting behavior of enslavers, 126–30; paranoid imagination and failed social cognition of enslavers, 122–26; textual interior metaphor, 58–59

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“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (Poe): consideration of motive, 73–74; mentalistic and materialistic reasoning process, 80–82, 84, 212n64; and probability, 217n22 nineteenth-century American novels: canon, 3, 196–97n9; scholarship on, 3–4 nineteenth-century mind sciences: diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, 21–28, 166–70, 202n42, 203–4n49, 204n54, 205n61, 236nn68–69; and literary historical scholarship, 13–16; social cognition in, 16–20, 24, 25–26, 28–29 novel, as genre, 4–5, 35–36 olfaction, 159–60, 234–35n46 opaque Black interiority, 110–14, 116 otherness, 1–2 Otter, Samuel, 15 Paretsky, Sara, 218n34 Parkinson, James, 23–24 Pasanek, Brad, 37 passive construction, 54–57, 212n59, 212n61 Patterson, Orlando, 227n57 Peirce, C. S., 234n40 Pennington, James W. C., 118, 226n40 personhood. See Black personhood and consciousness Peterson, Christopher, 78 Peterson, Jordan, 195n2 physiognomy and phrenology, 13, 15, 62–63, 71, 173 Pickens, Therí A., 129–30 Pinchevski, Amit, 92

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S N L 262

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Pinel, Philippe, 18, 167–68, 203n49, 236n68 pluralistic folk psychology, 8–9, 198–99n19, 199n23 Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Gold Bug,” 212n64; international reputation, 187, 240n14; and James, 178, 179, 186–88, 238n98; “The Man of the Crowd,” 70–72; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 57–58, 186–88; in nineteenthcentury American canon, 197n9; “The Purloined Letter,” 80, 82–84. See also “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”; “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” Poirier, Richard, 3 Portsmouth, Lord, 25, 27 pragmatics of behavior: accounting for randomness and regularity, 88–89, 128–30; as concept, 86–87; and hyperopacity, 89–91, 97, 101, 124, 147; interpretation shaped by interpersonal and microsocial contexts, 94–96, 103–4; interpretive strategies undermined by unconstrained individual choice, 126–27, 131–33; interpretive strategies undermined by unexpected behaviors, 96–99; misreading as ontology of the subject, 93–94, 222n80. See also intention and motive Pratt, Lloyd, 27, 29, 205n66 pretend play and pretense, 154–55, 181, 233n30 priming effects, 90, 96 privacy: of Black interiority, 107–8, 110–14, 116; inaccessible to the wealthy American, 183–86. See also mind-as-container/mentalstates-as-texts metaphor

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propositional mental states, defined, 196n4. See also Theory of Mind (ToM) and social cognition psychological depth, 115–16 psychology: curative fooling, 166–70, 236nn68–69; diagnostic practice in nineteenth century, 21–28, 166–70, 202n42, 203–4n49, 204n54, 205n61, 236nn68–69; emergence as discipline, 17–19 race. See Black personhood and consciousness; enslaver-enslaved relationship; white supremacist cognitive model Rancière, Jacques, 219n53 Ravindranathan, Thangam, 76 Ray, Isaac, Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, 17, 22 reading, as learned ability, 6–7 realist novels, 38, 39, 77, 94, 100–101 Rebhorn, Matthew, 16 religiosity, 108, 122, 124–25, 132–33 Richardson, Charles F., 240n14 Richardson, Joan, 14 Rinehart, Nicholas, 104, 225n34 Robbins, Bruce, 221–22n71 romantic racialism, 106, 108–9 Romero, Lora, 215n94 Rorty, Richard, 104 Roth, Marty, 216n14 Rothman, David, 202n42 Ruffin, Thomas, 227n57 Rusert, Britt, 20, 203n46, 225n32 Russow, Lilly-Marlene, 231n12 Ruttenburg, Nancy, 219n53 Salazar, James, 69, 70, 216n4 Samuels, Ellen, 15 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 232n29, 233n30

