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– MARINA WARNER – hypnotist at work on four subjects sitting in states of trance.13 Saint Bernadette was tested by doctors during her visions in 1854: she was pricked with pins and burned with candles and felt no hurt – to the wonder of the attendant crowd. Somnambulism figures vividly in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and in films inspired by them; hypnotic trance became a popular theme at the turn of the century, in George du Maurier’s bestseller Trilby (1894), and in the Gothic film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, made in 1919. The writer Lewis Carroll gave the concept of Wonderland far more serious thought than his readers imagine. Considering ways of entering such other worlds, he defined three psychic states: first, ordinary consciousness; secondly, an ‘Eerie’ condition in which the subject is conscious but aware of the presence of fairies; and thirdly, a trance in which the immaterial body – the spirit or soul – of the subject migrates elsewhere, either to places in this world, or to fairyland, but without causing death or permanent damage to the body from which, it is parted. He proposed these possibilities in the preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded in 1891, but there are traces of it in much earlier writings of the 1860s. The ‘Wonderland’ which Carroll invented for Alice was not a mere idle fancy to him. The figures of entranced, Sleeping Beauties are usually women or children, and sometimes both combined, as in the case of the Blessed Imelda Lambertini, a 12-year-old preserved in a casket in Bologna. It would 118
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– On the Threshold – of course be absurd to suggest that all cult statues, all Mesmer’s clients, all hysterical mediums and patients, were or are female. But, as Benjamin Franklin’s commission on Mesmer noted, women were in the majority among his following, as they were among Freud’s and Breuer’s pioneering patients and analysands. Josephine Hilgard, in a study of hypnosis, has linked susceptibility to hypnotism with the imaginative capacity to lose oneself in a book, a film, or a soap opera, and has drawn attention to the mingling of fantasy and reality, the readiness to play pretend and make-believe games, of a subject in hypnosis – malleable, impressionable, and ductile, like wax. She connects this to the state of childhood, and, historically, perceptions of women and children have been tightly intertwined.14 Virgin martyrs – from Santa Fina to Bernadette – are frequently children, and their posthumous cults preserve them on the child-like threshold where death does not mark them. Through her femaleness and her infantile smallness, the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ at Madame Tussaud’s conveys with especial aptness this liminal state, which is in a sense the desired condition of the reader and viewer who begins to voyage by means of imagery, as Jane Eyre does when she looks at Bewick’s engravings and other picture-books and imagines realms far beyond her circumstances.15 The sleeper solicits us to return to the imagined perceptions of childhood, an entranced floating out of range of all co-ordinates and moorings, 119

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– MARINA WARNER –

hypnotist at work on four subjects sitting in states of trance.13 Saint Bernadette was tested by doctors during her visions in 1854: she was pricked with pins and burned with candles and felt no hurt – to the wonder of the attendant crowd. Somnambulism figures vividly in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and in films inspired by them; hypnotic trance became a popular theme at the turn of the century, in George du Maurier’s bestseller Trilby (1894), and in the Gothic film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, made in 1919.

The writer Lewis Carroll gave the concept of Wonderland far more serious thought than his readers imagine. Considering ways of entering such other worlds, he defined three psychic states: first, ordinary consciousness; secondly, an ‘Eerie’ condition in which the subject is conscious but aware of the presence of fairies; and thirdly, a trance in which the immaterial body – the spirit or soul – of the subject migrates elsewhere, either to places in this world, or to fairyland, but without causing death or permanent damage to the body from which, it is parted. He proposed these possibilities in the preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded in 1891, but there are traces of it in much earlier writings of the 1860s. The ‘Wonderland’ which Carroll invented for Alice was not a mere idle fancy to him.

The figures of entranced, Sleeping Beauties are usually women or children, and sometimes both combined, as in the case of the Blessed Imelda Lambertini, a 12-year-old preserved in a casket in Bologna. It would

118

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