The psycho-babel nineteenth-century American literature: Mental heteroglossia in the psychological works of Hawthorne, Poe, Dickinson, and Melville (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville)

This dissertation explores how and why four major nineteenth-century American authors engaged with major transitions in views of the mind through their fiction and poetry. Most critical work on the psychological dimension of the writings of Hawthorne, Poe, Dickinson, and Melville links their views to a single nineteenth- or twentieth-century theory of human cognition. These accounts do not emphasize that a discipline of psychology did not exist until the late-nineteenth century in America and that, therefore, a multidisciplinary discourse about the mind suffuses the psychological works of Hawthorne, Poe, Dickinson, and Melville.; Each chapter utilizes Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia and its manipulation in novelistic discourse to explore a different fictional "dialogue" between two discrete languages for understanding the mind. Hawthorne was preoccupied in his short works and The Marble Faun with the divergence of medical from theological (Puritan) views of the mind. His fiction strives to salvage the Puritan sensitivity to symbol while heeding contemporary medical warnings about the potential pathology of mental excitement in general and religious revival in particular. Poe progressively rejects both Romantic and medical constructions of the imagination and associates it in his later writings with the traits to which it had been opposed by doctors and Romantics alike: reason, sanity, and scientific acumen. Dickinson utilizes a new, corporeal conception of the human mind in "cerebral" poems that link the intangible, traditionally religious entities of the mind, soul, and God to the brain to liberate a transcendent space for her poetry. And Melville reveals and resists the social implications of the replacement of a transcendent conception of the human mind with a new, Darwinian view in Billy Budd.; All four authors negotiate a transition from older (largely theological) to newer (largely scientific) ways of seeing the human mind. Rather than reflect or advocate a single model of the mind, their works situate readers on the threshold of change in the multidisciplinary nineteenth-century endeavor to plumb the human mind.