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Index

Sebeok, Thomas, 234n40 Seligman, Martin, 127–28, 227n60, 228nn61–62 sentimental fiction, 64, 213–14n82 sentimental subjectivity, 108–9, 110–11, 121, 224n8, 226–27n51 Shapiro, Stephen, 210n32 Sharpe, Jenny, 228n71 slavery. See enslaver-enslaved relationship smell, sense of, 159–60, 234–35n46 Smith, Gail K., 111, 112 Smith, Matthew Wilson, 203n46 Smith, Sidney, 195n1 social cognition. See Theory of Mind (ToM) and social cognition social inequality: correlation with social cognitive ability, 176–82; and epistemic injustice, 145, 150, 231n10; and free agency in postbellum South, 136, 137–40, 223–24n6, 230n83; and gaslighting, 150–53; and impossibility of epistemic certainty, 164–65; and restorative fooling, 170, 174–75. See also enslaver-enslaved relationship Spaulding, Shannon, 198n19 Spaulding, Timothy, 229n71 Spires, Derrick, 137, 138–39 spirituality, racial, 108–9, 110–11 Spitzka, Edward, 204n54 Stein, Gertrude, 7 Stein, Jordan, 4 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: “Caste and Christ,” 115; in conversation with Douglass and Delaney, 114–15, 225n29. See also Dred; Uncle Tom’s Cabin strangers: challenge of interpreting behaviors of, 27–28, 29; character typologies of, 70–72, 216n4;

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contractual dealings with, 27, 28, 205–6n66; rise as phenomenon, 69–70 suicide, 210–11n37 Sundquist, Eric, 138, 229–30n80 supernatural belief and conjuring, 134–35, 136, 138, 139–40, 151–52, 162, 229–30nn79–80 surveillance: of enslaved people, 117–19; of strangers, 70–71, 216n4 Suzuki, Akihito, 20, 21, 22, 23 tautology, 72, 81, 85–86, 131–32 textual containment. See mind-ascontainer/mental-states-as-texts metaphor Theory of Mind (ToM) and social cognition: anthropological approach, 9–11, 199nn22–23; classification, 30, 206n72; as concept, 2; literary studies approach, 6–9, 11–12, 13–16; as module, 7, 197n14; in nineteenth-century mind sciences, 16–20, 24, 25–26, 28–29. See also Black personhood and consciousness; fooling; intention and motive; mind-as-container/ mental-states-as-texts metaphor; pragmatics of behavior Thomas, James, 228n63 Thompson, Courtney E., 19, 203n46 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 91–92 Thoreau, Henry David, 197n9 Tobin, Vera, 212n61 Tomes, Nancy, 22 Tompkins, Jane, 3, 213n82 Trilling, Lionel, 3 Tuke, Edward Francis, 203n49 Tuke, Thomas Harrington, 203–4n49

S N L 263

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Twain, Mark: in nineteenth-century American canon, 197n9; The Prince and the Pauper, 148, 149–50, 163, 175; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 148, 149–50, 163, 175, 232n15. See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe): private Black interiority, 107–8, 111, 113; sentimental subjectivity, 108–9, 110–11, 121, 226–27n51; supernatural resistance, 134–35 Vermeule, Blakey, 2, 99, 222n78 violence: fooling necessitated by, 165; and learned helplessness, 127–29; and legacy of slavery, 160–61, 162–64; liberating, 114, 121; rationality/irrationality of racial, 129–30; reading and writing interrupted by, 43, 207n15; and white innocence, 156; and white paranoia about Black revolt, 110, 118–19, 122–26 Voloshin, Beverly, 209n26

S N L 264

Wallace, Maurice O., 121 Warner, Susan, The Wide, Wide World, 213n82 Watt, Ian, 220–21n63 wealth. See money and wealth Weiss, Jennifer, 234n40 white innocence, 155–56 white structures of surveillance, 117–19 white supremacist cognitive model: dehumanization trope, 104–5, 106–7, 229n79; destabilized by private Black interiority, 107–8, 110–14; paranoia about Black

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revolt, 110, 118–19, 122–26; physiological racial stereotypes, 173–74; romantic racialism, 106, 108–9; and unequal free agency in postbellum South, 136, 137–40, 223–24n6, 230n83. See also Black personhood and consciousness; enslaver-enslaved relationship Whitman, Walt, 197n9 Wieland (Brown): access to consciousness through free indirect discourse, 51–54; access to consciousness through passive construction, 54–57, 212n59; biloquism vs. ventriloquism, 208n18; dislocation of behavioral origin, 43–45, 50–51, 208–9n22; evacuation of consciousness, 49, 51; hypocrisy vs. sincerity, 46; interrupted reading, 207n15; invasion of interiority, 48–51; and Lockean psychology, 45–46, 209n26 Williams, Raymond, 217n14 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 240n14 Winter, Alison, 203n46 Wise, Sarah, 22, 203n48 witches, 151–52 Woloch, Alex, 95, 101 women: and childish innocence, 154, 232–33n29; conflation of enslavement and femininity, 109, 121; privileged access to text and behavior, 67–68, 213–14n82, 215n94 Wood, Gordon, 208–9n22 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 130–33 Young, Kevin, 170–71 Zawidzki, Tadeusz, 9 Zunshine, Lisa, 2, 79, 92, 117, 218n34

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